I also find utilitarian thinking to be more useful/practical than “longtermist thinking”. That said, I haven’t seen much advocacy for longtermism as a guide to personal action, rather than as a guide to research that much more intensively attempts to map out long-term consequences.
Maybe an apt comparison would be “utilitarianism is to decisions I make in my daily life as longtermism is to the decisions I’d make if I were in an influential position with access to many person-years of planning”. But this is me trying to guess what another author was thinking; you could consider writing to them directly, too.
(I assume you’ve heard/considered points of this type before; I’m writing them out here mostly for my own benefit, as a way of thinking through the question.)
Sure, but not even close to the same extent.
I also find utilitarian thinking to be more useful/practical than “longtermist thinking”. That said, I haven’t seen much advocacy for longtermism as a guide to personal action, rather than as a guide to research that much more intensively attempts to map out long-term consequences.
Maybe an apt comparison would be “utilitarianism is to decisions I make in my daily life as longtermism is to the decisions I’d make if I were in an influential position with access to many person-years of planning”. But this is me trying to guess what another author was thinking; you could consider writing to them directly, too.
(I assume you’ve heard/considered points of this type before; I’m writing them out here mostly for my own benefit, as a way of thinking through the question.)