First I should note that I wrote my previous comment on my phone in the middle of the night when I should have been asleep long before, so I wasnāt thinking fully about how others would interpret my words. Seeing the reaction to it I see that the comment didnāt add value as written and I probably should just just waited to write it later when I could unambiguously communicate what bothered me about it at length (as I do in this comment).
To clarify, I agree with you an Yglesias that most longtermists are working on things like preventing AI from causing human extinction only a few decades from now, meaning the work is also very important from a short-term perspective that doesnāt give weight to what happens after say, 2100. So I agree with you that āālongtermismā in practice mostly manifests as working on [reducing near-term] x-risk.ā
To explain what bothered me about Yglesiasā post more clearly, let me first say that my answer to āWhatās long-term about ālongtermismā?ā is the (my words:) āgiving significant moral weight to the many potential beings that might come to exist over the course of the long-term future (trillions upon trillions of years)ā part of longtermism. Since that āpartā of longtermism actually is wholly what long-termism is, one could also just answer ālongtermism is long-termā.
In other words, the question sounds similar to (though not exactly like) āWhatās liberal about liberalism?ā or āWhatās colonial about colonialism?ā
I therefore would expect a post with the title āWhatās long-term about ālongtermismā?ā to explain that longtermism is a moral view that gives enough moral weight to the experiences of future beings that might come to exist such that the long-term future of life matters a lot in expectation given how long that future might be (trillions upon trillions of years) and how much space in the universe it might make use of (a huge number of resources beyond this pale blue dot).
But instead, Yglesiasā post points out that the interventions that people who care about beings in the long-term future think are most worthwhile often look like things that people who didnāt care about future generations would also think are important (if they held the same empirical beliefs about near-term AI x-risk, as some of them do).
And my reaction to that is, okay, yes Yglesias, I get it and agree, but you didnāt actually argue that longtermism isnāt ālong termā like your title suggested you might. Longtermism absolutely is ālong-termā (as I described above). The fact that some interventions favored by longtermists also look good from non-longtermist moral perspectives doesnāt change that.
Yglesias:
Because at the end of the day, the people who work in this field and who call themselves ālongtermistsā donāt seem to be motivated by any particularly unusual ideas about the long term.
This statement is a motte in that he says āany particularly unusual ideas about the long termā rather than ālongtermismā.
(I think the vast majority of people care about future generations in some capacity, e.g. they care about their children and their friendsā children before the children are born. Where we draw the line between this and some form of āstrong longtermismā that actually is āparticularly unusualā is unclear to me. E.g. I think most people also actually care about their friendsā unborn childrenās unborn children too, though people often donāt make this explicit so itās unclear to me how unusual the longtermism moral view actually is.)
If we replace the āany particularly unusual ideas about the long termā with ālongtermismā then Yglesiasā statement seems to become an easily-attackable bailey.
In particular, I would say that the statement seems false and uncharitable and unsubstantiated. Yglesias is making a generalization, and obviously itās a generalization thatās true of some people working on reducing x-risks posed by AI, but I know itās definitely not true of many others working on x-risks. E.g. There are definitely many self-described longtermists working on reducing AI x-risk who are in fact motivated by wanting to make sure that humanity doesnāt go extinct so that future people can come to exist.
While Iām not an AI alignment researcher, Iāve personally donated a substantial fraction of my earnings to people doing this work and do many things that fall in the movement building /ā field building category to try to get other people to work on reducing AI risk, and I can personally attest to the fact that I care a lot more about preventing extinction to ensure that future beings are able to come to exist and live great lives than I care about saving my own life and everyone I know and love today. Itās not that I donāt care about my own life and everyone else alive todayāI do a tremendous amountābut rather that as Derrick Parfit says the worst part about everyone dying today would by far be the loss of all future value, not 8 billion humans lives being cut short.
The last thing that Iāll say in this comment is that I found the post via Yglesiasā Some thoughts on the FTX collapse post that Rob responded to in the OP. Hereās how Yglesias cited his āWhatās long-term about ālongtermismā?ā in the FTX collapse post:
If you are tediously familiar with the details of EA institutions, I think youāll see my list is closer to the priorities of Open Philanthropy (the Dustin Moskovitz /ā Cari Tuna EA funding vehicle) than to those of the FTX Future Fund. In part, thatās because as you can see in the name, SBF was very publicly affiliated with promoting the ālongtermismā idea, which I find to be a little bit confused.
