For longtermists, surprising applications of ethical principles aren’t as valuable, because by default we shouldn’t expect them to influence humanity’s trajectory, and because we’re mainly using a maxipok strategy
Aiming for maxipok doesn’t mean not influencing the trajectory (if the counterfactual is catastrophe), it’s just much harder to measure impact. If measuring impact is hard, de-risking becomes more important, because of path-dependency. If we build out one or two particular longtermist cause areas really strongly with lots of certainty, they’ll have a lot of momentum (orgs and stuff) and if we find out later that they are having negative impact or not having impact (or worse, this happens and we just never find out), that will be bad.
I agree longtermist cause prioritisation is harder, even though I didn’t really think your reasons were very well articulated (in particular I don’t understand why you’re comparing altruism with understanding & controlling the future, seems like apples and oranges to me and surely it’s the intersection of X and altruism with the market gap), but I don’t think it’s less valuable.
Aiming for maxipok doesn’t mean not influencing the trajectory (if the counterfactual is catastrophe), it’s just much harder to measure impact. If measuring impact is hard, de-risking becomes more important, because of path-dependency. If we build out one or two particular longtermist cause areas really strongly with lots of certainty, they’ll have a lot of momentum (orgs and stuff) and if we find out later that they are having negative impact or not having impact (or worse, this happens and we just never find out), that will be bad.
I agree longtermist cause prioritisation is harder, even though I didn’t really think your reasons were very well articulated (in particular I don’t understand why you’re comparing altruism with understanding & controlling the future, seems like apples and oranges to me and surely it’s the intersection of X and altruism with the market gap), but I don’t think it’s less valuable.