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I agree that it’s an important insight that financial investments are not the only thing with compounding impact potential over time. And that therefore other actions may be similarly or more attractive than financial investments from a ‘patient longtermism’ perspective.
If haven’t seen it, you might be interested in this post and the comments as they discuss some related points (among others).
Neat, thanks Max!
Maybe it is because I’ve been reading a lot on biology lately, but the talk of “storing” and “accumulating” potential over time triggered me to think of DNA as an example of this. Over time, DNA “stores” the beneficial traits that have emerged in a given species, while mutations “accumulate” and those with positive impact stick around. Seeing that our capacity to retain and create knowledge, and come up with constructs like “money” in the first place depended in part on our accumulated traits in DNA, an argument could be made that DNA is the original patient long-termist investment. Improvements in our brains tens of thousands of years ago helped us begin thinking these thoughts and expanding our impacts beyond anything any other species has ever been able to do. So what might be coming next? Preserving humans (and their DNA) to see what beneficial traits accumulate into the long-term future may be an enabler to the other patient long-term investments. Better brains leads to faster/better/more knowledge creation, and may even slowly improve our capacity for cooperation by overcoming wiring issues that hinder our ability to play nice with others.
I haven’t thought at all about how to frame this as something in which to proactively “invest”, but I can already see difficulties arising from a discussion of how to intervene. I was mainly just wanting to point out the similarities in the concepts and there are some pitfalls to avoid in this concept for sure. For example, how actively, do we intervene, if at all, to “preserve DNA” or to make sure beneficial traits are “stored” and allowed to “accumulate”. I think a safer interpretation would just be to observe the benefits we have gained from the long-term existence of our DNA and argue for things like the avoidance of existential risks to make sure that the passive storage and accumulation process can continue. Which probably just brings us back to deciding what specific investments, in things like knowledge or coordination as you mentioned, are needed to meet this goal. Don’t want this to be read like “let’s go update our DNA to be smarter now!”…
This made me think of the way David Deutsch talks about knoweldge creation—where knowledge manifests physically in e.g. the way a species is adapted to its niche. The process of natural selection that lead to this adapation is a process of “exploratiin” and “error correction” that accumulates knoweldge. That degree of adaptation is the physical manifestation of kowledge. DNA is an important substrate of this process—however, I expect that DNA won’t be the most fruitful level of abstraction at which to think about the patient longtermist question.
Still, to explore this framework a bit more …
Re accumulation, one potential implication is that we might want to pay attention to the “error correction” mechanism that is essential to knoweldge accumulation. The scientific method is an example of this. We could try to improve the “machinery of science” that is based on this error correction logic, and we could try to apply this logic of error correction(more/better) to more areas beyond academia. Some examples here might be ways to make it easier to have constructive disagreements (eg. adverserial collaborations, the Letter community, a hypothetical wiki that is structured in a way that shows main disagreeing view poitns on a topic, …) or more experimentation/evaluation/updating mechanisms, in particualr in policy making. (Some areas, e.g. business or medicine, have figured out a bunch about how to do these sorts of things, but for reasons these insights are not necesarily being applied as widely as they could).
Good insight, thank you for writing this post! I agree with it. Now that you point it out, I find striking how knowlege has compounded, even more impressively than money.
I would like to add another contestant: influence, within or out of mainstream institutions. As a movement, social capital and influence on other people (especially politicians) could prove very useful to be able to have a large impact when the time is right. I’m thinking especially of the Mont Pelerin society: how they spread in economics academia by convincing people and placing people in positions of (mostly academic) influence; and how they eventually became orthodox economic policy.
The EA community also seems to be very aware of the MPS. What I’m pointing out is that, under your framework, community building is also an intervention for patient longtermism.
I agree something about influence is important. As a counterpoint, I think many manifestations of “having influence” don’t store well (e.g. the fact that at a given time, a relatively large number of EAs have an “influential role” (whatever that means exactly) is only weakly related to how many EAs will have an influential role in t+1 (say a generation later).
Wrt accumulation, influence also seems less straightforward to grow when you compare it to e.g. money (and to a lesser extent to knowledge) which, thanks to interest rates, accumulates at a certain rate basically for free (without you having to do anything) and fairly robustly. I’m not saying that influence is clearly a worse investment than money when it comes to future impact potenital, but that money is a pretty good and stable baseline that might not be as easy to beat as one might think at first sight. Also I think approaches of using “influence” to store and accumulate impact potential will vary a lot on these dimensions, so we’d probably want to talk about such approaches in the concrete rather than the abstract
> under your framework, community building is also an intervention for patient longtermism
+1 and also worth flagging that e.g. Philip Trammel explicitly says so too in his work on patient longtermism (though he clarifies that this is only true for specific types of community building)