As Iāve explained at length in this comment, I think longtermism is not confused. Contra Yglesias (though again Yglesias doesnāt actually argue against the claim, which is what I found annoying), longtermism is in fact ālong-term.ā
Yglesias is actually the one who is confused, both in his failure to recognize that longtermism is in fact ālong-termā and because he confuses/āconflates the motivations of some people working on reducing near-term extinction risk from AI with ālongtermism.ā
Again: Longtermism is a moral view that emphasizes the importance of future generations throughout the long term future. People who favor this view (self-identified ālongtermistā EAs) often end up favoring working on reducing the risk of near-term human extinction from AI. People who are only motivated by what happens in the near term may also view working on this problem to be important. But that does not mean that longtermism is not ālong termā, because āthe motivation of some people working on reducing near-term extinction risk from AIā is not ālongtermism.ā
I want to say āobviously!ā to this (because thatās what I was thinking when I read Yglesiasā post late last night and which is why I was annoying by it), but I also recognize that EAsā communications related to ālongtermismā have been far from perfect and itās not surprising that some smart people like Yglesias are confused.
In my view it probably would have been better to have and propagate a term for the general idea of ācreating new happy beings is a morally good as opposed to morally neutral matterā rather than ālongtermism,ā and then we could just talk about the obvious fact that under this moral view it seems very important to not miss out on the opportunity to put the extremely large stock of resources available in our galaxy and beyond to use producing happy beings for trillions upon trillions of years to come, by e.g. allowing human extinction in the near term or otherwise not becoming grabby and enduring for a long time. But this would be the subject of another discussion.
Edited to add: Sorry this post is so long. Whenever I feel like I wasnāt understood in writing I have a tendency to want to write a lot more to overexplain my thoughts. In other words Iāve written absurdly long comments like this before in similar circumstances. Hopefully it wasnāt annoying to read it all. Obviously the time cost to me of writing it is much more than the time-cost to you or others for reading it, but I also Iām wary of putting out lengthy text for others to read where shorter text could have sufficed. I just know I have trouble keeping my comments concise under conditions like this and psychologically it was easier for me to just write everything out as I wrote it. (To share, I also think doing this generally isnāt a very good use of my time and Iād like to get better at not doing this, or at least not as often.)
First I should note that I wrote my previous comment on my phone in the middle of the night when I should have been asleep long before, so I wasnāt thinking fully about how others would interpret my words. Seeing the reaction to it I see that the comment didnāt add value as written and I probably should just just waited to write it later when I could unambiguously communicate what bothered me about it at length (as I do in this comment).
No worries! I appreciate the context and totally relate :) (and relate with the desire to write a lot of things to clear up a confusion!)
For your general point, I would guess this is mostly a semantic/ānamespace collision thing? Thereās ālongtermismā as the group of people who talk a lot about x-risk, AI safety and pandemics because they hold some weird beliefs here, and thereās longtermism as the moral philosophy of future people matter a lot.
I saw Mattās point as saying that the ālongtermismā group, doesnāt actually need to have much to do with the longtermism philosophy, and that thus itās weird that they call themselves longtermists. Because they are basically the only people working on AI X-risk and thus are the group associated with that worldview, and try hard to promote it. Even though this is really an empirical belief and not much to do with their longtermism.
I mostly didnāt see his post as an attack or comment on the philosophical movement of longtermism.
But yeah, overall I would guess that we mostly just agree here?
Thereās ālongtermismā as the group of people who talk a lot about x-risk, AI safety and pandemics because they hold some weird beliefs here
InterestingāWhen I think of the group of people ālongtermistsā I think of the set of people who subscribe to (and self-identify with) some moral view thatās basically ālongtermism,ā not people who work on reducing existential risks. While thereās a big overlap between these two sets of people, I think referring to e.g. people who reject caring about future people as ālongtermistsā is pretty absurd, even if such people also hold the weird empirical beliefs about AI (or bioengineered pandemics, etc) posing a huge near-term extinction risk. Caring about AI x-risk or thinking the x-risk from AI is large is simply not the thing that makes a person a ālongtermist.ā
But maybe people have started using the word ālongtermistā in this way and thatās the reason Yglesiasā worded his post as he did? (I havenāt observed this, but it sounds like you might have.)
