Unfortunately not that “succinct” :) but I argue here that cluelessness-ish arguments defeat the impartial altruistic case for any intervention, longtermist or not. Tl;dr: our estimates of the sign of our net long-term impact are arbitrary. (Building on Mogensen (2021).)
(It seems maybe defensible to argue something like: “We can at least non-arbitrarily estimate net near-term effects. Whereas we’re clueless about the sign of any particular (non-‘gerrymandered’) long-term effect (or, there’s something qualitatively worse about the reasons for our beliefs about such effects). So we have more reason to do interventions with the best near-term effects.” This post gives the strongest case for that I’m aware of. I’m not personally convinced, but think it’s worth investigating further.)
Unfortunately not that “succinct” :) but I argue here that cluelessness-ish arguments defeat the impartial altruistic case for any intervention, longtermist or not. Tl;dr: our estimates of the sign of our net long-term impact are arbitrary. (Building on Mogensen (2021).)
(It seems maybe defensible to argue something like: “We can at least non-arbitrarily estimate net near-term effects. Whereas we’re clueless about the sign of any particular (non-‘gerrymandered’) long-term effect (or, there’s something qualitatively worse about the reasons for our beliefs about such effects). So we have more reason to do interventions with the best near-term effects.” This post gives the strongest case for that I’m aware of. I’m not personally convinced, but think it’s worth investigating further.)