I’d love to hear some of the counter-arguments against what Paul has wrote here. I have started reading up on long termism and I am having problems with the idea of “We cannot count future people in one scenario while treating people saved today as if their influence ends at the moment of rescue.” that is mentioned as well as the idea that future people need to be repeatably saved to exist. If you avert a existential extinction level disaster in 2030 that allows future people in 2100 to live and flourish, but a second disaster (of the same or a similar type) needs to be averted in 2050, how do you avoid double counting that life saved? I’m sure this problem has been explored but I’d like to read the counter-arguments.
If you avert a existential extinction level disaster in 2030 that allows future people in 2100 to live and flourish, but a second disaster (of the same or a similar type) needs to be averted in 2050, how do you avoid double counting that life saved?
The short answer is that you discount the value of the future you save based on the expected number of lives in it.
I.e. if, in a simple case, you know the Sun will turn into a red giant and kill us all in 2100, then averting extinction this year would says 10s of billions of lives, but no more. This is more complicated when we have X% chance of going extinct by 2100, Y% by 2200 etc…
I’m less sure what to say about Paul’s point that saving a life today = many more lives that exist in the future. I’d guess that demographic projections lower the impact of this on the calculation (i.e. we expect a lower population anyway), but I’m not sure. A more general response is that basically everything except preventing extinction washes out in the long-term, so increasing population over the next 100 years would be no exception.
Hey guys, if you want, give me some hypothetical scenarios (A vs B), and I can work through them from the POV of my framework. Stress test it and show its utility at the same time.
I’d love to hear some of the counter-arguments against what Paul has wrote here. I have started reading up on long termism and I am having problems with the idea of “We cannot count future people in one scenario while treating people saved today as if their influence ends at the moment of rescue.” that is mentioned as well as the idea that future people need to be repeatably saved to exist. If you avert a existential extinction level disaster in 2030 that allows future people in 2100 to live and flourish, but a second disaster (of the same or a similar type) needs to be averted in 2050, how do you avoid double counting that life saved? I’m sure this problem has been explored but I’d like to read the counter-arguments.
The short answer is that you discount the value of the future you save based on the expected number of lives in it.
I.e. if, in a simple case, you know the Sun will turn into a red giant and kill us all in 2100, then averting extinction this year would says 10s of billions of lives, but no more. This is more complicated when we have X% chance of going extinct by 2100, Y% by 2200 etc…
I’m less sure what to say about Paul’s point that saving a life today = many more lives that exist in the future. I’d guess that demographic projections lower the impact of this on the calculation (i.e. we expect a lower population anyway), but I’m not sure. A more general response is that basically everything except preventing extinction washes out in the long-term, so increasing population over the next 100 years would be no exception.
Hey guys, if you want, give me some hypothetical scenarios (A vs B), and I can work through them from the POV of my framework. Stress test it and show its utility at the same time.