Just want to pick up on one thing that wasnāt picked up by anyone else:
I was talking to a fairly senior person at a prominent ML lab and they said that their lab is pretty skeptical of ālongtermism.ā I asked them how they would define ālongtermismā and they said something like ācaring about future interests at the expense of current ones.ā
You put this personās position on longtermism down to a ālack of reflectionā, but I donāt think you should be that surprised that people have this impression of it (at least if you had this conversation recently, maybe not if you had it a year or two ago). It seems even before WWOTF came out, and definitely since, those hostile to longtermism have been framing it in precisely such a way, e.g: that it either literally means believing present people no moral value, that itās based on crazy maths that has no grounding in reality, that it is the first step on the path to justifying genocide, eugenics etc. etc.
And Iāve seen basically no pushback at all from longtermist themselves. Perhaps this was driven by a view not to stoop down to a low level,[1] perhaps because there was a diffusion of responsibility, or perhaps because people thought the anti-longtermist memes[2] wouldnāt catch on. But I think with hindsight we can see that this strategy has failed. Outside of explicitly EA spaces, the term ālongtermismā has come to be seen in exactly the negative light that this senior person expressed.
So I donāt think you should blame their ability to reason or reflect (at least, not to the extent of pinning the whole blame on them). I think instead the blame should go to longtermists who underestimated the well being poisoned against them and did very little to counteract it, leading to longtermism being a persona non-grata idea outside of EA. All in all, Iām a little bit surprised that you were so flabbergasted.
If you want to discuss those over DMs instead of continuing with more comments on this Quick Take, feel free to reach out :)
Sorry I think the strikethrough was insufficiently obvious in signaling that I want to wait a while before representing this argument; I decided to delete the whole thing.
Just want to pick up on one thing that wasnāt picked up by anyone else:
You put this personās position on longtermism down to a ālack of reflectionā, but I donāt think you should be that surprised that people have this impression of it (at least if you had this conversation recently, maybe not if you had it a year or two ago). It seems even before WWOTF came out, and definitely since, those hostile to longtermism have been framing it in precisely such a way, e.g: that it either literally means believing present people no moral value, that itās based on crazy maths that has no grounding in reality, that it is the first step on the path to justifying genocide, eugenics etc. etc.
And Iāve seen basically no pushback at all from longtermist themselves. Perhaps this was driven by a view not to stoop down to a low level,[1] perhaps because there was a diffusion of responsibility, or perhaps because people thought the anti-longtermist memes[2] wouldnāt catch on. But I think with hindsight we can see that this strategy has failed. Outside of explicitly EA spaces, the term ālongtermismā has come to be seen in exactly the negative light that this senior person expressed.
So I donāt think you should blame their ability to reason or reflect (at least, not to the extent of pinning the whole blame on them). I think instead the blame should go to longtermists who underestimated the well being poisoned against them and did very little to counteract it, leading to longtermism being a persona non-grata idea outside of EA. All in all, Iām a little bit surprised that you were so flabbergasted.
If you want to discuss those over DMs instead of continuing with more comments on this Quick Take, feel free to reach out :)
Thatās a separate issue, but I think this kind of approach to the media landscape was a very naĆÆve one from senior EAs imo
In the original āideasā sense, not the viral joke sense
Sorry I think the strikethrough was insufficiently obvious in signaling that I want to wait a while before representing this argument; I decided to delete the whole thing.