This argument has some force but I don’t think it should be overstated.
Re perpetual foundations: Every mention of perpetual foundations I can recall has opened with the Franklin example, among other historical parallels, so I don’t think its advocates could be accused of being unaware that the idea has been attempted!
It’s true at least one past example didn’t pan out. But cost-benefit analysis of perpetual foundations builds in an annual risk of misappropriation or failure. In fact such analyses typically expect 90%+ of such foundations to achieve next to nothing, maybe even 99%+. Like business start-ups, the argument is that the 1 in 100 that succeeds will succeed big and pay for all the failures.
So seeing failed past examples is entirely consistent with the arguments for them and the conclusion that they are a good idea.
Re communist revolutions: Many groups have tried to change how society is organised or governed hoping that it will produce a better world. Almost all the past examples of such movements I can think of expected benefits to come fairly soon — within a generation or two at most — and though advocates for such changes usually hoped the benefits will be long-lasting, benefits to be derived millions of years in the future is hardly what motivated their participants.
Many, especially the most violent ones, have been disastrous, like the various communist revolutions you refer to. Others of course have been by and large positive, such as people advocating for broadening the franchise, ending slavery, weakening the power of monarchies or phasing out non-self-governing territories. Many also died for those causes. Advocates for those ideas hoped to benefit both current and future generations in much the same way as did communists, and on the whole I think human governance has improved as a result of all these efforts in aggregate over the last thousand years.
On balance I don’t think communists are a closer match to longtermism than many other incremental and radical political movements (culturally it’s probably the opposite). And if you broaden the range of reform movements considered then it’s hard to know whether they’ve been a success or failure.
(Or, as they say, it’s still too soon to tell whether the French revolution was a good idea!)
Re religions: Religions are a possible analogy for longtermism but while very numerous I think the similarities are not enough to make them an especially compelling reference class.
What’s most distinctive about religions isn’t that they’re focused on the very long term. In fact many of them are millennialist, or see the universe as fundamentally cyclical, or are focused on reaching an unchanging Platonic realm in which time is a meaningless concept.
For comparison one could also argue from ‘almost all religions proposed are wrong’ (necessarily so because they are numerous and contradictory) to ‘almost all broad worldviews or opinions are wrong, including the pro-incrementalist one you present in this blog post’. I don’t find that a very strong rebuttal to your view for the same reason I don’t find it a strong rebuttal of longtermism.
Re the longtermist paradox: I agree 99%+ of improvements to the world have been driven by people trying to improve things in a more immediate way than longtermists typically do. But using the same definition I also think 99.9%+ of all human effort has gone towards such things.
We need to divide the impact by the inputs to see how cost-effective those actions are. Even if longtermism is far more cost-effective than non-longtermism, we should expect non-longtermism to be dominating total impact because it’s wildly wildly larger in scale.
Through history so few people have done things that would only be particularly recommended by longtermism that we just don’t know yet whether it will pan out in practice. The distribution of impact across projects should be expected to be very fat tailed, so even after the fact it will require a huge sample to empirically assess in a statistically sound way. Sometimes life just sucks that way!
Advocates for those ideas hoped to benefit both current and future generations in much the same way as did communists, and on the whole I think human governance has improved as a result of all these efforts in aggregate over the last thousand years.
That sounds doubtful to me. Hegelian ideas about the nature of history are an important part of communism and part of how communist thinkers thought their actions will have effects on the far future.
Just because you observe that people who argued for ending slavery had positive longterm effects doesn’t imply that those longterm effects were central to how those people thought about the issue.
At some base-rate we cannot just keep saying “oh, another failed past example of perpetual foundation. But that is ok, this is actually consistent with the conclusion that they are still a good idea.”
The dis-analogy here with business startups is that we actually have clear evidence that some business startups do drastically succeed to make up for all the failures. Granted, this could just be because there haven’t been enough perpetual foundations for us to finally hit on the great result that will make up for the failures.
