As currently defined, long termists have two possible choices.
Direct work to reduce X-risk
Investing for the future (by saving or movement building) to then spend on reduction of x-risk at a later date
There are however other actions that may be more beneficial.
Let us look again at the definition of influential again
a time ti is more influential (from a longtermist perspective) than a time tj iff you would prefer to give an additional unit of resources,[1] that has to be spent doing direct work (rather than investment), to a longtermist altruist living at ti rather than to a longtermist altruist living at tj.
While direct work is not formally defined it can be seen here to be mainly referred to as near-term existential risk mitigation.
The most obvious implication, however, is regarding what proportion of resources longtermist EAs should be spending on near-term existential risk mitigation versus what I call ‘buck-passing’ strategies like saving or movement-building.
What happens if the answer is neither option? What are the other levers we have on the future. One is that we might be able to take actions that change the expected rate of return. Perhaps the expected rate of return on investments is very bad, but there are actions you can take to increase it to more normal levels? Or there is low-hanging fruit for vastly increasing the expected rate of return on investments in the long term.
So let us introduce another type of influential (and another version of hingeness). Influential-i, that is the time that has the most influential action being ones that attempt to impact interest rates.
a time ti is more influential-i (from a longtermist perspective) than a time tj iff you would prefer to give an additional unit of resources,[1] that has to be spent doing direct work to alter investment rates (rather than normal investment itself or X-risk reduction), to a longtermist altruist living at ti rather than to a longtermist altruist living at tj.
So what would increase the rate of return on investment? New energy sources with high energy returned on energy invested could increase the rate of return on investment. For example, if you manage to help invent nuclear fusion you would increase the amount of cleaner energy available to civilisation giving more resources to future altruists to use to solve problems.
Avoiding vast decreases in the rate of return would be actions that manage to stave of civilization collapse. Civilization collapse should be a lot higher on the radar for long term altruists, as it is.
More likely than existential risk (considering civilisations have collapsed in the past and there are inside views for it happening in the future)
Likely to cause a collapse in the effective altruism movement as well as people focus lower on maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Likely to cause hyperinflation (at the minimum), wiping out savings.
As currently defined, long termists have two possible choices.
Direct work to reduce X-risk
Investing for the future (by saving or movement building) to then spend on reduction of x-risk at a later date
There are however other actions that may be more beneficial.
Let us look again at the definition of influential again
While direct work is not formally defined it can be seen here to be mainly referred to as near-term existential risk mitigation.
What happens if the answer is neither option? What are the other levers we have on the future. One is that we might be able to take actions that change the expected rate of return. Perhaps the expected rate of return on investments is very bad, but there are actions you can take to increase it to more normal levels? Or there is low-hanging fruit for vastly increasing the expected rate of return on investments in the long term.
So let us introduce another type of influential (and another version of hingeness). Influential-i, that is the time that has the most influential action being ones that attempt to impact interest rates.
So what would increase the rate of return on investment? New energy sources with high energy returned on energy invested could increase the rate of return on investment. For example, if you manage to help invent nuclear fusion you would increase the amount of cleaner energy available to civilisation giving more resources to future altruists to use to solve problems.
Avoiding vast decreases in the rate of return would be actions that manage to stave of civilization collapse. Civilization collapse should be a lot higher on the radar for long term altruists, as it is.
More likely than existential risk (considering civilisations have collapsed in the past and there are inside views for it happening in the future)
Likely to cause a collapse in the effective altruism movement as well as people focus lower on maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Likely to cause hyperinflation (at the minimum), wiping out savings.
Lowering/destroying existing existential risk reduction mitigation efforts (meteorite monitoring programs).
The long-termist community would do well to look at these options when thinking about the time frame of hundreds of years.