I agree that the scholarship of Bostrom and others starting in the 2000s on existential risk and global catastrophic risk, particularly taking into account the moral value of the far future, does seem novel, and does also seem actionable and important, in that it might, for example, make us re-do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on the expected value of money spent on asteroid defense and motivate us to spend 2x more (or something like that).
As someone who was paying attention to this scholarship long before anyone was talking about ālongtermismā, I was pretty disappointed when I found out ālongtermismā was just a recapitulation of that older scholarship, plus a grab bag of other stuff that was really unconvincing, or stuff that societies had already been doing for generations, or stuff that just didnāt make sense.
I agree that the scholarship of Bostrom and others starting in the 2000s on existential risk and global catastrophic risk, particularly taking into account the moral value of the far future, does seem novel, and does also seem actionable and important, in that it might, for example, make us re-do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on the expected value of money spent on asteroid defense and motivate us to spend 2x more (or something like that).
As someone who was paying attention to this scholarship long before anyone was talking about ālongtermismā, I was pretty disappointed when I found out ālongtermismā was just a recapitulation of that older scholarship, plus a grab bag of other stuff that was really unconvincing, or stuff that societies had already been doing for generations, or stuff that just didnāt make sense.