Now look again at your bulleted list of “big” indirect effects, and remember that you can only hasten them, not enable them. To me, this consideration make the impact we can have on them seem no more than a rounding error if compared to the impact we can have due to LEV (each year you bring LEV closer by saves 36,500,000 lives of 1000QALYS. This is a conservative estimate I made here.)
This isn’t clear to me. In Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill’s paper on strong longtermism, they argue that unless what we do now impacts a critical lock-in period, then most of the stuff we do now will “wash out” and have a low impact on the future.
If a lock-in period never comes, then there’s no compelling reason to focus on indirect effects of anti-aging, and therefore I’d agree with you that these effects are small. However, if there is a lock-in period, then the actual lives saved from ending aging could be tiny compared to the lasting billion year impact that shifting to a post-aging society lead to.
What a strong long-termist should mainly care about are these indirect effects, not merely the lives saved.
This isn’t clear to me. In Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill’s paper on strong longtermism, they argue that unless what we do now impacts a critical lock-in period, then most of the stuff we do now will “wash out” and have a low impact on the future.
If a lock-in period never comes, then there’s no compelling reason to focus on indirect effects of anti-aging, and therefore I’d agree with you that these effects are small. However, if there is a lock-in period, then the actual lives saved from ending aging could be tiny compared to the lasting billion year impact that shifting to a post-aging society lead to.
What a strong long-termist should mainly care about are these indirect effects, not merely the lives saved.