Maybe this is a me problem but I found this essay pretty impenetrable. I can’t figure out what the thesis is, and I struggle to even understand what most of the individual sentences are saying.
I personally found it a very refreshing change of language/thinking/style from the usual EA Forum/LessWrong post, and found spending some extra effort to (hopefully) understand it worth it and highly enjoyable.
My one sentence summary/translation would be that advocating for longtermism would likely benefit on the margin from using more of a virtue ethics approach (e.g. using saints and heroes as examples) instead of a rationalist/utilitarian approach, as most people feel even less of an obligation towards future beings than towards the global poor, and many of the most altruistic people act altruistically for emotional/spiritual reasons rather than rational ones.
I could have definitely misunderstood the post though, so someone correct me if I misinterpreted it, and there are a lot more valuable points. E.g. that most people agree on an abstract level that future people matter, and that actively causing them harm is bad. So I think it claims that longtermists should focus less on strengthening that case and more on other things. Another interesting point is that to “mitigate hazards we create for ourselves” we could take advantage of the fact that “causing harm is intuitively worse than not producing benefit” for most people.
I think SummaryBot below also did a good job at translating.
There are two slightly ‘meta’ issues here in that a) I cannot help but already be working in a different style, as that is my background, which I appreciate some will find cumbersome), and b) I wanted to avoid giving ‘my’ solutions as I am interested to see how else the challenges I raise can be responded to.
I would further add only that I too recommend the SummaryBot for a TL;DR
I really agreed with you when I was just glancing at the post trying to get a sense of what it was about, but then I looked at the comments and got convinced to try reading it in earnest, from the beginning. Then I flipped, and now I think the thesis is clear, the individual sentences are clear, and the writing is beautiful.
An unfortunate fact about some academic writing, specifically some writing in philosophy, in many of the humanities, and in some of the social sciences, is that there’s a lot of time-wasting, inscrutable papers and books. This kind of writing does not reward additional time and effort spent on reading it, or at least does so at such a miserly trickle that it’s not worthwhile. The preponderance of inscrutable texts makes it hard to tell, at a glance, what’s not worth reading and what’s written in sumptuous prose. This essay is sumptuous prose.
Maybe this is a me problem but I found this essay pretty impenetrable. I can’t figure out what the thesis is, and I struggle to even understand what most of the individual sentences are saying.
I personally found it a very refreshing change of language/thinking/style from the usual EA Forum/LessWrong post, and found spending some extra effort to (hopefully) understand it worth it and highly enjoyable.
My one sentence summary/translation would be that advocating for longtermism would likely benefit on the margin from using more of a virtue ethics approach (e.g. using saints and heroes as examples) instead of a rationalist/utilitarian approach, as most people feel even less of an obligation towards future beings than towards the global poor, and many of the most altruistic people act altruistically for emotional/spiritual reasons rather than rational ones.
I could have definitely misunderstood the post though, so someone correct me if I misinterpreted it, and there are a lot more valuable points. E.g. that most people agree on an abstract level that future people matter, and that actively causing them harm is bad. So I think it claims that longtermists should focus less on strengthening that case and more on other things. Another interesting point is that to “mitigate hazards we create for ourselves” we could take advantage of the fact that “causing harm is intuitively worse than not producing benefit” for most people.
I think SummaryBot below also did a good job at translating.
Thank you for this.
There are two slightly ‘meta’ issues here in that a) I cannot help but already be working in a different style, as that is my background, which I appreciate some will find cumbersome), and b) I wanted to avoid giving ‘my’ solutions as I am interested to see how else the challenges I raise can be responded to.
I would further add only that I too recommend the SummaryBot for a TL;DR
I really agreed with you when I was just glancing at the post trying to get a sense of what it was about, but then I looked at the comments and got convinced to try reading it in earnest, from the beginning. Then I flipped, and now I think the thesis is clear, the individual sentences are clear, and the writing is beautiful.
An unfortunate fact about some academic writing, specifically some writing in philosophy, in many of the humanities, and in some of the social sciences, is that there’s a lot of time-wasting, inscrutable papers and books. This kind of writing does not reward additional time and effort spent on reading it, or at least does so at such a miserly trickle that it’s not worthwhile. The preponderance of inscrutable texts makes it hard to tell, at a glance, what’s not worth reading and what’s written in sumptuous prose. This essay is sumptuous prose.