″ future people are as morally important as those alive now” seems like a very high bar for longtermism. If e.g. you think future people are 0.1% as important, but there’s no time discount for when (as long as they don’t exist yet), this doesn’t prevent you from concluding the future is hugely important. Similarly for some exponential discounts (though they need to be extremely small).
My idea of a guided flowchart is that nuances like this would be explained in the accompanying guidance, but not necessarily alluded to in the flowchart itself which is supposed to stay fairly high-level and simple. It may be however that that box can be reworded to something like “Are future people (even in millions of years) of non-negligible moral worth” or something like that.
Ideally someone would read the guidance for each box to ensure they progressing through the flowchart correctly.
Almost nobody? I’d imagine at least some people are interested in making an informed decision on cause area and would be interested in learning.
You might be right though. I’m not getting a huge amount of positive reception on this post (to put it lightly) so it may be that such a guided flowchart is a doomed enterprise.
EDIT: you could literally make it that you click on a box and guidance pops up so it could theoretically be very easy to engage with it.
″ future people are as morally important as those alive now” seems like a very high bar for longtermism. If e.g. you think future people are 0.1% as important, but there’s no time discount for when (as long as they don’t exist yet), this doesn’t prevent you from concluding the future is hugely important. Similarly for some exponential discounts (though they need to be extremely small).
Absolutely agree with that.
My idea of a guided flowchart is that nuances like this would be explained in the accompanying guidance, but not necessarily alluded to in the flowchart itself which is supposed to stay fairly high-level and simple. It may be however that that box can be reworded to something like “Are future people (even in millions of years) of non-negligible moral worth” or something like that.
Ideally someone would read the guidance for each box to ensure they progressing through the flowchart correctly.
I think if you present a simplified/summarised thing along with more detailed guidance you should assume that almost nobody will read the guidance.
Almost nobody? I’d imagine at least some people are interested in making an informed decision on cause area and would be interested in learning.
You might be right though. I’m not getting a huge amount of positive reception on this post (to put it lightly) so it may be that such a guided flowchart is a doomed enterprise.
EDIT: you could literally make it that you click on a box and guidance pops up so it could theoretically be very easy to engage with it.