Can we agree on a better name than 'near-termist'? "Not-longermist"? "Not-full-longtermist"?

I think it's especially confusing when longtermists working on AI risk think there is a non-negligble chance total doom may befall us in 15 years or less, whereas so-called neartermists working on deworming or charter cities are seeking payoffs that only get realized on a 20-50 year time horizon.

I don't think a good name for this exists, and I don't think we need one. It's usually better to talk about the specific cause areas than to try and lump all of them together as not-longtermism.

As you mention, there are lots of different reasons one might choose not to identify as a longtermist, including both moral and practical considerations.

But more importantly, I just don't think that longtermist vs not-longtermist is sufficiently important to justify grouping all the other causes into one group.

Trying to find a word for all the clusters other than longtermism  is like trying to find a word that describes all cats that aren't black, but isn't "not-black cats".

One way of thinking about these EA schools of thought is as clusters of causes in a multi-dimensional space. One of the dimensions along which these causes vary is longtermism vs. not-longtermism. But there are many other dimensions, including  animal-focused vs. people-focused, high-certainty vs low-certainty, etc. Not-longtermist causes all vary along these dimensions, too. Finding a simple label for a category that includes animal welfare, poverty alleviation, metascience, YIMBYism, mental health, and community building is going to be weird and hard.

It's because there are so many other dimensions that we can end up with people working on AI safety and people working on chicken welfare in the same movement. I think that's cool.  I really like that EA space has enough dimensions that a  really diverse set of causes can all count as EA. Focusing so much on the longtermism vs. not-longtermism dimension under-emphasizes this.

"Not longtermist" doesn't seem great to me. It implies being longtermist is the default EA position. I'd say I'm a longtermist, but I don't think we should normalise longtermism as the default EA position. This could be harmful for growth of the movement.

Maybe as Berger says "Global Health and Wellbeing" is the best term.

Agree that "neartermism" is lousy. I like "global health and wellbeing" or just "global wellbeing" as improvements.

Possible better: what I've found I say is that "I focus on doing good now" or "helping people now". I agree it's imperfect in that it's not a single word but it does have a temporal component to it, unlike "global health and wellbeing"

It still seems like prefixing with "not" still runs into defining based on disagreement, where I would guess people who lean that way would rather be named for what they're prioritizing as opposed to what they aren't. I came up with a few (probably bad) ideas along that vein:

• Immediatists (apparently not a made up word according to Merriam-Webster)
• Contemporary altruists
• Effective immediately

I'm relatively new so take my opinion with a big grain of salt. Maybe "not longtermist" is fine with most.

I think the problem is from Will MacAskill's original definition baking in assumptions about tractability [bold added]:

An alternative minimal definition, suggested by Hilary Greaves (though the precise wording is my own), is that we could define longtermism as the view that the (intrinsic) value of an outcome is the same no matter what time it occurs.  This rules out views on which we should discount the future or that we should ignore the long-run indirect effects of our actions, but would not rule out views on which it’s just empirically intractable to try to improve the long-term future. Part of the idea is that this definition would open the way to a debate about the relevant empirical issues, in particular on the tractability of affecting the long run. [...]

In my view, this definition would be too broad. I think the distinctive idea that we should be trying to capture is the idea of trying to promote good long-term outcomes. I see the term 'longtermism' creating value if it results in more people taking action to help ensure that the long-run future goes well.

I generally see this as broad global development (encompassing anything related to improving the world rather than preventing extinction (and some causes/interventions do both of these)).

I think neartermist is completely fine. I have no negative associations with the term, and suspect the only reason it sounds negative is because longtermism is predominant in the EA Community.

Is it possible to have a name related to discount rates? Please correct me if I am wrong, but I guess all "neartermists" have a high discount rate right?

The name should comprise the idea that the solution is not intended to perpetuate into the very long term, and may serve either only the very short term (e. g. a specific time in a life of one generation or the entire life of an individual) or the individuals which occur in the foreseeable future ('medium term'). This reasoning also implies that we would need 3 terms.

• Solidarity
• Lasting
• Locked

Solidarity  solutions do not address causes but improve the situations of those negatively affected by occurrences or systems. Examples include feeding refugees or regularly providing  deworming pills to affected persons. Lasting solutions address causes and improve systems in a way that is still alterable. Examples include conflict resolution (peace agreement) or prevention of human interaction with environment which can cause worm infections (e. g. roads, parks, mechanized farm work, river water quality testing and risky area swimming ban). Locked solutions are practically^[1] unalterable. For example, AI system that automatically allocates a place and nutrition for any actor or the eradication of worms. These can combine solidarity aspects (e. g. AI that settles refugees) and lasting changes (no worm infections in the foreseeable future).

Still, these names are written with the intent to denote intent of the solution rather than the impact. For example, a solidarity solution of providing deworming pills can enable income increases and generations to pay for deworming drugs by productivity increase and thus becomes lasting. It may be challenging to think of a solidarity solution that is in fact a locked one. For instance, if someone eradicates worms, then that is addressing the cause so is not a solidarity solution - the solution should be classified objectively. A program intended to last but not to be locked in can become practically unalterable, for example a peace agreement which is later digitized by AI governance. So, intent can be 'one step below' the impact but not two steps below. By definition, solutions that can be classified as one of the three levels cannot be classified as those of any level below or above.

From this writing, it is apparent that all solutions: solidarity, lasting, and locked are possible. I would further argue that it may be challenging to implement malevolent lasting and locked solutions in the present world because problems compel solving. Benevolent solutions may be easier to make lasting and locked because no one would intend to alter them. Of course, this allows for desired dystopias, which one should especially check for, as well as for lasting and locked solutions suboptimal for those who are not considered (no need to participate), so one should always keep checking for more entities to consider as well as implement this into any lasting and locked solutions.

1. ^{^}

   Locked solutions could be altered but that would be unrealistic (who would want no place to stay when the alternative is possible or worms that cause schistosomiasis).

I agree the name is non-ideal, and doesn't quite capture differences. A better term may be conventionalists versus non-conventionalists (or to make the two sides stand for something positive, conventionalists versus longtermists).

Conventionalists focus on cause areas like global poverty reduction, animal welfare, governance reforms, improving institutional decision making, and other things which have (to some extent) been done before.

Non-conventionalists focus on cause areas like global catastrophic risk prevention, s-risk prevention, improving our understanding of psychological valence, and other things which have mostly not been done before, or at least have been done comparatively fewer times.

These terms may also be terrible. Many before have tried to prevent the end of the world (see: Petrov), and prevent s-risks (see: effort against Nazism and Communism). Similarly, it's harder to draw a clear value difference or epistemic difference between these two divisions. One obvious choice is to say the conventionalists place less trust in inside-view reasoning, but the case that any particular (say) charter city trying out a brand new organizational structure will be highly beneficial seems to rely on far more inside-view reasoning (economic theory for instance) than the case that AGI is imminent (simply perform a basic extrapolation on graphs of progress or compute in the field).

"To define is to limit."
—Oscar Wilde

Let's be agnostic on near/long-termist definitions and try to do good.