But maybe people have started using the word ālongtermistā in this way and thatās the reason Yglesiasā worded his post as he did? (I havenāt observed this, but it sounds like you might have.)
Yeah this feels like the crux, my read is that ālongtermist EAā is a term used to encompass holy shit x risk EA too
Thanks for the reply, Neel.
First I should note that I wrote my previous comment on my phone in the middle of the night when I should have been asleep long before, so I wasnāt thinking fully about how others would interpret my words. Seeing the reaction to it I see that the comment didnāt add value as written and I probably should just just waited to write it later when I could unambiguously communicate what bothered me about it at length (as I do in this comment).
To clarify, I agree with you an Yglesias that most longtermists are working on things like preventing AI from causing human extinction only a few decades from now, meaning the work is also very important from a short-term perspective that doesnāt give weight to what happens after say, 2100. So I agree with you that āālongtermismā in practice mostly manifests as working on [reducing near-term] x-risk.ā
I also agree that thereās an annoying thing about ālongtermist EA marketingā related to the above. (I liked your Simplify EA Pitches to āHoly Shit, X-Riskā.)
To explain what bothered me about Yglesiasā post more clearly, let me first say that my answer to āWhatās long-term about ālongtermismā?ā is the (my words:) āgiving significant moral weight to the many potential beings that might come to exist over the course of the long-term future (trillions upon trillions of years)ā part of longtermism. Since that āpartā of longtermism actually is wholly what long-termism is, one could also just answer ālongtermism is long-termā.
In other words, the question sounds similar to (though not exactly like) āWhatās liberal about liberalism?ā or āWhatās colonial about colonialism?ā
I therefore would expect a post with the title āWhatās long-term about ālongtermismā?ā to explain that longtermism is a moral view that gives enough moral weight to the experiences of future beings that might come to exist such that the long-term future of life matters a lot in expectation given how long that future might be (trillions upon trillions of years) and how much space in the universe it might make use of (a huge number of resources beyond this pale blue dot).
But instead, Yglesiasā post points out that the interventions that people who care about beings in the long-term future think are most worthwhile often look like things that people who didnāt care about future generations would also think are important (if they held the same empirical beliefs about near-term AI x-risk, as some of them do).
And my reaction to that is, okay, yes Yglesias, I get it and agree, but you didnāt actually argue that longtermism isnāt ālong termā like your title suggested you might. Longtermism absolutely is ālong-termā (as I described above). The fact that some interventions favored by longtermists also look good from non-longtermist moral perspectives doesnāt change that.
Yglesias:
This statement is a motte in that he says āany particularly unusual ideas about the long termā rather than ālongtermismā.
(I think the vast majority of people care about future generations in some capacity, e.g. they care about their children and their friendsā children before the children are born. Where we draw the line between this and some form of āstrong longtermismā that actually is āparticularly unusualā is unclear to me. E.g. I think most people also actually care about their friendsā unborn childrenās unborn children too, though people often donāt make this explicit so itās unclear to me how unusual the longtermism moral view actually is.)
If we replace the āany particularly unusual ideas about the long termā with ālongtermismā then Yglesiasā statement seems to become an easily-attackable bailey.
In particular, I would say that the statement seems false and uncharitable and unsubstantiated. Yglesias is making a generalization, and obviously itās a generalization thatās true of some people working on reducing x-risks posed by AI, but I know itās definitely not true of many others working on x-risks. E.g. There are definitely many self-described longtermists working on reducing AI x-risk who are in fact motivated by wanting to make sure that humanity doesnāt go extinct so that future people can come to exist.
While Iām not an AI alignment researcher, Iāve personally donated a substantial fraction of my earnings to people doing this work and do many things that fall in the movement building /ā field building category to try to get other people to work on reducing AI risk, and I can personally attest to the fact that I care a lot more about preventing extinction to ensure that future beings are able to come to exist and live great lives than I care about saving my own life and everyone I know and love today. Itās not that I donāt care about my own life and everyone else alive todayāI do a tremendous amountābut rather that as Derrick Parfit says the worst part about everyone dying today would by far be the loss of all future value, not 8 billion humans lives being cut short.
