I feel like you’re probably too sceptical about the possibility of us ever knowing if longtermist interventions are positive. You say we can’t get feedback on longtermist interventions, and that is certainly true, but presumably later generations will be able to evaluate our current long-termist efforts and determine if they were good or not. Or do you doubt this as well?
I’ve sometimes wondered about this, but I’m not sure how it gets past the objection to Response 1. In 1000 years’ time, people will (at best!) be able to measure what the 1000-year effects were of our actions today. But aren’t we still completely clueless as to what the long-term effects of those actions are?
Not sure, maybe. The way I think about it is historians in a few thousand years could study say an institution we create now and try to judge if it reduced the probability of some lock-in event e.g. a great power conflict. If they judge it did then the institution was a pretty good intervention. Of course they will never be able to know for sure if the institution avoided such a conflict, but I don’t think they would have to, they would just have to determine if the institution had a non-negligible effect on the probability of such a conflict. It doesn’t seem impossible to me that they might have something to say about that.
Of course there are some long-term effects we would remain clueless about e.g. “did creating the institution delay the conception of a person which lead to an evil person being conceived etc. etc.” but this is the sort of cluelessness that Greaves (2016) argues we can ignore as these effects are ‘symmetric across acts’ i.e. it was just as likely to happen if we hadn’t created the institution.
I’ve sometimes wondered about this, but I’m not sure how it gets past the objection to Response 1. In 1000 years’ time, people will (at best!) be able to measure what the 1000-year effects were of our actions today. But aren’t we still completely clueless as to what the long-term effects of those actions are?
Not sure, maybe. The way I think about it is historians in a few thousand years could study say an institution we create now and try to judge if it reduced the probability of some lock-in event e.g. a great power conflict. If they judge it did then the institution was a pretty good intervention. Of course they will never be able to know for sure if the institution avoided such a conflict, but I don’t think they would have to, they would just have to determine if the institution had a non-negligible effect on the probability of such a conflict. It doesn’t seem impossible to me that they might have something to say about that.
Of course there are some long-term effects we would remain clueless about e.g. “did creating the institution delay the conception of a person which lead to an evil person being conceived etc. etc.” but this is the sort of cluelessness that Greaves (2016) argues we can ignore as these effects are ‘symmetric across acts’ i.e. it was just as likely to happen if we hadn’t created the institution.