In a sense, I agree with many of Greaves’ premises but none of her conclusions in this post that you mentioned here. I do think we ought to be doing more modeling, because there are some things that are actually possible to model reasonably accurately (and other things not).
Greaves says an argument for longtermism is, “I don’t know what the effect is of increasing population size on economic growth.” But we do! There are times when it increases economic growth, and there are times when it decreases it. There are very well-thought-out macro models of this, but in general, I think we ought to be in favor of increasing population growth.
She also says, “I don’t know what the effect [of population growth] is on tendencies towards peace and cooperation versus conflict.” But that’s like saying, “Don’t invent the plow or modern agriculture, because we don’t know whether they’ll get into a fight once villages have grown big enough.” This distresses me so much, because it seems that the pivotal point in her argument is that we can no longer agree that saving lives is good, but rather only that extinction is bad. If we can no longer agree that saving lives is good, I really don’t know what we can agree upon…
In a sense, I agree with many of Greaves’ premises but none of her conclusions in this post that you mentioned here. I do think we ought to be doing more modeling, because there are some things that are actually possible to model reasonably accurately (and other things not).
Greaves says an argument for longtermism is, “I don’t know what the effect is of increasing population size on economic growth.” But we do! There are times when it increases economic growth, and there are times when it decreases it. There are very well-thought-out macro models of this, but in general, I think we ought to be in favor of increasing population growth.
She also says, “I don’t know what the effect [of population growth] is on tendencies towards peace and cooperation versus conflict.” But that’s like saying, “Don’t invent the plow or modern agriculture, because we don’t know whether they’ll get into a fight once villages have grown big enough.” This distresses me so much, because it seems that the pivotal point in her argument is that we can no longer agree that saving lives is good, but rather only that extinction is bad. If we can no longer agree that saving lives is good, I really don’t know what we can agree upon…