(epistemic status—A first draft, probably needs more thought and reflection in the future)
I don’t necessarily disagree with your—but I am much more likely to endorse short term interventions that address poverty and short term technological improvements which reduce suffering for a few reasons
I consider current suffering as extremely negative and (comparatively) easy to fix. I find serious suffering—of the kind a lot of EA interventions try to prevent—absolutely intolerable disgust and fairness foundations (as Haidt would term them) on a deeply primal level to see needless suffering. Improving the speed of progress in attacking this suffering seems to be a big deal to me, because with some exceptions (defeat of death and ageing), I consider the life of those of us lucky enough to be born WIERD nations to already be pretty damn good—and that the welfare difference between me and a child growing up in Mogadishu may even be incommensurably greater than the difference between me and long run future saturated people. So I am much more concerned with current suffering, because current suffering is big and future suffering is likely—in the very long run, to be either catastrophic or very small.
The logical followup to that point is that I am interested in directional changes (as you are) that help ensure that we end up at ” very small” rather than catastrophic—but I am very sceptical about our ability to measure and show what current research is effective at making such changes.
I may be wrong about that scepticism, but even if I am I think that globally suffering has a big negative effect on the likleyhood of people investing in decision making or directional investments - it is hard to plan your mortgage payments when you have a broken leg. Given how comparatively simple it seems to me to be is be too fix our collective broken legs I think even those people who want us to plan our mortgage payments should consider it a high priority to get a splint now so that we can actually plan our mortgage payments without constantly worrying or facing searing pain from our broken leg. On a similar point, I disagree with you that “faster progress leading to niceness” is very speculative. Stephen Pinker’s excellent “The Better Angels of our Nature”—seems a good reference for this—I think it establishes fairly clearly that moral and technological progress has made us less warlike and less violent as a species.
(epistemic status—A first draft, probably needs more thought and reflection in the future)
I don’t necessarily disagree with your—but I am much more likely to endorse short term interventions that address poverty and short term technological improvements which reduce suffering for a few reasons
I consider current suffering as extremely negative and (comparatively) easy to fix. I find serious suffering—of the kind a lot of EA interventions try to prevent—absolutely intolerable disgust and fairness foundations (as Haidt would term them) on a deeply primal level to see needless suffering. Improving the speed of progress in attacking this suffering seems to be a big deal to me, because with some exceptions (defeat of death and ageing), I consider the life of those of us lucky enough to be born WIERD nations to already be pretty damn good—and that the welfare difference between me and a child growing up in Mogadishu may even be incommensurably greater than the difference between me and long run future saturated people. So I am much more concerned with current suffering, because current suffering is big and future suffering is likely—in the very long run, to be either catastrophic or very small.
The logical followup to that point is that I am interested in directional changes (as you are) that help ensure that we end up at ” very small” rather than catastrophic—but I am very sceptical about our ability to measure and show what current research is effective at making such changes.
I may be wrong about that scepticism, but even if I am I think that globally suffering has a big negative effect on the likleyhood of people investing in decision making or directional investments - it is hard to plan your mortgage payments when you have a broken leg. Given how comparatively simple it seems to me to be is be too fix our collective broken legs I think even those people who want us to plan our mortgage payments should consider it a high priority to get a splint now so that we can actually plan our mortgage payments without constantly worrying or facing searing pain from our broken leg. On a similar point, I disagree with you that “faster progress leading to niceness” is very speculative. Stephen Pinker’s excellent “The Better Angels of our Nature”—seems a good reference for this—I think it establishes fairly clearly that moral and technological progress has made us less warlike and less violent as a species.