I want to invite readers to attempt to describe their own implicit blueprints.
My primary blueprint is as follows:
I want the world in 30 years time to be in as good a state as it can be in order to face whatever challenges that will come next.
This is based of a few ideas.
Firstly, that almost no business government or policy-maker ever makes plans beyond a 25-30 year time horizon and my own understanding of how to manage situations of high uncertainty put in place the 30 year time limit.
Secondly there is an idea that is common across long-term policy making of setting out a clear vision of what you want to achieve in the long-term is a useful step. The Welsh Future Generations Bill and the work on long-term policy making in Portugal from the School of International Futures are examples of this.
Maybe you could describe this as a lens of: What is current best practice in long-term policy thinking?
This is combined with a few alternative approaches (alternative blueprints) such as: what will the world look like in 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 years? What are the biggest risks the world will face in the next 30 years? Of issues that really matter what what is politically of interest right now.
I think that longtermism poses deep problems of bounded rationality, and working out how to address those (in theory and in practice) is crucial if the longtermist project is to have the best chance of succeeding at its aims. I think this means we should have a lot of discussion about: …
I strongly agree.
However I think very few in the longtermism community are actually in need of lenses and blueprints right now. In fact sometimes I fell like I am the only one thinking like this. Maybe it is useful to staff like you at at FHI deciding what to research and it is definitely useful to me as someone working on policy making from a longtermist perspective. But most folk are not making any such decisions .
For what it is worth one of my main concerns with the longtermism community at present is it feels very divorced from actual decisions about how to make the world better. Worse it sometimes feels like folk in the longtermism community think that expected value calculations are the only valid decision making tool. I plan to write more on this at some point and would be interested in talking though if you fancy it.
I want the world in 30 years time to be in as good a state as it can be in order to face whatever challenges that will come next.
I like this! I sometimes use a perspective which is pretty close (though often think about 50 years rather than 30 years, and hold it in conjunction with “what are the challenges we might need to face in the next 50 years?”). I think 30 vs 50 years is a kind-of interesting question. I’ve thought about 50 because if I imagine e.g. that we’re going to face critical junctures with the development of AI in 40 years, that’s within the scope where I can imagine it being impacted by causal pathways that I can envision—e.g. critical technology being developed by people who studied under professors who are currently students making career decisions. By 60 years it feels a bit too tenuous for me to hold on to.
I kind of agree that if looking at policy specifically a shorter time horizon feels good.
Thank you for the excellent post
My primary blueprint is as follows:
I want the world in 30 years time to be in as good a state as it can be in order to face whatever challenges that will come next.
This is based of a few ideas.
Firstly, that almost no business government or policy-maker ever makes plans beyond a 25-30 year time horizon and my own understanding of how to manage situations of high uncertainty put in place the 30 year time limit.
Secondly there is an idea that is common across long-term policy making of setting out a clear vision of what you want to achieve in the long-term is a useful step. The Welsh Future Generations Bill and the work on long-term policy making in Portugal from the School of International Futures are examples of this.
Maybe you could describe this as a lens of: What is current best practice in long-term policy thinking?
This is combined with a few alternative approaches (alternative blueprints) such as: what will the world look like in 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 years? What are the biggest risks the world will face in the next 30 years? Of issues that really matter what what is politically of interest right now.
I strongly agree.
However I think very few in the longtermism community are actually in need of lenses and blueprints right now. In fact sometimes I fell like I am the only one thinking like this. Maybe it is useful to staff like you at at FHI deciding what to research and it is definitely useful to me as someone working on policy making from a longtermist perspective. But most folk are not making any such decisions .
For what it is worth one of my main concerns with the longtermism community at present is it feels very divorced from actual decisions about how to make the world better. Worse it sometimes feels like folk in the longtermism community think that expected value calculations are the only valid decision making tool. I plan to write more on this at some point and would be interested in talking though if you fancy it.
I like this! I sometimes use a perspective which is pretty close (though often think about 50 years rather than 30 years, and hold it in conjunction with “what are the challenges we might need to face in the next 50 years?”). I think 30 vs 50 years is a kind-of interesting question. I’ve thought about 50 because if I imagine e.g. that we’re going to face critical junctures with the development of AI in 40 years, that’s within the scope where I can imagine it being impacted by causal pathways that I can envision—e.g. critical technology being developed by people who studied under professors who are currently students making career decisions. By 60 years it feels a bit too tenuous for me to hold on to.
I kind of agree that if looking at policy specifically a shorter time horizon feels good.