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'm sympathetic to something in the vicinity of your complaint here, striving to compare like with like, and being cognizant of the weaknesses of the comparison when that's impossible (e.g. if someone tried the reasoning from the Shivani example in earnest rather than as a toy example in a philosophy paper I think it would rightly get a lot of criticism).
(I don't think that "subjective" and "objective" are quite the right categories here, btw; e.g. even the GiveWell estimates of cost-to-save-a-life include some subjective components.)
In terms of your general sympathy with longtermism -- it makes sense to me that the behaviour of its proponents should affect your sympathy with those proponents. And if you're thinking of the position as a political stance (who you're allying yourself etc.) then it makes sense that it could affect your sympathy with the position. But if you're engaged in the business of truth-seeking, why does it matter what the proponents do? You should ignore the bad arguments and pay attention to the best ones you can see -- whether or not anyone actually made them. (Of course I'm expressing a super idealistic position here, and there are practical reasons not to be all the way there, but I still think it's worth thinking about.)