This post is about a question:

What does longtermism recommend doing in all sorts of everyday situations?

I've been thinking (on and off) about versions of this question over the last year or two. Properly I don't want sharp answers which try to give the absolute best actions in various situations (which are likely to be extremely context dependent and perhaps also weird or hard to find), but good blueprints for longtermist decision-making in everyday situations: pragmatic guidance which will tend to produce good outcomes if followed.

The first part of the post explains why I think this is an important question to look into. The second part talks about my current thinking and some guess answers: that everyday longtermism might involve seeking to improve decision-making all around us (skewing to more important decision-making processes), while abiding by commonsense morality.

A lot of people provided some helpful thoughts in conversation or on old drafts; interactions that I remember as particularly helpful came from: Nick Beckstead, Anna Salamon, Rose Hadshar, Ben Todd, Eliana Lorch, Will MacAskill, Toby Ord. They may not endorse my conclusions, and in any case all errors, large and small, remain my own.

Motivations for the question

There are several different reasons for wanting an answer to this. The most central two are:

Strong longtermism says that the morally right thing to do is to make all decisions according to long-term effects. But for many many decisions it's very unclear what that means.
- At first glance the strong longtermist stance seems like it might recommend throwing away all of our regular moral intuitions (since they're not grounded in long-term effects). This could leave some dangerous gaps; we should look into whether they get rederived from different foundations, or if something else should replace them.
- More generally it just seems like if longtermism is important we should seek a deep understanding of it, and for that it's good to look at it from many angles (and everyday decisions are a natural and somewhat important class).
Having good answers to the question of everyday longtermism might be very important for the memetics / social dynamics of longtermism.
- People encountering and evaluating an idea that seems like it's claiming broad scope of applicability will naturally examine it from lots of angles.
  - Two obvious angles are "what does this mean

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Memetics