Against longtermism

I'm quite happy that you are thinking critically about what you are reading! I don't think you wrote a perfect criticism (see below), but the act of taking the time to write a criticism and posting it to a public venue is not an easy step. EA always needs people who are willing and eager to probe its ethical foundations. Below I'm going to address some of your specific points, mostly in a critical way. I do this not because I think your criticism is bad (though I do disagree with a lot of it), but because I think it can be quite useful to engage with newer people who take the time to write reasonably good reactions to something they've read. Hopefully, what I say below is somewhat useful for understanding the reasons for longtermism and what I see as some flaws in your argument. I would love for you to reply with any critiques of my response.

This has been quoted several times, even though it’s an absurd argument on its face. Imagine the world where Cleopatra skipped dessert. How does this cure cancer?

It doesn't, and that's not Parfit's point. Parfit's point is that if one were to employ a discount rate, Cleopatra's dessert would matter more than nearly anything today. Since (he claims) this is clearly wrong, there is something clearly wrong with a discount rate.

Most of the 80000 hours article attempts to persuade the reader that longtermism is morally good, by explaining the reasons that we should consider future people. But the part about how we are able to benefit future people is very short.

Well yes, but that's because it's in the other pages linked there. Mostly, this has to do with thinking about whether existential risks exist soon, and whether there is anything we can do about them. That isn't really in the scope of that article but I agree the article doesn't show it.

The world is a complex system, and trying to affect the far future state of a complex system is a fool’s errand.

That isn't entirely true. There are some things that routinely affect the far future of complex systems. For instance, complex systems can collapse, and if you can get them to collapse, you can pretty easily affect its far future. If it's about to collapse due to an extremely rare event, then preventing that collapse can affect its far future state.

Let’s look at a few major breakpoints and see whether longtermism was a significant factor.

Obviously, it wasn't. But of course it wasn't! There wasn't even longtermism at all, so it wasn't a significant factor in anyone's decisions. Maybe you are trying to say "people can make long term changes without being motivated by longtermism." But that doesn't say anything about whether longtermism might make them better at creating long term changes than they otherwise would be.

We can achieve longtermism without longtermism

I generally agree with this and so do many others. For instance see here and here. However, I think it's possible that this may not be true at some time in the future. I personally would like to have longtermism around, in case there is really something where it matters, mostly because I think it is roughly correct as a theory of value. Some people may even think this is already the case. I don't want to speak for anyone, but my sense is that people who work on suffering risk are generally considering longtermism but don't care as much about existential risk.

The main point is that intervening for long term reasons is not productive, because we cannot assume that interventions are positive. Historically, interventions based on “let’s think long term”, instead of solving an immediate problem, have tended to be negative or negligible in effect.

First, I agree that interventions may be negative, and I think most longtermists would also strongly agree with this. In terms of whether historical "long term" interventions have been negative, you've asserted it but you haven't really shown it. I would be very interested in research on this; I'm not aware of any. If this were true, I do think that would be a knock against longtermism as a theory of action (though not decisive, and not against longtermism as a theory of value). Though it maybe could still be argued that we live at "the hinge of history" where longtermism is especially useful.

I made some distinguishment between theory of value and theory of action. A theory of value (or axiology) is a theory about what states of the world are most good. For instance, it might say that a world with more happiness, or more justice, is better than a world with less. A theory of action is a theory about what you should do; for instance, that we should take whichever action produces the maximum expected happiness. Greaves and MacAskill make the case for longtermism as both. But it's possible you could imagine longtermism as a theory of value but not a theory of action.

For instance, you write:

Some blood may be shed and lives may be lost, but the expected value is strongly positive.

Various philosophers, such as Parfit himself, have suggested that for this reason, many utilitarians should actually "self-efface" their morality. In other words, they should perhaps start to believe that killing large numbers of people is bad, even if it increases utility, because they might simply be wrong about the utility calculation, or might delude themselves into thinking what they already wanted to do produces a lot of utility. I gave some more resources/quotes here.

Thanks for writing!

Nuclear war similarly can be justified without longtermism, which we know because this has been the case for many decades already

Much of the mobilization against nuclear risk from the 1940s onwards was explictly grounded in the threat of human extinction — from the Russell-Einsten manifesto to grassroots movements like Women Strike for Peace with the slogan "End the Arms Race not the Human Race"

Thanks for writing - I skimmed so may have missed things, but I think these arguments have significant weaknesses, e.g.:

• They draw a strong conclusion about major historical patterns just based on guesswork about ~12 examples (including 3 that are explicitly taken from the author's imagination).
• They do not consider examples which suggest long-term thinking has been very beneficial.
  • E.g. some sources suggest that Lincoln had long-term motivations for permanently abolishing slavery, saying, "The abolition of slavery by constitutional provision settles the fate, for all coming time, not only of the millions now in bondage, but of unborn millions to come--a measure of such importance that these two votes must be procured."
• As another comment suggests, the argument does not consider ways in which our time might be different (e.g. unusually many people are trying to have long-term impacts, people are less ignorant, tech advances may create rare opportunities for long-term impact).

Re Cleopatra:

The argument is not that Cleopatra's action is the beginning of a causal chain. In fact, the present and the future need not be linked causally at all for Parfit's argument to make sense.

