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!
In their article vadmas writes:
Some of your comments, including this one, seem to me to be defending simple or weak longtermism ('by far the most important effects are likely to be temporally distant'), rather than strong longtermism as defined above. I can imagine a few reasons for this:
At the moment, I don't have a great sense of which one is the case, and think clarity on this point would be useful. I could also have missed an another way to reconcile these.