I'm unsure if I agree or not. I think this could benefit from a bit of clarification on the "why this needs to be retired" parts.
For the first slogan, it seems like you're saying that this is not a complete argument for longtermism - just because the future is big doesn't mean its tractable, or neglected, or valuable at the margin. I agree that it's not a complete argument, and if I saw someone framing it that way I would object. But I don't think that means we need to retire the phrase unless we see it being constantly used as a strawman or something? It's not complete, but it's a quick way to summarize a big part of the argument.
For the second one, it sounds like you're saying this is misleading - it doesn't accurately represent the work being done, which is mostly on lock-in events, not affecting the long-term future. This is true, but it takes only one extra sentence to say "but this is hard so in practice we focus on lock-in". It's a quick way to summarize the philosophical motivations, but does seem pretty detached from practice.
I think my takeaway from thinking thru this comment is this:
- Longtermism is a complicated argument with a lot of separate pieces
- We have slogans that summarize some of those pieces and leave out others
- Those slogans are useful in a high-context environment, but can be misleading for those that don't already know all the context they implicitly rely on
How do you understand the claim about expected value? What is the expectation being taken over?
What are some examples of such proxies?
Why would we care about a hypothetical scenario where we're omniscient? Shouldn't we focus on the actual decision problem being faced?
Over my probability distribution for the future. In my expected/average future, almost all lives/experiences/utility/etc are in the long-term future. Moreover, the variance in values of such a variable between possible futures is almost entirely due to differences in the long-term future.
Sure, for the sake of making decisions. For the sake of abstract propositions about "what matters most," it's not necessarily constrained by what we know.
Okay, so you're thinking about what an outside observer would expect to happen. (Another approach is to focus on a single action A, and think about how A affects the long-run future in expectation.)
Coming back to this, in my experience the quote is used to express what we should do; it's saying we should focus on affecting the far future, because that's where the value is. It's not merely pointing out where the value is, with no reference to being actionable.
To give a contrived example: suppose there's a civilization in a galaxy far away that's immeasurably larger than our total potential future, and we can give them ~infinite utility by sending them one photon. But they're receding from us faster than the speed of light, so there's nothing we can do about it. Here, all of the expected value is in this civilization, but it has no bearing on how the EA community should allocate our budget.
I just don't think MacAskill/Greaves/others intended this to be interpreted as a perfect-information scenario with no practical relevance.
What do you think about MacAskill's claim that "there’s more of a rational market now, or something like an efficient market of giving — where the marginal stuff that could or could not be funded in AI safety is like, the best stuff’s been funded, and so the marginal stuff is much less clear."?
I mostly agree that obviously great stuff gets funding, but I think the "marginal stuff" is still orders of magnitude better in expectation than almost any neartermist interventions.
Do you disagree with FTX funding lead elimination instead of marginal x-risk interventions?
Not actively. I buy that doing a few projects with sharper focus and tighter feedback loops can be good for community health & epistemics. I would disagree if it took a significant fraction of funding away from interventions with a more clear path to doing an astronomical amount of good. (I almost added that it doesn't really feel like lead elimination is competing with more longtermist interventions for FTX funding, but there probably is a tradeoff in reality.)
I was just about to make all three of these points (with the first bullet containing two), so thank you for saving me the time!