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!
Goodness, I really hope so. As it stands, Greaves and MacAskill are telling people that they can “simply ignore all the effects [of their actions] contained in the first 100 (or even 1000) years”, which seems rather far from the practical advice both you and I hope they arrive at.
Anyway, I appreciate all your thoughtful feedback - it seems like we agree much more than we disagree, so I’m going to leave it here :)