I hope this clarifies my complaint about Yglesiasā Whatās long-term about ālongtermismā? post.
The last thing that Iāll say in this comment is that I found the post via Yglesiasā Some thoughts on the FTX collapse post that Rob responded to in the OP. Hereās how Yglesias cited his āWhatās long-term about ālongtermismā?ā in the FTX collapse post:
As Iāve explained at length in this comment, I think longtermism is not confused. Contra Yglesias (though again Yglesias doesnāt actually argue against the claim, which is what I found annoying), longtermism is in fact ālong-term.ā
Yglesias is actually the one who is confused, both in his failure to recognize that longtermism is in fact ālong-termā and because he confuses/āconflates the motivations of some people working on reducing near-term extinction risk from AI with ālongtermism.ā
Again: Longtermism is a moral view that emphasizes the importance of future generations throughout the long term future. People who favor this view (self-identified ālongtermistā EAs) often end up favoring working on reducing the risk of near-term human extinction from AI. People who are only motivated by what happens in the near term may also view working on this problem to be important. But that does not mean that longtermism is not ālong termā, because āthe motivation of some people working on reducing near-term extinction risk from AIā is not ālongtermism.ā
I want to say āobviously!ā to this (because thatās what I was thinking when I read Yglesiasā post late last night and which is why I was annoying by it), but I also recognize that EAsā communications related to ālongtermismā have been far from perfect and itās not surprising that some smart people like Yglesias are confused.
In my view it probably would have been better to have and propagate a term for the general idea of ācreating new happy beings is a morally good as opposed to morally neutral matterā rather than ālongtermism,ā and then we could just talk about the obvious fact that under this moral view it seems very important to not miss out on the opportunity to put the extremely large stock of resources available in our galaxy and beyond to use producing happy beings for trillions upon trillions of years to come, by e.g. allowing human extinction in the near term or otherwise not becoming grabby and enduring for a long time. But this would be the subject of another discussion.
Edited to add: Sorry this post is so long. Whenever I feel like I wasnāt understood in writing I have a tendency to want to write a lot more to overexplain my thoughts. In other words Iāve written absurdly long comments like this before in similar circumstances. Hopefully it wasnāt annoying to read it all. Obviously the time cost to me of writing it is much more than the time-cost to you or others for reading it, but I also Iām wary of putting out lengthy text for others to read where shorter text could have sufficed. I just know I have trouble keeping my comments concise under conditions like this and psychologically it was easier for me to just write everything out as I wrote it. (To share, I also think doing this generally isnāt a very good use of my time and Iād like to get better at not doing this, or at least not as often.)
No worries! I appreciate the context and totally relate :) (and relate with the desire to write a lot of things to clear up a confusion!)
For your general point, I would guess this is mostly a semantic/ānamespace collision thing? Thereās ālongtermismā as the group of people who talk a lot about x-risk, AI safety and pandemics because they hold some weird beliefs here, and thereās longtermism as the moral philosophy of future people matter a lot.
I saw Mattās point as saying that the ālongtermismā group, doesnāt actually need to have much to do with the longtermism philosophy, and that thus itās weird that they call themselves longtermists. Because they are basically the only people working on AI X-risk and thus are the group associated with that worldview, and try hard to promote it. Even though this is really an empirical belief and not much to do with their longtermism.
I mostly didnāt see his post as an attack or comment on the philosophical movement of longtermism.
But yeah, overall I would guess that we mostly just agree here?
InterestingāWhen I think of the group of people ālongtermistsā I think of the set of people who subscribe to (and self-identify with) some moral view thatās basically ālongtermism,ā not people who work on reducing existential risks. While thereās a big overlap between these two sets of people, I think referring to e.g. people who reject caring about future people as ālongtermistsā is pretty absurd, even if such people also hold the weird empirical beliefs about AI (or bioengineered pandemics, etc) posing a huge near-term extinction risk. Caring about AI x-risk or thinking the x-risk from AI is large is simply not the thing that makes a person a ālongtermist.ā
But maybe people have started using the word ālongtermistā in this way and thatās the reason Yglesiasā worded his post as he did? (I havenāt observed this, but it sounds like you might have.)
Yeah this feels like the crux, my read is that ālongtermist EAā is a term used to encompass holy shit x risk EA too