I found several of these arguments uncompelling. While you acknowledge that your approach is one of “many weak arguments,” the overall case doesn’t seem persuasive.
Specifically:
#1: This seems to be a non sequitur. If relatively short-term problems are also neglected, why exactly does this suggest that interventions that improve the long-term future would converge with those that improve the relatively short-term (yet not extremely short-term)? All that you’ve shown here is that we shouldn’t be surprised if interventions that improve the relatively short term may be quite different from those that people typically prioritize.
#2: Prima facie this is fair enough. But I’d expect the tractability of effectively preventing global catastrophic and/or x-risks to not be high enough for this to be competitive with malaria nets, if one is only counting present lives.
#4: Conversely, though, we’ve seen that the longtermist community has identified AI as one of the most plausible levers for positive or negative impact on the long term future, and increasing economic growth will on average increase AI capabilities more than safety. Re: EA meta, if your point is that getting more people into EA increases efforts on more short- and long-term interventions, sure, but this is entirely consistent with the view that the most effective interventions to improve the long vs short term will diverge. Maybe the most effective EA meta work from a longtermist perspective is to spread longtermism specifically, not EA in broad strokes. Tensions between short-term animal advocacy and long-term (wild) animal welfare have already been identified, e.g., here and here.
#5: For those who don’t have the skills for longtermist direct work and instead purely earn to give, this is fair enough, but my impression is that longtermists don’t focus much on effective donations anyway. So this doesn’t persuade me that longtermists with the ability to skill up in direct work that aims at the long term would just as well aim at the short term.
#6: If you grant longtermist ethics, by the complex cluelessness argument, aiming at improving the short term doesn’t help you avoid this feedback loop problem. Your interventions at the short term will still have long term effects that probably dominate the short term effects, and I don’t see why the feedback on short term effectiveness would help you predict the sign and magnitude of the long term effects. (Having said this, I don’t think longtermists have really taken complex cluelessness for long term-aimed interventions as seriously as they should, e.g., see Michael’s comment here. My critiques of your post here should not be taken as a wholesale endorsement of the most popular longtermist interventions.)
#8: I agree with the spirit of this point, that long term plans will be extremely brittle. But even if the following is true:
making the world in 10 years time or 25 years time as strong as possible to deal with the challenges beyond 10 or 25 years from now is likely the best way to plan for the long-term
I would expect “as strong as possible” to differ significantly from a near- vs longtermist perspective. Longtermists will probably want to build the sorts of capacities that are effective at achieving longtermist goals (conditional on your other arguments not providing a compelling case to the contrary), which would be different from those that non-longtermists are incentivized to build.
#9: I don’t agree that this is “common sense.” The exact opposite seems common sense to me—if you want to optimize X, it’s common sense that you should do things aimed at improving X, not aimed at Y. This is analogous to how “charity begins at home” doesn’t seem commonsensical, i.e., if the worst off people on this planet are in poor non-industrialized nations, it would be counterintuitive if the best way to help them were to help people in industrialized nations. Or if the best way to help farmed and wild animals were to help humans. (Of course there can be defeaters to common sense, but I’m addressing your argument on its own terms.)
Without going into specific details of each of your counter-arguments your reply made me ask myself: why would it be that for across a broad range of arguments I consistently find them more compelling than you do? Do we disagree on each of these points or is there some underlying crux?
I expect if there is a simple answer here it is that my intuitions are more lenient towards many of these arguments as I have found some amount of convergence to be a thing time and time again in my life to date. Maybe this would be an argument #11 and it might go like this:
#11. Having spent many years doing EA stuff, convergence keeps happening to me.
When doing UK policy work the coalition we built essentially combined long- and near-termist types. The main belief across both groups seemed to be that the world is chronically short term and if we want to prevent problems (x-risks, people falling into homelessness) we need to fix government and make it less short-term. (This looks like evidence of #1 happening in practice). This is a form of improving institutional decision making (which looks like #6).
Helping government make good risk plans, e.g. for pandemics, came very high up the list of Charity Entrepreneurship’s neartermist policy interventions to focus on. It was tractable and reasonably well evidenced. Had CE believed that Toby’s estimates of risks were correct it would have looked extremely cost-effective too. (This looks like #2).
People I know seem to work in longtermist orgs, where talent is needed, but donate to neartermist orgs, where money is needed. (This looks like #5).
In the EA meta and community building work I have done covering both long- and near-term causes seems advantageous. For example Charity Entrepreneurship’s model (talent + ideas > new charities) is based on regularly switching cause areas. (This looks like #6.)
Etc.
It doesn’t feel like I really disagree with any thing concrete that you wrote (except maybe I think you overstate the conflict between long- and near-term animal welfare folk), more that you and I have different intuitions on how much this all points push towards convergence being possible, or at least not suspicious. And maybe those intuitions, as intuitions often do, arise from different lived experiences to date. So hopefully the above captures some of my lived experiences.
