Hello! My name is Vaden Masrani and I'm a grad student at UBC in machine learning. I'm a friend of the community and have been very impressed with all the excellent work done here, but I've become very worried about the new longtermist trend developing recently.
I've written a critical review of longtermism here in hopes that bringing an 'outsiders' perspective might help stimulate some new conversation in this space. I'm posting the piece in the forum hoping that William MacAskill and Hilary Greaves might see and respond to it. There's also a little reddit discussion forming as well that might be of interest to some.
Cheers!
I appreciate the points here. I think I might be slightly less pessimistic than you about the ability to evaluate arguments in foreign domains, but the thrust of why I was making that point was because: I think for pushing out the boundaries of collective knowledge it's roughly correct to adopt the idealistic stance I was recommending; & I think that Vaden is engaging in earnest and noticing enough important things that there's a nontrivial chance they could contribute to pushing such boundaries (and that this is valuable enough to be encouraged rather than just encouraging activity that is likely to lead to the most-correct beliefs among the convex hull of things people already understand).