Thanks ThomasWoodside! I noticed the forum has relatively low throughput so I decided to “learn in public” as it were :)
I understand the Cleopatra paragraph now and I’ve edited my post. I wasn’t able to understand his point before, so I got it wrong. Thanks for explaining it!
Obviously, it wasn’t. But of course it wasn’t! There wasn’t even longtermism at all, so it wasn’t a significant factor in anyone’s decisions. Maybe you are trying to say “people can make long term changes without being motivated by longtermism.” But that doesn’t say anything about whether longtermism might make them better at creating long term changes than they otherwise would be.
This is a good point. I wanted to show “longtermism is not necessary for long term changes”, which I think is pretty likely. The more venturesome idea is “longtermism would not make better long term changes”, and those examples don’t address that point.
My intuition is that a longtermism mindset likely would not have a significant positive impact (such as the imaginary examples I wrote), but it’s pretty hard to “prove” that because we don’t have a counterfactual history. We could go through historical examples of people with longterm views (in journals and diaries?), and see whether they had positive or negative impact. That might be a big project though.
I generally agree with this and so do many others. For instance see here and here.
These are really good links, thank you!
In terms of whether historical “long term” interventions have been negative, you’ve asserted it but you haven’t really shown it. I would be very interested in research on this; I’m not aware of any. If this were true, I do think that would be a knock against longtermism as a theory of action (though not decisive, and not against longtermism as a theory of value). Though it maybe could still be argued that we live at “the hinge of history” where longtermism is especially useful.
Same! I agree this is a weakness of my post. Theory of action vs theory of value is a good concept—I don’t have a strong view on longtermism as a theory of value, I mostly care about the theory of action.
Thanks ThomasWoodside! I noticed the forum has relatively low throughput so I decided to “learn in public” as it were :)
I understand the Cleopatra paragraph now and I’ve edited my post. I wasn’t able to understand his point before, so I got it wrong. Thanks for explaining it!
This is a good point. I wanted to show “longtermism is not necessary for long term changes”, which I think is pretty likely. The more venturesome idea is “longtermism would not make better long term changes”, and those examples don’t address that point.
My intuition is that a longtermism mindset likely would not have a significant positive impact (such as the imaginary examples I wrote), but it’s pretty hard to “prove” that because we don’t have a counterfactual history. We could go through historical examples of people with longterm views (in journals and diaries?), and see whether they had positive or negative impact. That might be a big project though.
These are really good links, thank you!
Same! I agree this is a weakness of my post. Theory of action vs theory of value is a good concept—I don’t have a strong view on longtermism as a theory of value, I mostly care about the theory of action.