Executive summary: The author argues that prudential longtermism—the idea that individuals should act now based on the possibility of personally experiencing far-future consequences—collapses under the logic of procrastination, since it’s always rational to wait and see if life extension becomes real; more broadly, both prudential and moral longtermism fail to generate novel or actionable insights beyond ordinary long-term planning or concern for existential risks.
Key points:
Prudential longtermism assumes future technologies (like rejuvenation or mind uploading) might let individuals live far longer, implying their present actions could affect their distant personal future—but since we’ll learn within a normal lifespan whether that’s true, delaying decisions is optimal and low-cost.
This “strategy of procrastination” makes prudential longtermism practically toothless: it gives no reason to act differently today.
Efforts like funding life-extension research are really short- or medium-term prudence (“rolling longtermism”) rather than genuine longtermism—an attitude humans have effectively practiced for millennia.
Even if immortality or 1,000-year lives were possible, the capacity to continually update plans means there’s little value in planning more than about a century ahead; only extinction-level risks demand longer-term action.
The conceptual problem extends to moral longtermism: unless it provides guidance distinct from ordinary intergenerational care, it isn’t a novel moral theory but a rebranding of familiar principles.
The essay concludes that philosophy should prioritize ideas that are not only true but important—offering meaningful, novel, or actionable insights—whereas both prudential and moral longtermism fail this test by producing chmess-like puzzles rather than valuable guidance.
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Executive summary: The author argues that prudential longtermism—the idea that individuals should act now based on the possibility of personally experiencing far-future consequences—collapses under the logic of procrastination, since it’s always rational to wait and see if life extension becomes real; more broadly, both prudential and moral longtermism fail to generate novel or actionable insights beyond ordinary long-term planning or concern for existential risks.
Key points:
Prudential longtermism assumes future technologies (like rejuvenation or mind uploading) might let individuals live far longer, implying their present actions could affect their distant personal future—but since we’ll learn within a normal lifespan whether that’s true, delaying decisions is optimal and low-cost.
This “strategy of procrastination” makes prudential longtermism practically toothless: it gives no reason to act differently today.
Efforts like funding life-extension research are really short- or medium-term prudence (“rolling longtermism”) rather than genuine longtermism—an attitude humans have effectively practiced for millennia.
Even if immortality or 1,000-year lives were possible, the capacity to continually update plans means there’s little value in planning more than about a century ahead; only extinction-level risks demand longer-term action.
The conceptual problem extends to moral longtermism: unless it provides guidance distinct from ordinary intergenerational care, it isn’t a novel moral theory but a rebranding of familiar principles.
The essay concludes that philosophy should prioritize ideas that are not only true but important—offering meaningful, novel, or actionable insights—whereas both prudential and moral longtermism fail this test by producing chmess-like puzzles rather than valuable guidance.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
That sounds right to me! Good job, SummaryBot!