It’s a controversial claim, and I don’t endorse it. One attempt is this: http://blog.givewell.org/2013/05/15/flow-through-effects/
Which argues that general economic growth and human empowerment has lots of good long-run side effects, so that boosting these is a good thing to do. The main response to this is that that’s true in the past, but if technological progress causes new xrisks, it’s not clear whether it’ll be true in the future.
Another strand of argument is to look at what rules of thumb people who had lots of impact in the past followed, and argue that something like “take really good opportunities to have a lot of short-run impact” seems like a better rule of thumb than “try to figure out what’s going to happen in the long-run future and how you can shape it). I haven’t seen this argued for in writing though.
It’s a controversial claim, and I don’t endorse it. One attempt is this: http://blog.givewell.org/2013/05/15/flow-through-effects/ Which argues that general economic growth and human empowerment has lots of good long-run side effects, so that boosting these is a good thing to do. The main response to this is that that’s true in the past, but if technological progress causes new xrisks, it’s not clear whether it’ll be true in the future.
Another strand of argument is to look at what rules of thumb people who had lots of impact in the past followed, and argue that something like “take really good opportunities to have a lot of short-run impact” seems like a better rule of thumb than “try to figure out what’s going to happen in the long-run future and how you can shape it). I haven’t seen this argued for in writing though.
Also there have been arguments that the best way to shape the long-run future might be through “broad” interventions rather than “narrow” ones, and broad interventions are often things that involve doing short-term common sense good, like making people better educated. http://lesswrong.com/lw/hjb/a_proposed_adjustment_to_the_astronomical_waste/ http://effective-altruism.com/ea/r6/what_is_a_broad_intervention_and_what_is_a_narrow/