I don’t think a good name for this exists, and I don’t think we need one. It’s usually better to talk about the specific cause areas than to try and lump all of them together as not-longtermism.
As you mention, there are lots of different reasons one might choose not to identify as a longtermist, including both moral and practical considerations.
But more importantly, I just don’t think that longtermist vs not-longtermist is sufficiently important to justify grouping all the other causes into one group.
Trying to find a word for all the clusters other than longtermism is like trying to find a word that describes all cats that aren’t black, but isn’t “not-black cats”.
One way of thinking about these EA schools of thought is as clusters of causes in a multi-dimensional space. One of the dimensions along which these causes vary is longtermism vs. not-longtermism. But there are many other dimensions, including animal-focused vs. people-focused, high-certainty vs low-certainty, etc. Not-longtermist causes all vary along these dimensions, too. Finding a simple label for a category that includes animal welfare, poverty alleviation, metascience, YIMBYism, mental health, and community building is going to be weird and hard.
“Not-longtermism” would just be everything outside of some small circle in this space. Not a natural category.
It’s because there are so many other dimensions that we can end up with people working on AI safety and people working on chicken welfare in the same movement. I think that’s cool. I really like that EA space has enough dimensions that a really diverse set of causes can all count as EA. Focusing so much on the longtermism vs. not-longtermism dimension under-emphasizes this.
I weakly disagree. When a belief is ubiquitous enough, as longtermism arguably is in the EA movement, it can be quite helpful to have a term that describes its negation: cf ‘atheist’, ‘moral antirealist’ (or ‘amoralist’), ‘anarchist’ etc. I don’t think such words have the effect of under-emphasising those views—if anything, I’d say they give them more weight.
I agree that the term, whether neartermist or not-longtermist, does not describe a natural category. But I think the latter does a better job at communicating that. The way I hear it, “not-longtermist” sounds like “not that part of idea-space”, whereas neartermist sounds like an actual view people may hold that relates to how we should prioritise the nearterm versus the longterm. So I think your point actually supports one of David’s alternative suggested terms.
And though you say you don’t think we need a term for it at all, the fact that the term “neartermist” has caught on suggests otherwise. If it wasn’t helpful, people wouldn’t use it. However, perhaps you didn’t just mean that we didn’t need one, but that we shouldn’t use one at all. I’d disagree with that too because it seems to me reasonable in many cases to want to distinguish longtermism with other worldviews EAs often have (i.e., it seems fair to me to say that Open Philanthropy’s internal structure is divided on longtermist/not-longtermist lines).
I don’t think a good name for this exists, and I don’t think we need one. It’s usually better to talk about the specific cause areas than to try and lump all of them together as not-longtermism.
As you mention, there are lots of different reasons one might choose not to identify as a longtermist, including both moral and practical considerations.
But more importantly, I just don’t think that longtermist vs not-longtermist is sufficiently important to justify grouping all the other causes into one group.
Trying to find a word for all the clusters other than longtermism is like trying to find a word that describes all cats that aren’t black, but isn’t “not-black cats”.
One way of thinking about these EA schools of thought is as clusters of causes in a multi-dimensional space. One of the dimensions along which these causes vary is longtermism vs. not-longtermism. But there are many other dimensions, including animal-focused vs. people-focused, high-certainty vs low-certainty, etc. Not-longtermist causes all vary along these dimensions, too. Finding a simple label for a category that includes animal welfare, poverty alleviation, metascience, YIMBYism, mental health, and community building is going to be weird and hard.
It’s because there are so many other dimensions that we can end up with people working on AI safety and people working on chicken welfare in the same movement. I think that’s cool. I really like that EA space has enough dimensions that a really diverse set of causes can all count as EA. Focusing so much on the longtermism vs. not-longtermism dimension under-emphasizes this.
I weakly disagree. When a belief is ubiquitous enough, as longtermism arguably is in the EA movement, it can be quite helpful to have a term that describes its negation: cf ‘atheist’, ‘moral antirealist’ (or ‘amoralist’), ‘anarchist’ etc. I don’t think such words have the effect of under-emphasising those views—if anything, I’d say they give them more weight.
Agree and I don’t think it’s a natural category. I just don’t want it to be called “neartermism”
I agree that the term, whether neartermist or not-longtermist, does not describe a natural category. But I think the latter does a better job at communicating that. The way I hear it, “not-longtermist” sounds like “not that part of idea-space”, whereas neartermist sounds like an actual view people may hold that relates to how we should prioritise the nearterm versus the longterm. So I think your point actually supports one of David’s alternative suggested terms.
And though you say you don’t think we need a term for it at all, the fact that the term “neartermist” has caught on suggests otherwise. If it wasn’t helpful, people wouldn’t use it. However, perhaps you didn’t just mean that we didn’t need one, but that we shouldn’t use one at all. I’d disagree with that too because it seems to me reasonable in many cases to want to distinguish longtermism with other worldviews EAs often have (i.e., it seems fair to me to say that Open Philanthropy’s internal structure is divided on longtermist/not-longtermist lines).
Also, cool image!