I apologize because I’m a bit late to the party, haven’t read all the essays in the series yet, and haven’t read all the comments here. But with those caveats, I have a basic question about the project:
Why does better futures work look so different from traditional, short-termist EA work (i.e., GHW work)?
I take it that one of the things we’ve been trying to do by investing in egg-sexing technology, strep A vaccines, and so on is make the future as good as possible; plenty of these projects have long time horizons, and presumably the goal of investing in them today is to ensure that—contingent on making it to 2050—chickens live better lives and people no longer die of rheumatic heart disease. But the interventions recommended in the essay on how to make the future better look quite different from the ongoing GHW work.
Is there some premise baked into better futures work that explains this discrepancy, or is this project in some way a disavowal of current GHW priorities as a mechanism for creating a better future? Thanks, and I look forward to reading the rest of the essays in the series.
That’s a great question. Longtermists look to impact the far future (even thousands/million of years in the future) rather than the nearish future because they think the future could be very long, so there’s a lot more value at stake looking far out.
They also think there are tangible, near-term decisions (e.g. about AI, space governance etc.) that could lock in values or institutions and shape civilization’s long-run trajectory in predictable ways. You can read more on this in essay 4 “Persistent Path-Dependence”.
Ultimately, it just isn’t clear how things like saving/improving lives now will influence the far future trajectory, so these aren’t typically prioritized by longtermists.
Okay, so a simple gloss might be something like “better futures work is GHW for longtermists”?
In other words, I take it there’s an assumption that people doing standard EA GHW work are not acting in accordance with longtermist principles. But fwiw, I get the sense that plenty of people who work on GHW are sympathetic to longtermism, and perhaps think—rightly or wrongly—that doing things like facilitating the development of meat alternatives will, in expectation, do more to promote the flourishing of sentient creatures far into the future than, say, working on space governance.
I think generally GHW people don’t think you can predictably influence the far future because effects “wash out” over time, or think trying to do so is fanatical (you’re betting on an extremely small chance of very large payoff).
If you look at, for example, GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analyses, effects in the far future don’t feature. If they thought most of the value of saving a life was in the far future you would think they would incorporate that. Same goes for analyses by Animal Charity Evaluators.
Longtermists think they can find interventions that avoid the washing out objection. Essay 4 of the series goes into this, also see the shorter summary.
I apologize because I’m a bit late to the party, haven’t read all the essays in the series yet, and haven’t read all the comments here. But with those caveats, I have a basic question about the project:
Why does better futures work look so different from traditional, short-termist EA work (i.e., GHW work)?
I take it that one of the things we’ve been trying to do by investing in egg-sexing technology, strep A vaccines, and so on is make the future as good as possible; plenty of these projects have long time horizons, and presumably the goal of investing in them today is to ensure that—contingent on making it to 2050—chickens live better lives and people no longer die of rheumatic heart disease. But the interventions recommended in the essay on how to make the future better look quite different from the ongoing GHW work.
Is there some premise baked into better futures work that explains this discrepancy, or is this project in some way a disavowal of current GHW priorities as a mechanism for creating a better future? Thanks, and I look forward to reading the rest of the essays in the series.
That’s a great question. Longtermists look to impact the far future (even thousands/million of years in the future) rather than the nearish future because they think the future could be very long, so there’s a lot more value at stake looking far out.
They also think there are tangible, near-term decisions (e.g. about AI, space governance etc.) that could lock in values or institutions and shape civilization’s long-run trajectory in predictable ways. You can read more on this in essay 4 “Persistent Path-Dependence”.
Ultimately, it just isn’t clear how things like saving/improving lives now will influence the far future trajectory, so these aren’t typically prioritized by longtermists.
Okay, so a simple gloss might be something like “better futures work is GHW for longtermists”?
In other words, I take it there’s an assumption that people doing standard EA GHW work are not acting in accordance with longtermist principles. But fwiw, I get the sense that plenty of people who work on GHW are sympathetic to longtermism, and perhaps think—rightly or wrongly—that doing things like facilitating the development of meat alternatives will, in expectation, do more to promote the flourishing of sentient creatures far into the future than, say, working on space governance.
I think generally GHW people don’t think you can predictably influence the far future because effects “wash out” over time, or think trying to do so is fanatical (you’re betting on an extremely small chance of very large payoff).
If you look at, for example, GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analyses, effects in the far future don’t feature. If they thought most of the value of saving a life was in the far future you would think they would incorporate that. Same goes for analyses by Animal Charity Evaluators.
Longtermists think they can find interventions that avoid the washing out objection. Essay 4 of the series goes into this, also see the shorter summary.