An adapted excerpt from What We Owe The Future by Will MacAskill is now live in The New York Times and will run as the cover story for their Sunday Opinion this weekend.
I think the piece makes for a great concise introduction to longtermism, so please consider sharing the piece on social media to boost its reach!
Basically, William MacAskill's longtermism, or EA longtermism is trying to solve the distributional shift issue. Most cultures that have long-term thinking assume that there's no distributional shift such that no key assumptions of the present are wrong. Now if this assumption is correct, we shouldn't interfere with cultures, as they will go to local optimums. But it isn't and thus longtermism from has to deal with weird scenarios like AI or x-risk.
Thus the form of EA longtermism is not obvious, as it can't assume that there's no distributional shift into out of distribution behavior. In fact, we have good reasons of thinking that there will be massive distributional shifts. That's the key difference between EA and other culture's longtermism.