I agree the name is non-ideal, and doesn’t quite capture differences. A better term may be conventionalists versus non-conventionalists (or to make the two sides stand for something positive, conventionalists versus longtermists).
Conventionalists focus on cause areas like global poverty reduction, animal welfare, governance reforms, improving institutional decision making, and other things which have (to some extent) been done before.
Non-conventionalists focus on cause areas like global catastrophic risk prevention, s-risk prevention, improving our understanding of psychological valence, and other things which have mostly not been done before, or at least have been done comparatively fewer times.
These terms may also be terrible. Many before have tried to prevent the end of the world (see: Petrov), and prevent s-risks (see: effort against Nazism and Communism). Similarly, it’s harder to draw a clear value difference or epistemic difference between these two divisions. One obvious choice is to say the conventionalists place less trust in inside-view reasoning, but the case that any particular (say) charter city trying out a brand new organizational structure will be highly beneficial seems to rely on far more inside-view reasoning (economic theory for instance) than the case that AGI is imminent (simply perform a basic extrapolation on graphs of progress or compute in the field).
I agree that conventionists versus non-conventionalists may be a thing, but I don’t think this captures what people are talking about when they talk about being a long-term missed or not a long-termist. This seems a different axis.
I agree the name is non-ideal, and doesn’t quite capture differences. A better term may be conventionalists versus non-conventionalists (or to make the two sides stand for something positive, conventionalists versus longtermists).
Conventionalists focus on cause areas like global poverty reduction, animal welfare, governance reforms, improving institutional decision making, and other things which have (to some extent) been done before.
Non-conventionalists focus on cause areas like global catastrophic risk prevention, s-risk prevention, improving our understanding of psychological valence, and other things which have mostly not been done before, or at least have been done comparatively fewer times.
These terms may also be terrible. Many before have tried to prevent the end of the world (see: Petrov), and prevent s-risks (see: effort against Nazism and Communism). Similarly, it’s harder to draw a clear value difference or epistemic difference between these two divisions. One obvious choice is to say the conventionalists place less trust in inside-view reasoning, but the case that any particular (say) charter city trying out a brand new organizational structure will be highly beneficial seems to rely on far more inside-view reasoning (economic theory for instance) than the case that AGI is imminent (simply perform a basic extrapolation on graphs of progress or compute in the field).
I agree that conventionists versus non-conventionalists may be a thing, but I don’t think this captures what people are talking about when they talk about being a long-term missed or not a long-termist. This seems a different axis.