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All of bezurli's Comments + Replies

Open Thread: Spring 2022
bezurli1
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Thanks for the comment. I really hadn't considered colonizing the stars and bringing animals.

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Linch
TBC, I think it's more likely that utopia would not look like having animals in the stars. Digital minds seem more likely, but also I think it's likely just that the future will be really weird, even weirder than digital minds.
Open Thread: Spring 2022
bezurli4
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Hey, everyone. I don't post here often and I'm not particularly knowledgeable about strong longtermism, but I've been thinking a bit about it lately and wanted to share a thought I haven't seen addressed yet and I was wondering if it’s reasonable and unaddressed. I’m not sure this is the right place though, but here goes.

It seems to me that strong longtermism is extremely biased towards human beings.

In most catastrophic risks I can imagine (climate change, AI misalignment, and maybe even nuclear war* or pandemics**), it seems unlikely that earth would beco... (read more)

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Babel
Great points! I agree that the longtermist community need to better internalize the anti-speciesist belief that we claim to hold, and explicitly include non-humans in our considerations. On your specific argument that longtermist work doesn't affect non-humans: * X-risks aren't the sole focus of longtermism. IMO work in the S-risk space takes non-humans (including digital minds) much more seriously, to the extent that human welfare is mentioned much less often than non-human welfare. * I think X-risk work does affect non-humans. Linch's comment mentions one possible way, though I think we need to weigh the upsides and downsides more carefully. Another thing I want to add is that misaligned AI can be a much powerful actor than other earth-originating intelligient species, and may have a large influence on non-humans even after human extinction. * I think we need to thoroughly investigate the influence of our longtermist interventions on non-humans. This topic is highly neglected relative to its importance.
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Frank_R
I agree with Linchs comment, but I want to mention a further point. Let us suppose that the well-being of all non-human animals between now and the death of the sun is the most important value. This idea can be justified since there are much more animals than humans. Let us suppose furthermore that the future of human civilization has no impact on the lives of animals in the far future. [I disagree with this point since it might be possible that future humans abolish wild animal suffering or in the bad case they take wild animals with them when they colonize the stars and thus extend wild animal suffering.] Nevertheless, let us assume that we cannot have any impact on animals in the far future. In my opinion, the most logical thing would be to focus on the things that we can change (x-risks, animal suffering today etc.) and to develop a stoic attitude towards the things we cannot change. 
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Linch
If humanity survives, we have a decent shot of reducing suffering in nature and spreading utopia throughout the stars.  If humanity dies, but not all life, and some other species eventually evolves intelligence and then builds civilization, I think they might also have a shot of doing the same thing, but this is more speculative and uncertain, and seems to me to be a much worse bet than betting on humanity (flawed as we are).
Growth and the case against randomista development
bezurli17
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But should we make people want pro-growth policies? I'm rather sceptic that there is a positive expected outcome from influencing certain politics. In the end, founding a think tank that lobbies in favor of development policies is, in a way, to believe we know better than development country voters themselves what is best for them (assuming we're talking about functional democracies).

Although that line of argument may be attractive for a few reasons already mentioned on the forum (because people don't trust institutions, because they lack b... (read more)

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brunoparga11
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I was with you until the very end, then I got confused. Do you think it is fair to say that people don't know what's best for them when it comes to trade liberalization? (I do.)

I have way fewer qualms about saying that voters don't know what's best for them. Take, for example, South Africa. They use a pretty darn good voting system - single-ballot closed-list proportional representation with half the seats coming from province-level lists and the other half from nationwide lists - and I think the conduct of the elections themselves is d... (read more)

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