[Question] Neartermist crucial considerations?

[Anthony DiGiovanni]

I’ve mostly thought of crucial considerations (CCs) in the longtermist domain. It’s not surprising that if you’re trying to improve welfare impartially over space and time, there will be a lot of CCs. But suppose you’re focusing on the near term (including /​ especially animal welfare). I’m curious to hear which CCs people working on near-term philanthropy have found to be especially important. Just listing them, with relevant links if necessary, would be great. Thanks!

(Some examples that have occurred to me: displacement effects, the poor meat eater problem, maybe wacky anthropics stuff? I’m also aware of the CCs tag on the Forum.)

[Max_Carpendale]

The small animal replacement problem and other cases where a reduction in consumption of one animal product leads to an increase in another, more harmful animal product.

Other less relevant examples in my work:

Wild animal welfare CCs can also complicates things at both the near term and the long term because of food web effects.

Whether welfare reforms cause momentum vs. complacency is another example, but I feel fairly confident in my conclusion on that.

[quila]

maybe wacky anthropics stuff?

this comes to mind

https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​jGoExJpGgLnsNPKD8/​​does-ultimate-neartermism-via-eternal-inflation-dominate?commentId=oQf9RDLqjkLjobmne

[quila]

in a thread there i mentioned that even for a described ‘ultimate neartermist’, the best action is actually to cause acausal trade (i.e. by causing aligned ASI) with an ASI at an earlier point in time. for a hypothetical value which only cares about near-term beings, this would also be true, because most near-term beings are not on earth.

also, if i consider a hypothetical value which just cares about near-term beings on earth, it may prefer to destroy earth instead of slowly reducing animal suffering. ‘would want to destroy earth’ is a classical response to the idea of pure negative utilitarianism, but it would apply to standard utilitarianism too if the things valued (in this hypothetical case, just near-term beings on earth) experienced more bad than good which could not be mitigated enough in the near-term.

(disclaimer: the ‘neartermism’ of actual humans is probably importantly different to these, probably more reliant on moral intuition than these literal interpretations. i’m a longtermist myself.)