Instead, what he employs is a "reductio ad absurdum" - he takes the non-longtermist position to an extreme where it has counterintuitive implications.

If discounting WAS true, then any of Cleopatra's actions (even something insignificant as eating dessert) would've mattered so much more than anything that happens today (including curing cancer). This seems counterintuitive to most of us. Therefore, something is wrong with this kind of discounting.

In the past, all events with big positive impacts on the future occurred because people wanted to solve a problem or improve their circumstances, not because of longtermism.

Here's a parallel argument.

Before effective altruism was conceived, all events that generated good consequences occurred because people wanted to solve a problem or improve their circumstances, not because of EA. Since EA was not necessary to achieve any of those good consequences, EA is irrelevant.

The problem with both arguments is that the point of an ideology like EA or longtermism is to increase the likelihood that people take actions to make big positive impacts in the future. The printing press, the wheel, and all good things of the past occurred without us having values of human rights, liberalism, etc. This is not an argument for why these beliefs don't matter.

Some comments on "the road to hell is paved with good intentions"

This podcast is kind of relevant: Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all - 80,000 Hours (80000hours.org)

So people in the Middle Ages believed that the best thing was to save more souls, but I don't think that exactly failed. That is, if a man's goal was to have more people believe in Christianity, and he went with sincerity in the Crusades or colonial missionary expeditions, he probably did help achieve that goal.

Likewise, for people in the 1700s, 1800s and early 1900s, when the dominant paradigm shifted to one of human progress, I think people could reliably find ways to improve long-term progress. New science and technology, liberal politics, etc all would have been straightforward and effective methods to get humanity further on the track of rising population, improved quality of life, and scientific advancement.

Point is, I think people have always tended to be significantly more right than wrong about how to change the world. It's not too too hard to understand how one person's actions might contribute to an overriding global goal. The problem is in the choice of such an overriding paradigm. The first paradigm was that the world was stagnant/repetitive/decaying and just a prelude to the afterlife. The second paradigm was that the world is progressing and things will only get steadily better via science and reason. Today we largely reject both these paradigms, and instead we have a view of precarity - that an incredibly good future is in sight but only if we proceed with caution, wisdom, good institutions and luck. And I think the deepest risk is not that we are unable to understand how to make our civilization more cautious and wise, but that this whole paradigm ends up being wrong.

I don't mean to particularly agree or disagree with your original post, I just think this is a helpful clarification of the point.

Interesting write-up, thanks!

Elsewhere in his article, Parfit discusses probability discounting, which Parfit demonstrates does not always correlate with time-based discounting.  I think probability discounting is closer to the intuition you have regarding the irrelevance of Cleopatra's spending on dessert vs whether cures for cancer exist now. 

Parfit's example involving Cleopatra is meant to show that, for example, spending on Cleopatra's dessert would be ranked by a policy-maker of her government  as having higher value than spending whose higher value (curing cancer) would not accrue until presumably thousand's of years later, if the policymaker used temporal discounting to make the comparison .

Your line of argument against longtermism, that today's actions have increasingly uncertain far-future outcomes, might coincide with the belief that probability discounting is a good thing even though time-based discounting is, as Parfit claims, nonsense. However, I see a dilemma in that, assuming that Cleopatra's government expected her empire to continue indefinitely, its policymakers could allocate money during Cleopatra's time toward identifying and curing human disease over the long-term. It would be a reasonable expectation on the policymakers' part that  the empire's chances of  discovering cures for cancer would go up, not down, over a few thousand years. 

Here is the report (at first I'd been unable to find it)

If they are indeed net positive it does seem useful to establish consensus that that is so!

At this section of my policy platform I have compiled sources with all the major arguments I could find regarding nuclear power. Specifically, under the heading "Fission power should be supported although it is expensive and not necessary"

https://happinesspolitics.org/platform.html#cleanenergy

I think with this compilation of pros/cons, and a background understanding that fossil fuel use is harmful, it is easy to see that nuclear is at least better than using fossil fuels.

I recall the Founder's Pledge report on climate change some years ago discussed nuclear proliferation from nuclear energy and it seemed like nuclear power plants could equally promote proliferation or work against it (the latter by using up the supply of nuclear fuel). Considering how many lives have been taken by fossil fuels, I feel it's clear that nuclear energy has been net good. That said I have a hard time believing that a longtermist in the 1960s would oppose nuclear power plants.

Not that I disagree with the general idea that if you imagine longtermists in the past, they could have come up with a lot of neutral or even harmful ideas.

If it does not serve any useful purpose, then why focus on longtermism?

I think you're right that we can make a good case for increased spending on nuclear safety, pandemic preparedness, and AI safety without appeal to longtermism. But here's one useful purpose of longtermism: only the longtermist arguments suggest that those causes are overwhelmingly important; and because of the longtermist arguments, we have many talented people are working zealously to solve those issues—people who would otherwise be working on other things.

Obviously this doesn't address your concern that longtermism is incorrect; it's merely a reason why, if longtermism is correct, it's a useful thing to talk about.

Out of curiosity: The phrase "Past performance is not indicative of future results" is often brought up when doing the kind of historic analysis you are presenting.

How much do you think this applies here? Would things look different if we had an Effective Altruism Movement centuries ago?

I just found this forum post which is talking about the same ballpark of things! Mostly agree with the forum post too.

Only read the summary. I agree.