Yeah, I didn’t read your other posts (including Proving Too Much), so it’s possible they counter some of my points, clarify your argument more, or the like.
(The reason I didn’t read them is that I read your first post, read most comments on it, listened to the 3 hour podcast, and have read a bunch of other stuff on related topics (e.g., Greaves & MacAskill’s paper), so it seems relatively unlikely that reading your other posts would change my mind.)
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Hmm, something that strikes me about that quote is that it seems to really be about deontology vs consequentialism—and/or maybe placing less moral weight on future generations. It doesn’t seem to be about reasons why strong longtermism would have bad consequences or reasons why longtermist arguments have been unsound (given consequentialism). Specifically, that quote’s arguments for its conclusion seem to just be that we have a stronger “duty” to the present, and that “we should never attempt to balance anybody’s misery against somebody else’s happiness.”
(Of course, I’m not reading the quote in the full context of its source. Maybe those statements were meant more like heuristics about what types of reasoning tend to have better consequences?)
But if I recall correctly, your post mostly focused on arguments that stronglongtermist would have bad consequences or that longtermist arguments have been unsound. And “we should never attempt to balance anybody’s misery against somebody else’s happiness” is either:
Also an argument against any prioritisation of efforts that would help people, including e.g. GiveWell’s work, or
Basically irrelevant, if it just means we can’t “actively cause” misery in someone (as opposed to just “not helping”) in order to help others
I think that longtermism doesn’t do that any more than GiveWell does
So I think that that quote arrives at a similar conclusion to you, but it might show very different reasoning for that conclusion than your reasoning?
Do you have a sense of what the double crux(es) is/are between you and most longtermists?
Hey Vaden!
Yeah, I didn’t read your other posts (including Proving Too Much), so it’s possible they counter some of my points, clarify your argument more, or the like.
(The reason I didn’t read them is that I read your first post, read most comments on it, listened to the 3 hour podcast, and have read a bunch of other stuff on related topics (e.g., Greaves & MacAskill’s paper), so it seems relatively unlikely that reading your other posts would change my mind.)
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Hmm, something that strikes me about that quote is that it seems to really be about deontology vs consequentialism—and/or maybe placing less moral weight on future generations. It doesn’t seem to be about reasons why strong longtermism would have bad consequences or reasons why longtermist arguments have been unsound (given consequentialism). Specifically, that quote’s arguments for its conclusion seem to just be that we have a stronger “duty” to the present, and that “we should never attempt to balance anybody’s misery against somebody else’s happiness.”
(Of course, I’m not reading the quote in the full context of its source. Maybe those statements were meant more like heuristics about what types of reasoning tend to have better consequences?)
But if I recall correctly, your post mostly focused on arguments that stronglongtermist would have bad consequences or that longtermist arguments have been unsound. And “we should never attempt to balance anybody’s misery against somebody else’s happiness” is either:
Also an argument against any prioritisation of efforts that would help people, including e.g. GiveWell’s work, or
Basically irrelevant, if it just means we can’t “actively cause” misery in someone (as opposed to just “not helping”) in order to help others
I think that longtermism doesn’t do that any more than GiveWell does
So I think that that quote arrives at a similar conclusion to you, but it might show very different reasoning for that conclusion than your reasoning?
Do you have a sense of what the double crux(es) is/are between you and most longtermists?