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 meant if everyone were actively engaged in this project. (I think there are plenty of people in the world who are just getting on with their thing, and some of them make the world a bit worse rather than a bit better.)
Overall though I think that longtermism is going to end up with practical advice which looks quite a lot like "it is the duty of each generation to do what it can to make the world a little bit better for its descendants"; there will be some interesting content in which dimensions of betterness we pay most attention to (e.g. I think that the longtermist lens on things makes some dimension like "how much does the world have its act together on dealing with possible world-ending catastrophes?" seem really important).