Thoughts on Émile P. Torres’ new article, ‘Understanding “longtermism”: Why this suddenly influential philosophy is so toxic’?
I’m previously unfamiliar with this author’s work, though I see they have written other criticisms of EA and longtermism that have been discussed here. This new article (link below) is the only writing of Torres’ that I’ve read. I’d like to hear thoughts from the community on this. Much of the criticism seems to be cherry-picked statements that are taken out of context, but a proper steelmanning of these criticisms seems worthwhile.
https://www.salon.com/2022/08/20/understanding-longtermism-why-this-suddenly-influential-philosophy-is-so/?fbclid=IwAR1YpCMs7TJa0aB7HK6yFj05IxsiY2KcEnfy3ej0JqtDOuu6kaM6TpnUZUI
See Response to Phil Torres’ ‘The Case Against Longtermism’ and Response to Recent Criticisms of Longtermism, including comments.
This. It was already talked and discussed a whole lot, but the worst thing about it is that it’s a Salon article. Even before the fact that the news is mostly useless for reasons like this: https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood#:~:text=At a global scale%2C anything,networked global media covering
It’s an article that has severe charitability issues, and it’s basically as bad as a political article for explaining longtermism, which has negative value.