Overall though I think that longtermism is going to end up with practical advice which looks quite a lot like “it is the duty of each generation to do what it can to make the world a little bit better for its descendants.”
Goodness, I really hope so. As it stands, Greaves and MacAskill are telling people that they can “simply ignore all the effects [of their actions] contained in the first 100 (or even 1000) years”, which seems rather far from the practical advice both you and I hope they arrive at.
Anyway, I appreciate all your thoughtful feedback—it seems like we agree much more than we disagree, so I’m going to leave it here :)
I think the crucial point of outstanding disagreement is that I agree with Greaves and MacAskill that by far the most important effects of our actions are likely to be temporally distant.
I don’t think they’re saying (and I certainly don’t think) that we can ignore the effects of our actions over the next century; rather I think those effects matter much more for their instrumental value than intrinsic value. Of course, there are also important instrumental reasons to attend to the intrinsic value of various effects, so I don’t think intrinsic value should be ignored either.
Strong longtermism goes beyond its weaker counterpart in a significant way. While longtermism says we should be thinking primarily about the far-future consequences of our actions (which is generally taken to be on the scale of millions or billions of years), strong longtermism says this is the only thing we should think about.
Some of your comments, including this one, seem to me to be defending simple or weak longtermism (‘by far the most important effects are likely to be temporally distant’), rather than strong longtermism as defined above. I can imagine a few reasons for this:
You don’t actually agree with strong longtermism
You do agree with strong longtermism, but I (and presumably vadmas) am misunderstanding what you/MacAskill/Greaves mean by strong longtermism; the above quote is, presumably unintentionally, misunderstanding their views. In this case I think it would be good to hear what you think the ‘strong’ in ‘strong longermism’ actually means.
You think the above quote is compatible with what you’ve written above.
At the moment, I don’t have a great sense of which one is the case, and think clarity on this point would be useful. I could also have missed an another way to reconcile these.
I’m not fully bought into strong longtermism (nor, I suspect, are Greaves or MacAskill), but on my inside view it seems probably-correct.
When I said “likely”, that was covering the fact that I’m not fully bought in.
I’m taking “strong longtermism” to be a concept in the vicinity of what they said (and meaningfully distinct from “weak longtermism”, for which I would not have said “by far”), that I think is a natural category they are imperfectly gesturing at. I don’t agree with with a literal reading of their quote, because it’s missing two qualifiers: (i) it’s overwhelmingly what matters rather than the only thing; & (ii) of course we need to think about shorter term consequences in order to make the best decisions for the long term.
Both (i) and (ii) are arguably technicalities (and I guess that the authors would cede the points to me), but (ii) in particular feels very important.
I think this is a good point, I’m really enjoying all your comments in this thread:)
It strikes me that one way that the next century effects of our actions might be instrumentally useful is that they might give some (weak) evidence as to what the longer term effects might be.
All else equal, if some action causes a stable, steady positive effect each year for the next century, then I think that action is more likely to have a positive long term effect than some other action which has a negative effect in the next century. However this might be easily outweighed by specific reasons to think that the action’s longer run effects will differ.
Goodness, I really hope so. As it stands, Greaves and MacAskill are telling people that they can “simply ignore all the effects [of their actions] contained in the first 100 (or even 1000) years”, which seems rather far from the practical advice both you and I hope they arrive at.
Anyway, I appreciate all your thoughtful feedback—it seems like we agree much more than we disagree, so I’m going to leave it here :)
I think the crucial point of outstanding disagreement is that I agree with Greaves and MacAskill that by far the most important effects of our actions are likely to be temporally distant.
I don’t think they’re saying (and I certainly don’t think) that we can ignore the effects of our actions over the next century; rather I think those effects matter much more for their instrumental value than intrinsic value. Of course, there are also important instrumental reasons to attend to the intrinsic value of various effects, so I don’t think intrinsic value should be ignored either.
In their article vadmas writes:
Some of your comments, including this one, seem to me to be defending simple or weak longtermism (‘by far the most important effects are likely to be temporally distant’), rather than strong longtermism as defined above. I can imagine a few reasons for this:
You don’t actually agree with strong longtermism
You do agree with strong longtermism, but I (and presumably vadmas) am misunderstanding what you/MacAskill/Greaves mean by strong longtermism; the above quote is, presumably unintentionally, misunderstanding their views. In this case I think it would be good to hear what you think the ‘strong’ in ‘strong longermism’ actually means.
You think the above quote is compatible with what you’ve written above.
At the moment, I don’t have a great sense of which one is the case, and think clarity on this point would be useful. I could also have missed an another way to reconcile these.
I think it’s a combination of a couple of things.
I’m not fully bought into strong longtermism (nor, I suspect, are Greaves or MacAskill), but on my inside view it seems probably-correct.
When I said “likely”, that was covering the fact that I’m not fully bought in.
I’m taking “strong longtermism” to be a concept in the vicinity of what they said (and meaningfully distinct from “weak longtermism”, for which I would not have said “by far”), that I think is a natural category they are imperfectly gesturing at. I don’t agree with with a literal reading of their quote, because it’s missing two qualifiers: (i) it’s overwhelmingly what matters rather than the only thing; & (ii) of course we need to think about shorter term consequences in order to make the best decisions for the long term.
Both (i) and (ii) are arguably technicalities (and I guess that the authors would cede the points to me), but (ii) in particular feels very important.
I think this is a good point, I’m really enjoying all your comments in this thread:)
It strikes me that one way that the next century effects of our actions might be instrumentally useful is that they might give some (weak) evidence as to what the longer term effects might be.
All else equal, if some action causes a stable, steady positive effect each year for the next century, then I think that action is more likely to have a positive long term effect than some other action which has a negative effect in the next century. However this might be easily outweighed by specific reasons to think that the action’s longer run effects will differ.