We asked David about longtermists’ responses to his work in the podcast episode we did with him. Here’s the (rough, automatically generated) transcript, but you can listen to the relevant section here; it starts at ~33:50.
David: I think to contextualize that, let me use the word I’m going to use in my book, namely a strategy of shedding zeros. So, longtermists say, look, the axiological case for longtermism is 10 orders of magnitude or 15 orders of magnitude better than the case for competing short-termist interventions.
So, therefore, unless you are radically non-consequentialist, longtermism is going to win at the level. And I want to chip away a lot of zeros in those value estimates, and then maybe do some other deontic things too. And so if the longtermist is just in one swoop gonna hand me five or ten or twenty zeros, I think there’s two things to say. The first is they might run out of zeros just there.
5, 10, 20 orders of magnitude is a lot. But the second is this isn’t the only time I’m gonna ask them for some orders of magnitude back. And this thing that they do, which is correct, is they point at every single argument I make and they say “I can afford to pay that cost and that cost and that cost.” But the question is whether they can afford to pay them all together, and I think, at least as the line of the argument in my book, that if we’re really tossing orders of magnitude around that freely, we’re probably going to run out of orders of magnitude quite quickly.
Leah: Got it. Okay. And, I just want to follow up on the last thing you said. So has that been the response of the people who are writing on these issues? Like, do they read your work and say, yeah, I concede that?
David: I get, well, sometimes it’s concessive, sometimes it’s not, but almost always, somebody raised their hand, they say, David, couldn’t I believe that, and still be a longtermist? So I had to rewrite some of the demographics section in my paper. They said, look, aren’t you uncertain about demographics?
Maybe there’s a 10 to the 8th probability I’m right about demographics, so maybe I lose eight orders of magnitude, and the response there is, okay, maybe you do. And then they’ll say about the time of perils, maybe there’s a 10 to the 9th chance I’m right about the time of perils, maybe I lose nine orders of magnitude, and okay, you do.
Obviously, we have a disagreement about how many orders of magnitude are lost each time, but I think it’s a response I see in isolation every time I give a paper, and I’d like people to see it as a response that works in isolation, but can’t just keep being repeated.
We asked David about longtermists’ responses to his work in the podcast episode we did with him. Here’s the (rough, automatically generated) transcript, but you can listen to the relevant section here; it starts at ~33:50.
David: I think to contextualize that, let me use the word I’m going to use in my book, namely a strategy of shedding zeros. So, longtermists say, look, the axiological case for longtermism is 10 orders of magnitude or 15 orders of magnitude better than the case for competing short-termist interventions.
So, therefore, unless you are radically non-consequentialist, longtermism is going to win at the level. And I want to chip away a lot of zeros in those value estimates, and then maybe do some other deontic things too. And so if the longtermist is just in one swoop gonna hand me five or ten or twenty zeros, I think there’s two things to say. The first is they might run out of zeros just there.
5, 10, 20 orders of magnitude is a lot. But the second is this isn’t the only time I’m gonna ask them for some orders of magnitude back. And this thing that they do, which is correct, is they point at every single argument I make and they say “I can afford to pay that cost and that cost and that cost.” But the question is whether they can afford to pay them all together, and I think, at least as the line of the argument in my book, that if we’re really tossing orders of magnitude around that freely, we’re probably going to run out of orders of magnitude quite quickly.
Leah: Got it. Okay. And, I just want to follow up on the last thing you said. So has that been the response of the people who are writing on these issues? Like, do they read your work and say, yeah, I concede that?
David: I get, well, sometimes it’s concessive, sometimes it’s not, but almost always, somebody raised their hand, they say, David, couldn’t I believe that, and still be a longtermist? So I had to rewrite some of the demographics section in my paper. They said, look, aren’t you uncertain about demographics?
Maybe there’s a 10 to the 8th probability I’m right about demographics, so maybe I lose eight orders of magnitude, and the response there is, okay, maybe you do. And then they’ll say about the time of perils, maybe there’s a 10 to the 9th chance I’m right about the time of perils, maybe I lose nine orders of magnitude, and okay, you do.
Obviously, we have a disagreement about how many orders of magnitude are lost each time, but I think it’s a response I see in isolation every time I give a paper, and I’d like people to see it as a response that works in isolation, but can’t just keep being repeated.