I basically agree with those two points, but also think they don’t really defeat the case for strong longtermism, or at least for e.g. some tens or hundreds or thousands of people doing “second- or third-order” research on these things.
This research could, for example, attempt to:
flesh out the two points you raised
quantify how much those points reduce the value of second- or third-order research into longtermism
consider whether there are any approaches to first- or second- or third-order longtermism-related work that don’t suffer those objections, or suffer them less
It’s hard to know how to count these things, but, off the top of my head, I’d estimate that:
something like 50-1000 people have done serious, focused work to identify high-priority longtermist interventions
fewer have done serious, focused work to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of those interventions, or to assess arguments for and against longtermism (e.g., work like this paper or Tarsney’s epistemic challenge paper)
So I think we should see “strong longtermism actually isn’t right, e.g. due to the epistemic challenge” as a live hypothesis, but that it does seem too early to say we’ve concluded that or that we’ve concluded it’s not worth looking into. It seems that we’re sufficiently uncertain, the potential stakes are sufficiently high, and the questions have been looked into sufficiently little that, whether we’re leaning towards thinking strong longtermism is true or that it’s false, it’s worth having at least some people doing serious, focused work to “double-check”.
I basically agree with those two points, but also think they don’t really defeat the case for strong longtermism, or at least for e.g. some tens or hundreds or thousands of people doing “second- or third-order” research on these things.
This research could, for example, attempt to:
flesh out the two points you raised
quantify how much those points reduce the value of second- or third-order research into longtermism
consider whether there are any approaches to first- or second- or third-order longtermism-related work that don’t suffer those objections, or suffer them less
It’s hard to know how to count these things, but, off the top of my head, I’d estimate that:
something like 50-1000 people have done serious, focused work to identify high-priority longtermist interventions
fewer have done serious, focused work to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of those interventions, or to assess arguments for and against longtermism (e.g., work like this paper or Tarsney’s epistemic challenge paper)
So I think we should see “strong longtermism actually isn’t right, e.g. due to the epistemic challenge” as a live hypothesis, but that it does seem too early to say we’ve concluded that or that we’ve concluded it’s not worth looking into. It seems that we’re sufficiently uncertain, the potential stakes are sufficiently high, and the questions have been looked into sufficiently little that, whether we’re leaning towards thinking strong longtermism is true or that it’s false, it’s worth having at least some people doing serious, focused work to “double-check”.