Something can be a promising X intervention even if its something that had been thought of before in connection with another purpose.
For example, GLP-1 blockers are promising obesity interventions. When we discovered they were very effective at weight loss, this was an important intellectual contribution to the world. It gave fat people a new reason to take the drugs. This is true even though GPL-1s were already an approved medical intervention for a different purpose (diabetes).
Even beyond this, I think Nick’s Astronomical Waste argument is Longtermist. So in that sense it is a novel Longtermist idea, even if it predates the term ‘Longtermism’.
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 “longtermism”, I was pretty disappointed when I found out “longtermism” 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 didn’t make sense.
Something can be a promising X intervention even if its something that had been thought of before in connection with another purpose.
For example, GLP-1 blockers are promising obesity interventions. When we discovered they were very effective at weight loss, this was an important intellectual contribution to the world. It gave fat people a new reason to take the drugs. This is true even though GPL-1s were already an approved medical intervention for a different purpose (diabetes).
Even beyond this, I think Nick’s Astronomical Waste argument is Longtermist. So in that sense it is a novel Longtermist idea, even if it predates the term ‘Longtermism’.
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 “longtermism”, I was pretty disappointed when I found out “longtermism” 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 didn’t make sense.