I found several of these arguments uncompelling. While you acknowledge that your approach is one of “many weak arguments,” the overall case doesn’t seem persuasive.
Specifically:
#1: This seems to be a non sequitur. If relatively short-term problems are also neglected, why exactly does this suggest that interventions that improve the long-term future would converge with those that improve the relatively short-term (yet not extremely short-term)? All that you’ve shown here is that we shouldn’t be surprised if interventions that improve the relatively short term may be quite different from those that people typically prioritize.
#2: Prima facie this is fair enough. But I’d expect the tractability of effectively preventing global catastrophic and/or x-risks to not be high enough for this to be competitive with malaria nets, if one is only counting present lives.
#4: Conversely, though, we’ve seen that the longtermist community has identified AI as one of the most plausible levers for positive or negative impact on the long term future, and increasing economic growth will on average increase AI capabilities more than safety. Re: EA meta, if your point is that getting more people into EA increases efforts on more short- and long-term interventions, sure, but this is entirely consistent with the view that the most effective interventions to improve the long vs short term will diverge. Maybe the most effective EA meta work from a longtermist perspective is to spread longtermism specifically, not EA in broad strokes. Tensions between short-term animal advocacy and long-term (wild) animal welfare have already been identified, e.g., here and here.
#5: For those who don’t have the skills for longtermist direct work and instead purely earn to give, this is fair enough, but my impression is that longtermists don’t focus much on effective donations anyway. So this doesn’t persuade me that longtermists with the ability to skill up in direct work that aims at the long term would just as well aim at the short term.
#6: If you grant longtermist ethics, by the complex cluelessness argument, aiming at improving the short term doesn’t help you avoid this feedback loop problem. Your interventions at the short term will still have long term effects that probably dominate the short term effects, and I don’t see why the feedback on short term effectiveness would help you predict the sign and magnitude of the long term effects. (Having said this, I don’t think longtermists have really taken complex cluelessness for long term-aimed interventions as seriously as they should, e.g., see Michael’s comment here. My critiques of your post here should not be taken as a wholesale endorsement of the most popular longtermist interventions.)
#8: I agree with the spirit of this point, that long term plans will be extremely brittle. But even if the following is true:
I would expect “as strong as possible” to differ significantly from a near- vs longtermist perspective. Longtermists will probably want to build the sorts of capacities that are effective at achieving longtermist goals (conditional on your other arguments not providing a compelling case to the contrary), which would be different from those that non-longtermists are incentivized to build.
#9: I don’t agree that this is “common sense.” The exact opposite seems common sense to me—if you want to optimize X, it’s common sense that you should do things aimed at improving X, not aimed at Y. This is analogous to how “charity begins at home” doesn’t seem commonsensical, i.e., if the worst off people on this planet are in poor non-industrialized nations, it would be counterintuitive if the best way to help them were to help people in industrialized nations. Or if the best way to help farmed and wild animals were to help humans. (Of course there can be defeaters to common sense, but I’m addressing your argument on its own terms.)
Without going into specific details of each of your counter-arguments your reply made me ask myself: why would it be that for across a broad range of arguments I consistently find them more compelling than you do? Do we disagree on each of these points or is there some underlying crux?
I expect if there is a simple answer here it is that my intuitions are more lenient towards many of these arguments as I have found some amount of convergence to be a thing time and time again in my life to date. Maybe this would be an argument #11 and it might go like this:
#11. Having spent many years doing EA stuff, convergence keeps happening to me.
When doing UK policy work the coalition we built essentially combined long- and near-termist types. The main belief across both groups seemed to be that the world is chronically short term and if we want to prevent problems (x-risks, people falling into homelessness) we need to fix government and make it less short-term. (This looks like evidence of #1 happening in practice). This is a form of improving institutional decision making (which looks like #6).
Helping government make good risk plans, e.g. for pandemics, came very high up the list of Charity Entrepreneurship’s neartermist policy interventions to focus on. It was tractable and reasonably well evidenced. Had CE believed that Toby’s estimates of risks were correct it would have looked extremely cost-effective too. (This looks like #2).
People I know seem to work in longtermist orgs, where talent is needed, but donate to neartermist orgs, where money is needed. (This looks like #5).
In the EA meta and community building work I have done covering both long- and near-term causes seems advantageous. For example Charity Entrepreneurship’s model (talent + ideas > new charities) is based on regularly switching cause areas. (This looks like #6.)
Etc.
It doesn’t feel like I really disagree with any thing concrete that you wrote (except maybe I think you overstate the conflict between long- and near-term animal welfare folk), more that you and I have different intuitions on how much this all points push towards convergence being possible, or at least not suspicious. And maybe those intuitions, as intuitions often do, arise from different lived experiences to date. So hopefully the above captures some of my lived experiences.