One takeaway, I think, is that these things which already seem good under common sense are much more important in the longtermist view. For example, I think a longtermist would want extinction risk to be much lower than what you'd want from a commonsense view.
Does this apply to things other than existential risk?
Yes. I think your list of commonsense priorities are even more beneficial in the view of longtermism. Factors like "would this have happened anyway, just a bit later" may still apply and reduce the impact of any given intervention. Then again, notions like "we can reach more of the universe the sooner we start expanding" could be an argument for sooner being better for economic growth.
Answering this question depends a little on having a sense of what the "non-longtermist status quo" is, but:
I have not researched longtermism deeply. However, what I have found out so far leaves me puzzled and skeptical. As I currently see it, you can divide what longtermism cares about into two categories:
1) Existential risk.
2) Common sense long-term priorities, such as:
Existential risk isn’t a new idea (relative to longtermism) and economic growth, environmentalism, and societal progress aren’t new ideas either. Suppose I already care a lot about low-probability existential catastrophes and I already buy into common sense ideas about sustainability, growth, and progress. Does longtermism have anything new to tell me?
Longtermism suggests a different focus within existential risks, because it feels very differently about "99% of humanity is destroyed, but the remaining 1% are able to rebuild civilisation" and "100% of humanity is destroyed, civilisation ends", even though from the perspective of people alive today these outcomes are very similar.
I think relative to neartermist intuitions about catastrophic risk, the particular focus on extinction increases the threat from AI and engineered biorisks relative to e.g. climate change and natural pandemics. Basically, total extinction is quite a high bar, and most easily reached by things deliberately attempting to reach it, relative to natural disasters which don't tend to counter-adapt when some survive.
Longtermism also supports research into civilisational resilience measures, like bunkers, or research into how or whether civilisation could survive and rebuild after a catastrophe.
Longtermism also lowers the probability bar that an extinction risk has to reach before being worth taking seriously. I think this used to be a bigger part of the reason why people worked on x-risk when typical risk estimates were lower; over time, as risk estimates increased. longtermism became less necessary to justify working on them.
Maybe? This depends on what you think about the probability that intelligent life re-evolves on earth (it seems likely to me) and how good you feel about the next intelligent species on earth vs humans.
IMO, most x-risk from AI probably doesn't come from literal human extinction but instead AI systems acquiring most of the control over long run resources while some/most/all humans survive, but fair enough.
Conditioned on human extinction, do you expect intelligent life to re-evolve with levels of autonomy similar to what humanity has now (which seems quite important for assessing how bad human extinction would be on longtermist grounds)? I don't think it's likely.
Maybe the underlying crux (if your intuition differs) is what proportion of human extinction scenarios (not including non-extinction x-risk) involve intelligent/agentic AIs, and/or other conditions which would significantly limit the potential of new intelligent life even if it did re-emerge. My current low-resilience impression is probably 90+%.
And the above considerations and credences make how good the next intelligent species are vs. humans fairly inconsequential.
Yeah, it seems possible to be longtermist but not think that human extinction entails loss of all hope, but extinction still seems more important to the longtermist than the neartermist.
valid. I guess longtermists and neartermists will also feel quite different about this fate.
This is an interesting point, and I guess it’s important to make, but it doesn’t exactly answer the question I asked in the OP.
In 2013, Nick Bostrom gave a TEDx talk about existential risk where he argued that it’s so important to care about because of the 10^umpteen future lives at stake. In the talk, Bostrom referenced even older work by Derek Parfit. (From a quick Google, the Parfit stuff on existential risk was from his book Reasons and Persons, published in 1984.)
I feel like people in the EA community only started talking about "longtermism" in the last few years, whereas they had been talking about existential risk many years prior to that.
Suppose I already bought into Bostrom’s argument about existential risk and future people in 2013. Does longtermism have anything new to tell me?
I guess I think of caring about future people as the core of longtermism, so if you're already signed up to that, I would already call you a longtermist? I think most people aren't signed up for that, though.
I agree that if you're already bought in to moral consideration for 10^umpteen future people, that's longtermism.
Sorry for replying to this ancient post now. (I was looking at my old EA Forum posts after not being active on the forum for about a year.)
Here's why this answer feels unsatisfying to me. An incredibly mainstream view is to care about everyone alive today and everyone who will be born in the next 100 years. I have to imagine over 90% of people in the world would agree to that view or a view very close to that if you asked them.
That's already a reason to care about existential risks and a reason people do care about what they perceive as existential risks or global catastrophic risks. It's the reason most people who care about climate change care about climate change.
I don't really know what the best way to express the most mainstream view(s) would be. I don't think most people have tried to form a rigorous view on the ethics of far future people. (I have a hard enough time translating my own intuitions into a rigorous view, even with exposure to academic philosophy and to these sorts of ideas.) But maybe we could conjecture that most people mentally apply a "discount rate" to future lives, so that they care less and less about future lives as the centuries stretch into the future, and at some point it reaches zero.
Future lives in the distant future (i.e. people born significantly later than 100 years from now) only make an actionable difference to existential risk when the estimated risk is so low that it changes the expected value math to account for 10^16 or 10^52 or whatever it is hypothetical future lives. That feels like an important insight to me, but its applicability feels limited.
So: people who don't take a longtermist view of existential risk already have a good reason to care about existential risk.
Also: people who take a longtermist view of ethics don't seem to have a good reason to think differently about any other subject than existential risk. At least, that's the impression I get from trying to engage open-mindedly and charitably with this new idea of "longtermism".
Ultimately, I'm still kind of annoyed (or at least perplexed) by "longtermism" being promoted as if it's a new idea with broad applicability, when:
A longtermist view of existential risk has been promoted in discussions of existential risk for a very long time. Like, decades.
If longtermism is actionable for anything, it's for existential risk and very little (if anything) else.
Most people are already bought in to caring about existential risk for relatively "neartermist" reasons.
When I heard the hype about longtermism, I was expecting there to be more meat on the bone.
I think we have an empirical disagreement here. If I felt strongly motivated to try to persuade you about this, I would go try to find studies about it; I suspect we may not even have 90% agreement on "everyone alive today is worthy of moral concern", and I would strongly guess we don't have that level of agreement on caring about people who will be born 50 years from now. (Although I would also guess that many people just don't think about this kind of question very much and aren't guaranteed to have very clear or consistent answers.)
Even if people agreed with the premises, we could try to justify longtermism as arguing that the consequences of this belief are underexplored, though I hear you that you don't see a lot of neglected consequences.
At this point, though, I'm not actually that invested in trying to champion longtermism specifically, so I'm not the right person to defend it to you here. Let's fix x-risk and check in about it after that :)
I haven’t looked at any surveys, but it seems universal to care about future generations. This doesn’t mean people will necessarily act in a way that protects future generations' interests — doesn’t mean they won’t pollute or deforest, for example — but the idea is not controversial and is widely accepted.
Similarly, I think it’s basically universal to believe that all humans, in principle, have some value and have certain rights that should not be violated, but then, in practice, factors like racism, xenophobia, hatred based on religious fundamentalism, anti-LGBT hatred, etc. lead many people to dehumanize certain humans. There is typically an attempt to morally justify this, though, for example through appeals to “self-defense” (or similar concepts).
If you apply strict standards to the belief that everyone alive today is worthy of moral concern, then some self-identified effective altruists would fail the test, since they hold dehumanizing views about Black people, LGBT people, women, etc.
That’s getting into a different point than I was trying to make in the chunk of text you quoted. Which is just that Will MacAskill didn’t fall out of a coconut tree and come up with the idea that future generations matter yesterday. His university, Oxford, is over 900 years old. I believe in his longtermism book he cites the Iroquois principle of making decisions while considering how they will affect the next seven generations. Historically, many (most?) families on Earth have had close relationships between grandparents and grandchildren. Passing down tradition and transmitting culture (e.g., stories, rituals, moral principles) over long timescales is considered important in many cultures and religions.
There is a risk of a sort of plagiarism with this kind of discourse where people take ideas that have existed for centuries or millennia across many parts of the world and then package them as if they are novel, without adequately acknowledging the history of the ideas. That’s like the effective altruist’s or the ethical theorist’s version of "not invented here".