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!
From the comments in the NYT, two notes on communicating longtermism to people-like-NYT-readers:
Re 2, I do think it's confusing to act like longtermism is nonobvious unless you're emphasizing weird implications like our calculations being dominated by the distant future and x-risk and things at least as weird as digital minds filling the universe.
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... (read more)