(I mean, ersatz intergenerational communication)
I was intrigued by this project, Dear Tomorrow, where people are invited to write letters to the future to commit to take action against climate change. T. Shum’s paper suggests this increases “the willingness to donate to climate change mitigation efforts”—by raising the concern with the prospects of future generations. This fits my priors—and it reminded me of the impact Bostrom’s Letter from Utopia had on me.
I wonder if one could extrapolate this idea to long-termism in general—e.g., inviting people to write messages to their descendants in different future periods, regarding distinct global issues… Or even the opposite: make them write to an ancestor (as if they are the utopians in Bostrom’s tale), commenting on the latter’s nuisances and on the pros and cons of the present. Maybe there’s something like that already, and I just don’t know how to google it? Maybe it would be cool for us to try something like that in EA groups and workshops?
This closely parallels a required exercise in the Introductory EA Program; participants are asked to write letters to their present selves from someone who lives in an imagined future.
In this case, it’s a way of trying to express how it feels to live under a different set of moral views than our current set, but I think that your proposal would do something similar — pushing people to imagine the future as a real, tangible thing worth considering in their current decision processes. I’d be pleased to see this tried in a virtual program, or the fellowship of an individual EA group.