Scattered critiques of longtermism exist, but are generally informal, tentative, and limited in scope. This recent comment and its replies were the best directory I could find.
I vaguely recall a named paradox, maybe involving “procrastination” or “patience”, about how an immortal investor never cashes in—and possibly that this was a standard answer to Pascal’s wager/mugging together with some larger (but still tiny) probability of, say, getting hit by a meteor while you’re making the bet. Maybe I just imagined it.
I’ll answer my own question a bit:
Scattered critiques of longtermism exist, but are generally informal, tentative, and limited in scope. This recent comment and its replies were the best directory I could find.
A longtermist critique of “The expected value of extinction risk reduction is positive”, in particular, seems to be the best expression of my worry (1). My points about near-threshold lives and procrastination are another plausible story by which extinction risk reduction could be negative in expectation.
There’s writing about Pascalian reasoning (a couple that came up repeatedly were A Paradox for Tiny Probabilities and Enormous Values, In defence of fanaticism).
I vaguely recall a named paradox, maybe involving “procrastination” or “patience”, about how an immortal investor never cashes in—and possibly that this was a standard answer to Pascal’s wager/mugging together with some larger (but still tiny) probability of, say, getting hit by a meteor while you’re making the bet. Maybe I just imagined it.