So, although I agree your response on perpetual foundations is warranted, it still makes me raise my eyebrow.
This argument has some force but I don’t think it should be overstated.
Re perpetual foundations: Every mention of perpetual foundations I can recall has opened with the Franklin example, among other historical parallels, so I don’t think its advocates could be accused of being unaware that the idea has been attempted!
It’s true at least one past example didn’t pan out. But cost-benefit analysis of perpetual foundations builds in an annual risk of misappropriation or failure. In fact such analyses typically expect 90%+ of such foundations to achieve next to nothing, maybe even 99%+. Like business start-ups, the argument is that the 1 in 100 that succeeds will succeed big and pay for all the failures.
So seeing failed past examples is entirely consistent with the arguments for them and the conclusion that they are a good idea.
Re communist revolutions: Many groups have tried to change how society is organised or governed hoping that it will produce a better world. Almost all the past examples of such movements I can think of expected benefits to come fairly soon — within a generation or two at most — and though advocates for such changes usually hoped the benefits will be long-lasting, benefits to be derived millions of years in the future is hardly what motivated their participants.
Many, especially the most violent ones, have been disastrous, like the various communist revolutions you refer to. Others of course have been by and large positive, such as people advocating for broadening the franchise, ending slavery, weakening the power of monarchies or phasing out non-self-governing territories. Many also died for those causes. Advocates for those ideas hoped to benefit both current and future generations in much the same way as did communists, and on the whole I think human governance has improved as a result of all these efforts in aggregate over the last thousand years.
On balance I don’t think communists are a closer match to longtermism than many other incremental and radical political movements (culturally it’s probably the opposite). And if you broaden the range of reform movements considered then it’s hard to know whether they’ve been a success or failure.
(Or, as they say, it’s still too soon to tell whether the French revolution was a good idea!)
Re religions: Religions are a possible analogy for longtermism but while very numerous I think the similarities are not enough to make them an especially compelling reference class.
What’s most distinctive about religions isn’t that they’re focused on the very long term. In fact many of them are millennialist, or see the universe as fundamentally cyclical, or are focused on reaching an unchanging Platonic realm in which time is a meaningless concept.
For comparison one could also argue from ‘almost all religions proposed are wrong’ (necessarily so because they are numerous and contradictory) to ‘almost all broad worldviews or opinions are wrong, including the pro-incrementalist one you present in this blog post’. I don’t find that a very strong rebuttal to your view for the same reason I don’t find it a strong rebuttal of longtermism.
Re the longtermist paradox: I agree 99%+ of improvements to the world have been driven by people trying to improve things in a more immediate way than longtermists typically do. But using the same definition I also think 99.9%+ of all human effort has gone towards such things.
We need to divide the impact by the inputs to see how cost-effective those actions are. Even if longtermism is far more cost-effective than non-longtermism, we should expect non-longtermism to be dominating total impact because it’s wildly wildly larger in scale.
Through history so few people have done things that would only be particularly recommended by longtermism that we just don’t know yet whether it will pan out in practice. The distribution of impact across projects should be expected to be very fat tailed, so even after the fact it will require a huge sample to empirically assess in a statistically sound way. Sometimes life just sucks that way!
That sounds doubtful to me. Hegelian ideas about the nature of history are an important part of communism and part of how communist thinkers thought their actions will have effects on the far future.
Just because you observe that people who argued for ending slavery had positive longterm effects doesn’t imply that those longterm effects were central to how those people thought about the issue.
Your response to perpetual foundations seems to have surprising and suspicious convergence.
At some base-rate we cannot just keep saying “oh, another failed past example of perpetual foundation. But that is ok, this is actually consistent with the conclusion that they are still a good idea.”
The dis-analogy here with business startups is that we actually have clear evidence that some business startups do drastically succeed to make up for all the failures. Granted, this could just be because there haven’t been enough perpetual foundations for us to finally hit on the great result that will make up for the failures.
So, although I agree your response on perpetual foundations is warranted, it still makes me raise my eyebrow.