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!
As a minor point, I don't think that discounting the future really saves you from undefined expectations, as you're implying. I think that on simple models of future growth -- such as are often used in practice -- it does, but if you give some credence to wild futures with crazy growth rates, then it's easy to make the entire thing undefined even through a positive discount rate for pure time preference.