The founding premise of EA was that you need to weigh evidence. This distinction is saying the longtermists have abandoned the founding premise of the movement.
But many non-longtermists also care about future people, this hasn’t seemed to stop longtermists from using a term that implies non-longtermists (used to be called short-termism!?) don’t care about the future.
Yeah, one could say that I’m a longtermist (though the term doesn’t fit well), and one key thing that caused that was gradual disillusionment with evidence-based anything over the course of a few years – because of the low-quality standard metrics of many fields, the low external validity of RCTs, the difficulty with running controlled experiments on anything that matters, complex cluelessness, the allure of highly leveraged foundational and policy interventions, etc.
EA for me is about doing the most good. RCTs and such were just a tool that seemed promising to me at the time.
The founding premise of EA was that you need to weigh evidence. This distinction is saying the longtermists have abandoned the founding premise of the movement.
But many non-longtermists also care about future people, this hasn’t seemed to stop longtermists from using a term that implies non-longtermists (used to be called short-termism!?) don’t care about the future.
Yeah, one could say that I’m a longtermist (though the term doesn’t fit well), and one key thing that caused that was gradual disillusionment with evidence-based anything over the course of a few years – because of the low-quality standard metrics of many fields, the low external validity of RCTs, the difficulty with running controlled experiments on anything that matters, complex cluelessness, the allure of highly leveraged foundational and policy interventions, etc.
EA for me is about doing the most good. RCTs and such were just a tool that seemed promising to me at the time.
I think this is broadly a correct take. Longtermists care about expected value. Instead, classic EA is about following the evidence.