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!
Ah, gotcha. I agree that the process of scientific enquiry/discovery works best when people do as you said.
I think it’s worth distinguishing between that case where taking the less accurate path in the short-term has longer-term benefits, and more typical decisions like ‘what should I work on’, or even just truth-seeking that doesn’t have a decision directly attached but you want to get the right answer. There are definitely people who still believe what you wrote literally in those cases and ironically I think it’s a good example of an argument that sounds compelling but is largely incorrect, for reasons above.