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This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Why building and backing Welfare Tech companies may be one of the most promising things we can do for billions of animals.
I used AI to assist in writing this post, but I’ve rewritten it extensively and endorse it.
* Announcing the launch of Spring Innovation Fund, a not-for-profit venture philanthropy studio and fund built specifical...
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From the comments in the NYT, two notes on communicating longtermism to people-like-NYT-readers:
Re 2, I do think it's confusing to act like longtermism is nonobvious unless you're emphasizing weird implications like our calculations being dominated by the distant future and x-risk and things at least as weird as digital minds filling the universe.
Good points, though it's worth noting that the people who comment on NYT articles are probably not representative of the typical NYT reader
I'm also a bit surprised at how many of the comments are concerned about overpopulation. The most-recommended comment is essentially the tragedy of the commons. That comment's tone - and the tone of many like it, as well as a bunch of anti-GOP ones - felt really fatalistic, which worries me. So many of the comments felt like variations on "we're screwed", which goes against the belief in a net-positive future upon which longtermism is predicated.
On that note, I'll shoutout Jacy's post from about a month ago, echoing those fears in a more-EA way.
Longtermism per se isn't predicated on that belief at all—if the future is net-negative, it's still (overwhelmingly) important to make future lives less bad.
Basically, William MacAskill's longtermism, or EA longtermism is trying to solve the distributional shift issue. Most cultures that have long-term thinking assume that there's no distributional shift such that no key assumptions of the present are wrong. Now if this assumption is correct, we shouldn't interfere with cultures, as they will go to local optimums. But it isn't and thus longtermism from has to deal with weird scenarios like AI or x-risk.
Thus the form of EA longtermism is not obvious, as it can't assume that there's no distributional shift into out of distribution behavior. In fact, we have good reasons of thinking that there will be massive distributional shifts. That's the key difference between EA and other culture's longtermism.