I don’t think “patient” and “urgent” are opposites, in the way Phil Trammell originally defined patience. He used “patient” to mean a zero pure time preference, and “impatient” to mean a nonzero pure time preference. You can believe it is urgent that we spend resources now while still having a pure time preference. Trammell’s paper argued that patient actors should give later, irrespective of how much urgency you believe there is. (Although he carved out some exceptions to this.)
We will call someone “patient” if he has low (including zero) pure time preference with respect to the welfare he creates by providing a good.
And I agree that a person with a low or zero pure time preference may still want to use a large portion of their resources now, for example due to thinking now is a much “hingier”/”higher leverage” time than average, or thinking value drift will be high.
You highlighting this makes me doubt whether 80,000 Hours should’ve used “patient longtermism” as they did, whether they should’ve used “patient philanthropy” as they arguably did*, and whether I should’ve proposed the term “patient altruism” for the position that we should give/work later rather than now (roughly speaking).
On the other hand, if we ignore Trammell’s definition of the term, I think “patient X” does seem like a natural fit for the position that we should do X later, rather than now.
Do you have other ideas for terms to use in place of “patient”? Maybe “delayed”? (I’m definitely open to renaming the tag. Other people can as well.)
If the case for patient philanthropy is as strong as Phil believes, many of us should be trying to improve the world in a very different way than we are now.
He points out that on top of being able to dispense vastly more, whenever your trustees decide to use your gift to improve the world, they’ll also be able to rely on the much broader knowledge available to future generations. [...]
And there’s a third reason to wait as well. What are the odds that we today live at the most critical point in history, when resources happen to have the greatest ability to do good? It’s possible. But the future may be very long, so there has to be a good chance that some moment in the future will be both more pivotal and more malleable than our own.
Of course, there are many objections to this proposal. If you start a foundation you hope will wait around for centuries, might it not be destroyed in a war, revolution, or financial collapse?
Or might it not drift from its original goals, eventually just serving the interest of its distant future trustees, rather than the noble pursuits you originally intended?
Or perhaps it could fail for the reverse reason, by staying true to your original vision — if that vision turns out to be as deeply morally mistaken as the Rhodes’ Scholarships initial charter, which limited it to ‘white Christian men’.
Alternatively, maybe the world will change in the meantime, making your gift useless. At one end, humanity might destroy itself before your trust tries to do anything with the money. Or perhaps everyone in the future will be so fabulously wealthy, or the problems of the world already so overcome, that your philanthropy will no longer be able to do much good.
Are these concerns, all of them legitimate, enough to overcome the case in favour of patient philanthropy? [...]
Should we have a mixed strategy, where some altruists are patient and others impatient?
This suggests to me that 80k is, at least in that post, taking “patient philanthropy” to refer not just to a low or zero pure time preference, but instead to a low or zero rate of discounting overall, or to a favouring of giving/working later rather than now.
I don’t think “patient” and “urgent” are opposites, in the way Phil Trammell originally defined patience. He used “patient” to mean a zero pure time preference, and “impatient” to mean a nonzero pure time preference. You can believe it is urgent that we spend resources now while still having a pure time preference. Trammell’s paper argued that patient actors should give later, irrespective of how much urgency you believe there is. (Although he carved out some exceptions to this.)
Yes, Trammell writes:
And I agree that a person with a low or zero pure time preference may still want to use a large portion of their resources now, for example due to thinking now is a much “hingier”/”higher leverage” time than average, or thinking value drift will be high.
You highlighting this makes me doubt whether 80,000 Hours should’ve used “patient longtermism” as they did, whether they should’ve used “patient philanthropy” as they arguably did*, and whether I should’ve proposed the term “patient altruism” for the position that we should give/work later rather than now (roughly speaking).
On the other hand, if we ignore Trammell’s definition of the term, I think “patient X” does seem like a natural fit for the position that we should do X later, rather than now.
Do you have other ideas for terms to use in place of “patient”? Maybe “delayed”? (I’m definitely open to renaming the tag. Other people can as well.)
*80k write:
This suggests to me that 80k is, at least in that post, taking “patient philanthropy” to refer not just to a low or zero pure time preference, but instead to a low or zero rate of discounting overall, or to a favouring of giving/working later rather than now.