I’m so sorry you find my post ‘adversarial’. I do apologise if that is the impression you have received. It was not intended. By way of explanation—I’ve arrived at Effective Altruism via a path that started with existential risks and then expanded to longtermism, so I suppose I automatically start from a more risk-averse perspective. X-risks and longtermism lead to one thinking more in terms of the negative effects an intervention could have on vast numbers of future people (since a human extinction event would prevent huge numbers of future people from leading happy fulfilling lives up to the habitable limit of this planet, around one billion years, and prevent even huger, barely comprehensible numbers of future people expanding to settle inhabitable planets throughout the universe), and this often seems to conflict with considerations of smaller (in comparison) numbers of people here on this one planet in the short-term. It is a quite horrible moral dilemma, to weigh these up against one another, and one which is very uncomfortable indeed to contemplate or to even attempt to quantify. But we should not shrink from this difficult task, I feel.
I’m so sorry you find my post ‘adversarial’. I do apologise if that is the impression you have received. It was not intended. By way of explanation—I’ve arrived at Effective Altruism via a path that started with existential risks and then expanded to longtermism, so I suppose I automatically start from a more risk-averse perspective. X-risks and longtermism lead to one thinking more in terms of the negative effects an intervention could have on vast numbers of future people (since a human extinction event would prevent huge numbers of future people from leading happy fulfilling lives up to the habitable limit of this planet, around one billion years, and prevent even huger, barely comprehensible numbers of future people expanding to settle inhabitable planets throughout the universe), and this often seems to conflict with considerations of smaller (in comparison) numbers of people here on this one planet in the short-term. It is a quite horrible moral dilemma, to weigh these up against one another, and one which is very uncomfortable indeed to contemplate or to even attempt to quantify. But we should not shrink from this difficult task, I feel.