Note: I did not call anyone racist, other than to note that there are groups which embrace some views which themselves embrace that label—but on review, you keep saying that this is about calling someone racist, whereas I’m talking about unequal impacts and systemic impacts of choices—and I think this is a serious confusion which is hampering our conversation.
Perhaps I have misunderstood, but I interpreted your post as saying we should take the two critiques of longtermism seriously. I think the quality of the critiques is extremely poor, and am trying to explain why.
I might have been unclear. As I said initially, I claim it’s good to publicly address concerns about “the (indisputable) fact that avoiding X-risks can be tied to racist or eugenic historical precedents”, and this is what the LARB piece actually discussed. And I think that slightly more investigation into the issue should have convinced the author that any concerns about continued embrace of the eugenic ideas, or ignorance of the issues, were misplaced. I initially pointed out that specific claims about longtermism being similar to eugenics are “farcical.” More generally, I tried to point out in this post that many the attacks are unserious or uniformed- as Scott pointed out in his essay, which this one quoted and applied to this situation, the criticisms aren’t new.
More serious attempts at dialog, like some of the criticisms in the LARB piece are not bad-faith or unreasonable claims, even if they fail to be original. And I agree that “we cannot claim to take existential risk seriously — and meaningfully confront the grave threats to the future of human and nonhuman life on this planet — if we do not also confront the fact that our ideas about human extinction, including how human extinction might be prevented, have a dark history.” But I also think it’s obvious that others working on longtermism agree, so the criticism seems to be at best a weak man argument. Unfortunately, I think we’ll need to wait another year or so for Will’s new book, which I understand has a far more complete discussion of this, much of which was written before either of these pieces were published.
Note: I did not call anyone racist, other than to note that there are groups which embrace some views which themselves embrace that label—but on review, you keep saying that this is about calling someone racist, whereas I’m talking about unequal impacts and systemic impacts of choices—and I think this is a serious confusion which is hampering our conversation.
Perhaps I have misunderstood, but I interpreted your post as saying we should take the two critiques of longtermism seriously. I think the quality of the critiques is extremely poor, and am trying to explain why.
I might have been unclear. As I said initially, I claim it’s good to publicly address concerns about “the (indisputable) fact that avoiding X-risks can be tied to racist or eugenic historical precedents”, and this is what the LARB piece actually discussed. And I think that slightly more investigation into the issue should have convinced the author that any concerns about continued embrace of the eugenic ideas, or ignorance of the issues, were misplaced. I initially pointed out that specific claims about longtermism being similar to eugenics are “farcical.” More generally, I tried to point out in this post that many the attacks are unserious or uniformed- as Scott pointed out in his essay, which this one quoted and applied to this situation, the criticisms aren’t new.
More serious attempts at dialog, like some of the criticisms in the LARB piece are not bad-faith or unreasonable claims, even if they fail to be original. And I agree that “we cannot claim to take existential risk seriously — and meaningfully confront the grave threats to the future of human and nonhuman life on this planet — if we do not also confront the fact that our ideas about human extinction, including how human extinction might be prevented, have a dark history.” But I also think it’s obvious that others working on longtermism agree, so the criticism seems to be at best a weak man argument. Unfortunately, I think we’ll need to wait another year or so for Will’s new book, which I understand has a far more complete discussion of this, much of which was written before either of these pieces were published.
Sorry to jump in the conversation, but Toby Ord has another book? Maybe you’re talking about Will MacAskill’s upcoming book on longtermism?
Right—fixed. Whoops!