1. 1.1.: You might want to have a look at group of positions in metaethics called person affecting views, some of which include future people and some of which don't. The ones that do often don't care about increasing/decreasing the number of people in the future, but about improving the lives of future people that will exist anyway. That's compatible with longtermism - not all longtermism is about extinction risk. (See trajectory change and s-risk.) 1.2.: No, we don't just care about humans. In fact, I think it's quite likely that most of the value or disvalue will come from non-human minds. (Though I'm thinking digital minds rather than animals.) But we can't influence how the future will go if we're not around, and many x-risk scenarios would be quite bad full stop and not just bad for humans. 1.3.: You might want to have a look at cluelessness (EA forum and GPI website should have links) or the recent 80,000 Hours podcast with Alexander Berger. Predicting the future and how we can influence it is definitely extremely hard, but I don't think we're decisively in bad enough of a position where we can - with a good conscience - just throw our hands up and conclude there's definitely nothing to be done here.   2. 2.1 + 2.2.: Don't really want to write anything on this right now 2.3.: Definite no. It just argues that trade-offs must be made, and some bads are worse even than current suffering. Or rather: The amount of bad we can avert is greater even than if we focus on current suffering 2.4: Don't understand what you're getting at.   3. 3.1.: Can't parse the question 3.2.: I think many longtermists struggle with this. Michelle Hutchinson wrote a post on the EA forum recently on what still keeps her motivated. You can find it by searching her name ont he EA forum. 3.3.: No. Longtermism per se doesn't say anything about how much to personally sacrifice. You can believe in longtermism + think that you should give away your last penny and work every waking h

Hi - my intuitions fall in the other direction here, so I'm keen to explain why.  Implicit IMOs in front of everything here. 1:     1.1:  I have a younger brother. My parents could have stopped at one, and my family would broadly still be happy, but my brother is generally happy and leads a good life. Similarly, if they'd had a third child they probably would have been happy and great too, and I would have loved them. All else being equal I wish that youngest sibling could have existed. IMO these two sentiments aren't meaningfully distinct.      1.2:  We don't only care about humans.  Sure, the argument for making more humans would apply to insects or something as well. However, most of the things that would kill all the humans would also kill everything else, so for me not letting that happen is still much more of a priority.     1.3: True on the specifics, false more generally. I don't know exactly what the world should look like, but I'm pretty sure people being happy is good, more people being happy is better, and everything being unrecoverably dead is neutral at most.    2:     2.1: If we weren't potentially about to all die I'd be more willing to think about this, but we have to survive the next century or two first. Whether capitalism makes things better or worse for now depends much more on whether it makes us more or less likely to all die, than on anything else (again, for now).      2.2: I'm pretty sure non-privileged people also want to be alive and happy.      2.3: Possibly, and I'm ok with that. I'd rather live a worse life if it means my grandkids are more likely to survive and have happy ones. Although it's definitely better for everyone to be happier now, I feel like it doesn't amount to much if we all die in the next century.      2.4: If I can choose between a surviving but stable society, and a growing one, I would choose the growing one. But both are better than an empty rock, so the priority now is not dying either way.   3:      3.

No idea - I think it most depends on the specifics of your situation. On average I think people who start organisations later in their life using their experience and contacts are likely to be more successful.  

Different people in the community will have different views, but my own take is that the capitalism and markets can be great for growth and improving productive capacity but you want to make sure that the benefits are spread throughout society (see the book Why Nations Fail).  I'm sorry to hear that you're feeling overwhelmed by things. I've felt the same way at time. It's important to look after yourself, take time off, and connect with other people. For me, I love watching the Simpsons, going for runs with my friends, and drinking coffee! My own take on this is that the world is big and messy, and there are lot of bad things we each as individuals have to accept we can't control. But if you can find a niche doing something which hits the sweet spot of being both enjoyable and improving the world, then you can have a pretty good time!  I suspect you might be able to find lots of ways to use AI to make things better - I've seen some great work in improving agricultural production using machine learning which seems pretty good. And I'm sure there are lots of businesses and charities that would be interested in someone with your skillset.