Hey Kritika, great work! I must admit that I didn’t read all passages carefully yet, but here are some high-level thoughts that immediately came to mind.
The requirements for Institutional Longtermism that you suggest seem to me like desiderata from a (purely) longtermist perspective, but I don’t see why they should be considered requirements? For example, you suggest that it is a requirement that core long-term policies can only be modified by a supermajority of e.g. 90%. This may be desirable from a longtermist perspective, but long-term policies that can be modified by a smaller supermajority or even just a majority vote would still be valuable from a longtermist perspective.
This seems analogous to other causes, such as animal welfare. From a purely animal welfare perspective, it may be desirable to have animal welfare policies that cannot be modified by even 90% of voters, and so on. But that doesn’t mean that animal welfare is incompatible with democracy?
I guess you see the difference between the longtermist cause and other causes to be in longtermism’s demands: we should design institutions without exception such that they are optimized for the long-term future because the long-term future matter that incredibly much. But that would be a very extreme form of longtermism. Even Greaves’ and MacAskill’s Strong Longtermism only makes claims about what we should do / what is best to do on the margin. It doesn’t say that we should spend all (or even 50% of) our resources on the long-term future. Similarly, Institutional (even Strong) Longtermism could merely claim that a fraction of public resources should be spent on the long term. Let’s say that’s 10%. Then, decisions about the remaining 90% of public resources could be made based on democratic procedures.
Finally, I think it’s even desirable from a longtermist perspective to leave important political decisions in the hands of future people: they probably know better how to improve the long term (e.g. because of improved forecasting).
Hey Kritika, great work! I must admit that I didn’t read all passages carefully yet, but here are some high-level thoughts that immediately came to mind.
The requirements for Institutional Longtermism that you suggest seem to me like desiderata from a (purely) longtermist perspective, but I don’t see why they should be considered requirements? For example, you suggest that it is a requirement that core long-term policies can only be modified by a supermajority of e.g. 90%. This may be desirable from a longtermist perspective, but long-term policies that can be modified by a smaller supermajority or even just a majority vote would still be valuable from a longtermist perspective.
This seems analogous to other causes, such as animal welfare. From a purely animal welfare perspective, it may be desirable to have animal welfare policies that cannot be modified by even 90% of voters, and so on. But that doesn’t mean that animal welfare is incompatible with democracy?
I guess you see the difference between the longtermist cause and other causes to be in longtermism’s demands: we should design institutions without exception such that they are optimized for the long-term future because the long-term future matter that incredibly much. But that would be a very extreme form of longtermism. Even Greaves’ and MacAskill’s Strong Longtermism only makes claims about what we should do / what is best to do on the margin. It doesn’t say that we should spend all (or even 50% of) our resources on the long-term future. Similarly, Institutional (even Strong) Longtermism could merely claim that a fraction of public resources should be spent on the long term. Let’s say that’s 10%. Then, decisions about the remaining 90% of public resources could be made based on democratic procedures.
Finally, I think it’s even desirable from a longtermist perspective to leave important political decisions in the hands of future people: they probably know better how to improve the long term (e.g. because of improved forecasting).