Thought experiment for longtermism: if you were alive in 1920 trying to have the largest possible impact today, would the ideas you came up with without the benefit of hindsight still have an effect today?
I find this a useful intuition pump in general. If someone says “X will happen in 50 years” I think of myself looking at 2020 from 1970, asking how many of that sort of prediction I made then would have been accurate now. The world in 50 years is going to be at least as hard to imagine (hopefully more, given exponential growth) to us as the world of today would have from 1970. What did we know? What did we completely miss? What kinds of systematic mistakes might we be making?
I may have misunderstood your question, so there’s a chance that this is a tangential answer.
I think one mistake humans make is overconfidence in specific long-term predictions. Specific would mean like predicting when a particular technology will arrive, when we will hit 3 degrees of warming, when we will hit 11 billion population, etc.
I think the capacity of even smart humans to reasonably (e.g. >50% accuracy) predict when a specific event would occur is somewhat low; I would estimate around 20-40 years from when they are living.
You ask: “if you were alive in 1920 trying to have the largest possible impact today” what would you do? I would acknowledge that I cannot (with reasonable accuracy) predict the thing that will “the largest possible impact in 2020″ (which is a very specific thing to predict) and go with broad-based interventions (which is a more sure-shot answer) like improving international relations, promoting moral values, promoting education, promoting democracy, promoting economic growth, etc (these are sub-optimal answers; but they’re probably the best I could do).
I’d be interested to see a list of what kinds of systematic mistakes previous attempts at long-term forecasting made.
Also, I think that many longtermists (eg me) think it’s much more plausible to successfully influence the long run future now than in the 1920s, because of the hinge of history argument.
My understanding of the hinge of history argument is that the current time has more leverage than either the past or future. Even if that’s true, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s any more obvious what needs to be done to influence the future.
If I believed that e.g. AI is obviously the most important lever right now, and think I know which direction to push that lever, I would ask myself “using the same reasoning, which levers would I be trying to push where in 1920”. As far as I can tell this is pretty agnostic about how easy it is to push these levers around, just which you would want to be pushing.
Thought experiment for longtermism: if you were alive in 1920 trying to have the largest possible impact today, would the ideas you came up with without the benefit of hindsight still have an effect today?
I find this a useful intuition pump in general. If someone says “X will happen in 50 years” I think of myself looking at 2020 from 1970, asking how many of that sort of prediction I made then would have been accurate now. The world in 50 years is going to be at least as hard to imagine (hopefully more, given exponential growth) to us as the world of today would have from 1970. What did we know? What did we completely miss? What kinds of systematic mistakes might we be making?
I may have misunderstood your question, so there’s a chance that this is a tangential answer.
I think one mistake humans make is overconfidence in specific long-term predictions. Specific would mean like predicting when a particular technology will arrive, when we will hit 3 degrees of warming, when we will hit 11 billion population, etc.
I think the capacity of even smart humans to reasonably (e.g. >50% accuracy) predict when a specific event would occur is somewhat low; I would estimate around 20-40 years from when they are living.
You ask: “if you were alive in 1920 trying to have the largest possible impact today” what would you do? I would acknowledge that I cannot (with reasonable accuracy) predict the thing that will “the largest possible impact in 2020″ (which is a very specific thing to predict) and go with broad-based interventions (which is a more sure-shot answer) like improving international relations, promoting moral values, promoting education, promoting democracy, promoting economic growth, etc (these are sub-optimal answers; but they’re probably the best I could do).
I’d be interested to see a list of what kinds of systematic mistakes previous attempts at long-term forecasting made.
Also, I think that many longtermists (eg me) think it’s much more plausible to successfully influence the long run future now than in the 1920s, because of the hinge of history argument.
My understanding of the hinge of history argument is that the current time has more leverage than either the past or future. Even if that’s true, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s any more obvious what needs to be done to influence the future.
If I believed that e.g. AI is obviously the most important lever right now, and think I know which direction to push that lever, I would ask myself “using the same reasoning, which levers would I be trying to push where in 1920”. As far as I can tell this is pretty agnostic about how easy it is to push these levers around, just which you would want to be pushing.