We’ve talked about this, but I wanted to include my two counterarguments as a comment to this post:
It seems like there’s a good likelihood that we have semi-mathusian constraints nowadays. While I would admit that one should be skeptical of total malthusianism (ie for every person dying another one lives because we are at max carrying capacity), I think it is much more reasonable to think that carrying constraints actually do exist and maybe its something like for every death you get .2 lives or something. If this is true, I think this argument weakens a bunch.
This argument only works if, conditional on existential risk not happening, we don’t hit malthusian constraints at any point in the future, which seems quite implausible. If we don’t get existential risk and the pie just keeps growing, it seems like we would just get super-abundance and the only thing holding people back would be malthusian physical constraints on creating happy people. Therefore, we just need some people to live past that time of super-abundance to have massive growth. Additionally, even if you think those people wouldn’t have kids (which I find pretty implausible—as one person’s preference for children would lead to many kids given abundance), you could talk about those lives being extremely happy which holds most of the weight. This also
Side note: this argument seems to rely on some ideas about astronomical waste that I won’t discuss here (I also haven’t done so much thinking on the topic), but it seems maybe worth it to frame around that debate.
We’ve talked about this, but I wanted to include my two counterarguments as a comment to this post:
It seems like there’s a good likelihood that we have semi-mathusian constraints nowadays. While I would admit that one should be skeptical of total malthusianism (ie for every person dying another one lives because we are at max carrying capacity), I think it is much more reasonable to think that carrying constraints actually do exist and maybe its something like for every death you get .2 lives or something. If this is true, I think this argument weakens a bunch.
This argument only works if, conditional on existential risk not happening, we don’t hit malthusian constraints at any point in the future, which seems quite implausible. If we don’t get existential risk and the pie just keeps growing, it seems like we would just get super-abundance and the only thing holding people back would be malthusian physical constraints on creating happy people. Therefore, we just need some people to live past that time of super-abundance to have massive growth. Additionally, even if you think those people wouldn’t have kids (which I find pretty implausible—as one person’s preference for children would lead to many kids given abundance), you could talk about those lives being extremely happy which holds most of the weight. This also
Side note: this argument seems to rely on some ideas about astronomical waste that I won’t discuss here (I also haven’t done so much thinking on the topic), but it seems maybe worth it to frame around that debate.