The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk”

There are lots of people spouting things like "don't bother about climate change", and that harmful group has almost no overlap with anyone thinking seriously about the future of humanity. Taking the vanishingly small intersection and drumming it up for outsized outrage is ridiculous and harmful.

Another, far less ridiculous angle would be "here's a tiny group of wealthy people with weirdly contradictory viewpoints". Perhaps that might not have gathered as many clicks, though.

It doesn't appear to attempt to make actual arguments.

I think the article's mostly just an emotional appeal. I'd speculate that the argument-like content is meant as flavoring, to make the raw emotionalism less unpalatable.

The article seems to push for a narrative that effective altruism encourages ignoring current problems in favor of Super Science Future Hooey, but this quote brings up something important.

Mosquito nets are one of the most often suggested effective interventions in EA circles. Highly rated organizations like the Against Malaria Foundation focus on them. It's been one of GiveWell's top charities for a long time: https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

There are people who consider themselves effective altruists concerned with existential risks, however the article focuses on one logical extreme of analysis:

Well, just crunch the numbers: 0.00000000001 percent of 1023 people is 10 billion people, which is ten times greater than 1 billion people.

While you do sometimes see analyses like these, they're more often used as intuition pumps and in stress testing ethical frameworks than anything else. If someone were to try to use something like the above in an argument, it would likely just become an unpersuasive Pascal's Mugging.

In reality, you can make an overwhelming case for paying attention to existential risk while valuing 'potential' lives at precisely zero. It turns out that 'everyone who exists now, dies' is pretty bad, and many of the potential existential threats have nonnegligible probability. Civilizational threats are even more likely, and still extremely bad.

Articles like this would make sense to me if the government was preparing to throw trillions of dollars at speculative 'longtermist' problems based on low probability/high impact arguments, but they're not. Instead, we see massive underinvestment even given a valuation of potential humans at zero.

I want to avoid a path where effective altruism- which, at its core, is just people trying to do a better job of doing good, through many different paths- becomes some political football or ammunition in a culture war. This kind of article seems to be really trying to do that.

This comment and others in the article seem to be making a (bad) case that Effective Altruists don't care about the Global South. I find this bizarre because all EA enthusiasts I know are very much into mosquito net altruism.

GiveWell, an organization very popular among EA folks, has a list of top charities and most of them target the Global South https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities.