This is a linkpost for https://ourworldindata.org/longtermism
Hi everyone! I'm Max Roser from Our World in Data.
I wanted to share an article with you that I published this week: The Future is Vast: Longtermism’s perspective on humanity’s past, present, and future.
In it I try to convey some of the key ideas of longtermism in an accessible way—especially through visualizations like the ones below.
I hope it makes these ideas more widely known and gets many more people interested in thinking what we can do now to make the long-term future much better.
We have written about some related topics for a long time (in particular war, nuclear war, infectious diseases, and climate change), but overall we want to do more work that is helpful for longtermists and those who work on the reduction of catastrophic & existential risks. To link to one example, I recently wrote this about the risk from nuclear weapons.
My colleagues Charlie Giattino and Edouard Mathieu are starting to work on visualizing data related to AI (e.g., this chart on AI training compute).
Charlie, Ed, and I are sharing this here because we'd love to hear your thoughts about our work. We're always interested to hear your ideas for how OWID can be helpful for those interested in longtermism and effective altruism (here is Ed's earlier question on this forum).
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This was fantastic, thanks for sharing!
I think there're a lot of inferential steps most people would need to go through to get from their current worldview, to a longtermist worldview. But I think a pretty massive one is just getting people to appreciate how big the future could be, and I think this post does a great job of that.
An added bonus is that the idea that the future could be huge is a claim the longtermist community is particularly certain of (whereas other important ideas, such as the likelihood of various existential risks and what we can do about them are extremely uncertain and contested). While quantifying how big the future could be, or is on expectation, is really difficult -- but the idea that it could be extremely big stands up to scrutiny quite well. I think it's really useful to have such beautifully illustrated graphs that put where humanity is now into context, I'm excited to use them for future work on longtermism at Giving What We Can.
RE something that would be useful for OWID on longtermism. I'd be very interested in approximate data on the amount of funding each year that gets directed to improving the very long-term future. Given there'd be a lot of difficult edge-cases here (e.g., should climate change funding be included?), it may need to be operationalised quite narrowly (perhaps "How much money do we spend each year on avoiding human extinction?" would be better.)
Makes sense! From your appearance on the 80,000 Hours podcast, I was shocked by how much you have managed to do given you're such a small team. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you accomplish as you expand :)