On the summary: I’d have found this summary more useful if it had made the ideas in the paper simpler, so it was easier to get an intuitive grasp on what was going on. This summary has made the paper shorter, but (as far as I can recall) mostly by compressing the complexity, rather than lessening it!
On the paper itself: I still find Tarsney’s argument hard to make sense of (in addition to the above, I’ve read the full paper itself a couple of times).
AFAIT, the set up is that the longtermist wants to show that there are things we can do now that will continually make the future better than it would have been (‘persistent-difference strategies’).
However, Tarnsey takes the challenge to be that there are things that might happen that would stop these positive states happening (‘exogenously nullifying events’).
And what does all the work is that if the human population expands really fast (‘cubic growth model’), that is, because it’s fled to the stars, but the negative events should happen at a constant rate, then longtermism looks good.
I think what bothers me about the above is this: why think that we could ever identify and do something that would, in expectation, make a persistent positive difference, i.e. a difference for ever and ever and ever? Isn’t Tarsney assuming the existence of the thing he seeks to prove, ie ‘begging the question’? I think the sceptic is entitled to respond with a puzzled frown—or an incredulous stare - about whether we can really expect to knowingly change the whole trajectory of the future—that, after all, presumably is the epistemic challenge. That challenge seems unmet.
I’ve perhaps misunderstood something. Happy to be corrected!
By ‘persistent difference’, Tarsney doesn’t mean a difference that persists forever. He just means a difference that persists for a long time in expectation: long enough to make the expected value of the longtermist intervention greater than the expected value of the neartermist benchmark intervention.
Perhaps you want to know why we should think that we can make this kind of persistent difference. I can talk a little about that in another comment if so.
On the summary: I’d have found this summary more useful if it had made the ideas in the paper simpler, so it was easier to get an intuitive grasp on what was going on. This summary has made the paper shorter, but (as far as I can recall) mostly by compressing the complexity, rather than lessening it!
On the paper itself: I still find Tarsney’s argument hard to make sense of (in addition to the above, I’ve read the full paper itself a couple of times).
AFAIT, the set up is that the longtermist wants to show that there are things we can do now that will continually make the future better than it would have been (‘persistent-difference strategies’). However, Tarnsey takes the challenge to be that there are things that might happen that would stop these positive states happening (‘exogenously nullifying events’). And what does all the work is that if the human population expands really fast (‘cubic growth model’), that is, because it’s fled to the stars, but the negative events should happen at a constant rate, then longtermism looks good.
I think what bothers me about the above is this: why think that we could ever identify and do something that would, in expectation, make a persistent positive difference, i.e. a difference for ever and ever and ever? Isn’t Tarsney assuming the existence of the thing he seeks to prove, ie ‘begging the question’? I think the sceptic is entitled to respond with a puzzled frown—or an incredulous stare - about whether we can really expect to knowingly change the whole trajectory of the future—that, after all, presumably is the epistemic challenge. That challenge seems unmet.
I’ve perhaps misunderstood something. Happy to be corrected!
Thanks! This is valuable feedback.
By ‘persistent difference’, Tarsney doesn’t mean a difference that persists forever. He just means a difference that persists for a long time in expectation: long enough to make the expected value of the longtermist intervention greater than the expected value of the neartermist benchmark intervention.
Perhaps you want to know why we should think that we can make this kind of persistent difference. I can talk a little about that in another comment if so.