Phil Torres has an article criticizing Longtermism. I'm posting here in the spirit of learning from serious criticism. I'd love to hear others' reactions: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/the-dangerous-ideas-of-longtermism-and-existential-risk
Spelling out his biggest concern, he says "Even more chilling is that many people in the community believe that their mission to “protect” and “preserve” humanity’s 'longterm potential' is so important that they have little tolerance for dissenters." He asserts that "numerous people have come forward, both publicly and privately, over the past few years with stories of being intimidated, silenced, or 'canceled.'" This doesn't match my experience. I find the EA community loves debate and questioning assumptions. Have others had this experience? Are there things we could do to improve as a community?
Another critique Torres makes comes down to Longermism being intuitively bad. I don't agree with that, but I bet it is a convincing argument to many outside of EA. For a large number of people, Longtermism can sound crazy. Maybe this has implications for communications strategy. Torres gives examples of Longtermists minimizing global warming. A better framing for Longtermists to use could be something like "global warming is bad, but these other causes could be worse and are more neglected." I think many Longtermists, including Rob Wiblin of 80,000 hours, already employ this framing. What do others think?
Here is the passage where Torres casts Longtermism as intuitively bad:
If this sounds appalling, it’s because it is appalling. By reducing morality to an abstract numbers game, and by declaring that what’s most important is fulfilling “our potential” by becoming simulated posthumans among the stars, longtermists not only trivialize past atrocities like WWII (and the Holocaust) but give themselves a “moral excuse” to dismiss or minimize comparable atrocities in the future.
I feel like that guy's got a LOT of chutzpah to not-quite-say-outright-but-very-strongly-suggest that the Effective Altruism movement is a group of people who don't care about the Global South. :-P
More seriously, I think we're in a funny situation where maybe there are these tradeoffs in the abstract, but they don't seem to come up in practice.
Like in the abstract, the very best longtermist intervention could be terrible for people today. But in practice, I would argue that most if not all current longtermist cause areas (pandemic prevention, AI risk, preventing nuclear war, etc.) are plausibly a very good use of philanthropic effort even if you only care about people alive today (including children).
Or, in the abstract, AI risk and malaria are competing for philanthropic funds. But in practice, a lot of the same people seem to care about both, including many of the people that the article (selectively) quotes. …And meanwhile most people in the world care about neither.
I mean, there could still be an interesting article about how there are these theoretical tradeoffs between present and future generations. But it's misleading to name names and suggest that those people would gleefully make those tradeoffs, even if it involves torturing people alive today or whatever. Unless, of course, there's actual evidence that they would do that. (The other strong possibility is, if actually faced with those tradeoffs in real life, they would say, "Uh, well, I guess that's my stop, this is where I jump off the longtermist train!!").
Anyway, I found the article extremely misleading and annoying. For example, the author led off with a quote where Jaan Tallinn says directly that climate change might be an existential risk (via a runaway scenario), and then two paragraphs later the author is asking "why does Tallinn think that climate change isn’t an existential risk?" Huh?? The article could have equally well said that Jaan Tallinn believes that climate change is "very plausibly an existential risk", and Jaan Tallinn is the co-founder of an organization that does climate change outreach among other things, and while climate change isn't a principal focus of current longtermist philanthropy, well, it's not like climate change is a principal focus of current cancer research philanthropy either! And anyway it does come up to a reasonable extent, with healthy discussions focusing in particular on whether there are especially tractable and neglected things to do.
So anyway, I found the article very misleading.
(I agree with Rohin that if people are being intimidated, silenced, or cancelled, then that would be a very bad thing.)
To me, the question is "what are the logical conclusions that longtermism leads to?" The idea that as of today we have not exhausted every intervention available is less relevant in considerations of 100s of thousand and millions of years.
I agree. The... (read more)