He also gave a talk at the EA Summit 2014

b) personally feeling upset/jilted that he was rejected from a number of EA jobs.

That feels very uncharitable.


I understand you probably have insider knowledge, but in the linked article he mentions strong disagreements with ideas like:

Saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. [Consequently,] it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal.

Which it's something I see many people can have problems with. 

There are plenty of people that don't like (parts of) longtermism for reasons similar to those in the article, and I don't think most of them are bitter because they have been rejected from EA jobs or are SJW.

Edit: since this is getting a lot of downvotes, I just want to clarify that I do think that quote is a strawman of some longermist ideas. But I do think we should be charitable of critics' motivations and at least mention the ones they would agree with.

Edit2: Reading through https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/search?terms=torres , it seems there is indeed some extra information and a lot of prior history about Torres' motivations.
Especially in light of that my tone should have been way less strong. I should have written something like this: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xtKRPkoMSLTiPNXhM/response-to-phil-torres-the-case-against-longtermism?commentId=LQhs9jJ3qx7x6Gfiv
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xtKRPkoMSLTiPNXhM/response-to-phil-torres-the-case-against-longtermism?commentId=YSRyHbA2vmwMu9ZKo 

Summary of the talk:

• "Looking forward to having a conversation today with people about...how we can make the world a better place in the years and decades and centuries ahead. ... I thought it would be valuable where I ... go through some thoughts I have for ... why I think it's so important to be pushing the frontiers of technology in certain ways, both in a for-profit and non-profit context"
• "My claim is there are only four possible charts you can come up with" for how technological development will proceed over time [I'm not sure what he means exactly; I certainly think the real-life outcome may well look more messy than the ones he presented, but at least I agree that the cyclic one is incorrect. Says he likes exponential growth.]
• He suggests globalization has been overemphasized over technological development. "The question I always like to pose is, how can we go about developing the developed world."
• "maybe we can no longer have globalization continue without technological progress at this point"
• "[by 2030 we may be] losing a consensus even in a place like China for globalization, and we're close to a breakpoint in places like Brazil, Turkey [...] probably a very different paradigm is going to be needed in the decade ahead"
• "with the founders fund and with some of the nonprofit things that we've done" he's been trying to reverse recent trends via increasing technological progress.
• "we can think about shaping a future in which there's more technological progress"
• he presents a dichotomy between "technology" meaning "going from 0 to 1", i.e. making something new, and "globalization" meaning "1 to N", i.e. spreading existing technology around the world. Says almost all nonprofits today (i.e. 2013) are focused on globalization in this sense, not technology.
• "we have an educational system where we believe that all truth is collective and that the true answers are the answers that everybody knows to be true, whereas if you're going from 0 to 1, you kind of come up with a truth that nobody else knows at that point yet, and [there's] always this question about how do you explain this and [...] pull people in when you're trying to do something that's very, very new... I think there are... a number of features in our society that have made it unusually hostile to this idea of going from 0 to 1"
• What should we do to go back to an optimistic, definite future? We should ask what things are valuable, that we can actually do, that others are not doing. He uses this as an interview question and finds that most people find it very hard to answer. Says nonprofits should be looking for answers to this question.
• "good education...probably looks like something where everybody gets educated in a different way that's unique to them as a person"
• aging/dying is a topic on which "there's more psychological denial than any other topic"; there are many bad arguments against life extension; "every myth on this planet teaches us that the meaning of life is death... [this area] strikes me as grossly underfunded"
• AI "seems plausible in the next few decades" ... "probably the biggest 0 to 1 thing would be to get something like generalized artificial intelligence. It would change the world in ways that are more radical than we could imagine." [This is kind of an odd comment: he doesn't say that this immense change would be good thing or a dangerous thing, just that it would be radical.]

Thanks, fixed!

Depends if you like Peter Thiel. I don't know much about him, but his support for Trump was a big turnoff for me. I'm not sure why he wrote the techno-optimistic book "Zero to One" and then decided to plonk down his cash on a pathological liar bullshitter whose greatest concern seemed to be keeping Mexicans and Muslims out of the U.S. ... but he did get a tax cut out of it.

Anyway, Phil Torres is cheating here by saying "longtermists are directly associated with a Trump supporter in 2013!" when Trump did not run for president until 2015.