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!
Thanks! I think that there's quite a lot of good content in your critical review, including some issues that really should be discussed more. In my view there are a number of things to be careful of, but ultimately not enough to undermine the longtermist position. (I'm not an author on the piece you're critiquing, but I agree with enough of its content to want to respond to you.)
Overall I feel like a lot of your critique is not engaging directly with the case for strong longtermism; rather you're pointing out apparently unpalatable implications. I think this is a useful type of criticism, but one that often leads me suspecting that neither side is simply-incorrect, but rather looking for a good synthesis position which understands all of the important points. (Your argument against expected value is a direct rebuttal of the argument for, but in my eyes this is one of your weaker criticisms.)
The point I most appreciate you making is that it seems like strong longtermism could be used to justify ignoring all sorts of pressing present problems. I think that this is justifiably concerning, and deserves attention. However my view is more like "beware naive longtermism" (rather like "beware naive utilitarianism") rather than thinking that the entire framework is lost.
To expand on that:
(I'll address a few other points in replies to this comment, for better threading and because they seem less centrally important to me.)
Just wanted to quickly hop in to say that I think this little sub-thread contains interesting points on both sides, and that people who stumble upon it later may also be interested in Forum posts tagged “epistemic humility”.