The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk” • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #21

paulryanrogers wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps because some wealthy individuals with outsized influence+power are becoming so out of touch with the present they might cause outsized harm.

Anyone seriously trying to tell people they shouldn't work to address climate change should rightfully be decried for causing harm. But the angle of trying to paint everyone thinking about existential risk with that brush is itself irresponsible and inaccurate. 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…

Are they contradictory?

These supremacist ideas have a long and toxic history. And the moral foundations are always similar - some people today can be considered wholly disposable.

And they are supremacist - based on the unproven belief that humanity has an obvious manifest destiny which will incarnate (or perhaps insiliconate) super-intelligence across multiple galaxies.

It's juvenile Tom Swift fantasy.

Humanity has multiple immediate challenges now. They need actionable, practical intelligence.

If we can't find the relatively limited intelligence to deal with them, where are we going to find the IQ needed to colonise a galactic supercluster?

Of course some other species might evolve on Earth. But also - it might not. No matter what grand name this is given, "thinking" about it is just well-funded science fiction.

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

#42

Post by wizzwizz4 » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:40 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #31

clairity wrote: post #15

it's hard to take the idea of longtermism seriously when it makes a basic mistake of treating its far future (10^58 people living in a computer simulation) as virtually certain. it has no concept of stochastically discounting this future among infinitely many into the present, let alone today's value of all those potential future beings(?), to arrive at a reasonable weighting on present decisions. with that said, i d…

I blogged about the need for discounting the future a while ago: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2020/01/08/morality-th... I guess I should get more active on some Rationality forums; something like 80-90% of those who read my blog only do so because (and when) I link to it from here. Plus I bet a significant fraction of what I write is something someone else has already come up with and I just don’t know about…

You should add your voice to https://lesswrong.com, even if it's just linking your blog posts there. That community is too insular, and needs more independent voices.

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

#43

Post by conformist » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:40 PM UTC

There seem to be many people in the effective altruism movement, and also it's "longtermism" fraction, that try to think about the trade-offs alluded to in the article very carefully and in a structured way. The article seems to be straw-maning that somewhat and buries valid arguments in lots of flowery rhetorics?

Surely, there are simple arguments around discounting and uncertainty of estimates to be be made, to first criticise points within, say, Bostrom's framework, before moving on to broader moral appeals?

The 80k hours podcast has some interesting episodes related to considerations around that and the wider EA community: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/

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

#44

Post by tomrod » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:42 PM UTC

How fascinating that, in the middle of this war of philosophies criticizing long-term thinking, a huge advertisement for print copies interrupt both the article and the claims.

I align with Bostrom, personally, as in my view we should structure our society for long-term outcomes -- even if it means we have to save resources now (which makes people uncomfortable). I would think that this is orthogonal to some of the immediate issues stemming from things like wealth inequality.

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

#45

Post by gregmuellegger » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

rhaps0dy wrote: post #7

This article just attempts to discredit the idea of longtermism by ridiculing it, instead of presenting any actual counterarguments. It just writes about the implications of its strawman over and over in a sardonic tone. The only thing it wants to get across is “some rich people and philosophy weirdos like this idea, therefore it is bad”. Where are the actual counter-arguments in the article? I suppose it relies on t…

It mentions directly the idea that:

> a “small misstep for mankind,” however terrible a “massacre for man” it might otherwise be.

and

> You ought to care equally about people no matter when they exist, whether today, next year, or in a couple billion years henceforth

This means that there is put value on unborn, potentially possible lifes. And then you can start weighing these lifes against currently living humans. And then it becomes perfectly reasonable to perform genocide on impaired, or poor people as this would free up resources to focus on colonizing the solar system.

I think this is a particular counter argument where this kind of weighting human lifes becomes a bad idea. Especially when comparing current actual living, breathing humans against potential future beeings. This absolutely neglects the needs of current humans, with all their human rights to be able to get the share in the world they require to live in dignity.

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

#46

Post by wizzwizz4 » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

sammalloy wrote: post #36

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk, presumably is the outcomes of climate change- which are uncertain and almost certainly not guaranteed death for everyone

Wet bulb temperature, clathrate gun, food web collapse, albedo decrease, dormant virus release from permafrost, increase of tropical disease, water scarcity, crop and livestock failure—that /is/ almost certainly guaranteed extinction for humanity. How is this even debatable? We are already on this path.

But some groups of humans might survive, and might still have descendants tens of thousands of years later! It's not guaranteed that humanity goes extinct; we're pretty creative. (Though the same can't be said for a lot of other species.)

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

#47

Post by tomrod » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

Another idea -- humans seem to have a hard time when they don't have a long-term idea to rally around. For religionists this is the notion of the afterlife. For many post-religionists it's stoic acceptance of gnostic outcomes (nihilsm, existentialism) or perhaps fervor regarding long-term accomplishments like Longtermism or intelligence surviving heat death of the universe.

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

#48

Post by joe_the_user » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #21

paulryanrogers wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps because some wealthy individuals with outsized influence+power are becoming so out of touch with the present they might cause outsized harm.

Anyone seriously trying to tell people they shouldn't work to address climate change should rightfully be decried for causing harm. But the angle of trying to paint everyone thinking about existential risk with that brush is itself irresponsible and inaccurate. 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…

Another, far less ridiculous angle would be "here's a tiny group of wealthy people with weirdly contradictory viewpoints"

The article is quite clear that is criticizing an idea (This is a dangerous ideas). For any idea, if you at the people subscribing to it, you'll see they follow the idea in a somewhat contradictory fashion. But should hold back from looking at the idea itself 'cause otherwise one's ability to analyze is complete hobbled.

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

#49

Post by drdeca » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #35

majormajor wrote: post #12

> Well, just crunch the numbers: 0.00000000001 percent of 1023 people is 10 billion people, which is ten times greater than 1 billion people. This means that if you want to do the most good, you should focus on these far-future people rather than on helping those in extreme poverty today. As the FHI longtermists Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill—the latter of whom is said to have cofounded the Effective Altruism move…

Yeah, I'm still not sure how ethics should work in the face of not-(yet)-extant people, either. On the one hand, setting a bomb to scorch the face of the earth once everybody currently alive is dead… seems wrong? So future people's lives will matter. But on the other, I don't see anything wrong with not having children , so hypothetical people's existence doesn't matter.

Why not just say that two situations where there is one more person that came into existence in one situation than the other, but everyone else’s “time in which they are alive” and “how happy/satisfied/whatever they are” are the same, are morally incomparable?

So, that way, there is neither an obligation to try to make it so there will be more people if they would be happy, nor an obligation to not do so if they wouldn’t be, but there is an obligation to, if you do make a person, to endeavor to make situations good for them?

So then, future people’s well-being matters, conditional on them existing, but without an obligation to try to influence whether they exist or in what numbers (beyond how this influences people who already do exist or who will exist regardless ).

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

#50

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:49 PM UTC

sammalloy wrote: post #36

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk, presumably is the outcomes of climate change- which are uncertain and almost certainly not guaranteed death for everyone

Wet bulb temperature, clathrate gun, food web collapse, albedo decrease, dormant virus release from permafrost, increase of tropical disease, water scarcity, crop and livestock failure—that /is/ almost certainly guaranteed extinction for humanity. How is this even debatable? We are already on this path.

Well, expert organizations like the IPCC produce reports on the expected impact of climate change, which don't include human extinction as even a worst-case possibility. I'm the last person who'd claim the experts are always right, but it's gotta be at least debatable.