A key (new-ish) proposition in EA discussions is "Strong Longtermism," that the vast majority of the value in the universe is in the far future, and that we need to focus on it. This far future is often understood to be so valuable that almost any amount of preference for the long term is justifiable.
In this brief post, I want to argue that this strong claim is unnecessary compared to a weaker argument, creates new problems that are easily avoided otherwise, and should be replaced with the weaker claim. (I am far from the first to propose this.)
The 'regular longtermism' claim, as I present it, is that we should assign approximately similar value to the long term future as we do to the short-term. This is a philosophically difficult position which nonetheless, I argue, is superior to either status quo, or strong longtermism.
Philosophical grounding
The typical presentation of longtermism is that if we do not discount future lives exponentially, almost any weight placed on the future, which almost certainly can be massively larger than the present, will overwhelm the value of the present. This is hard to justify intuitively - it implies that we should ignore the near-term costs, and (taken to the extreme) could justify almost any atrocity in the pursuit of a miniscule reduction of long-term risks1.
The typical alternative is presented by naïve economic discounting, which assumes that we should exponentially discount the far future at some finite rate. This leads to claims that a candy bar today is worth more than the entire future of humanity starting in, say, 10,000 years. This is also hard to justify intuitively.
A third perspective roughly justifies the current position; we should discount the future at the rate current humans think is appropriate, but also separately place significant value on having a positive long term future. This preserves both the value of the long-term future of humanity if positive, and the preference for the present. Lacking any strong justification for setting the balance, I will very tentatively claim they should be weighted approximately equally, but this is not critical - almost any non trivial weight on the far future would be a large shift from the status quo towards longer-term thinking. This may be non-rigorous, but has many attractive features.
The key question, it seems, is whether the new view is different, and/or whether the exact weights for the near and long term will matter in practice.
Does 'regular longtermism' say anything?
Do the different positions lead to different conclusions in the short term? If they do not, there is clearly no reason to prefer strong longtermism. If they do, it seems that almost all of these differences are intuitively worrying. Strong longtermism implies we should engage in much larger near term sacrifices, and justifies ignoring near-term problems like global poverty, unless they have large impacts on the far future2. Strong neartermism, AKA strict exponential discounting, implies that we should do approximately nothing about the long term future.
So, does regular longtermism suggest less focus on reducing existential risks, compared to the status quo? Clearly not. In fact, it suggests overwhelmingly more effort should be spent on avoiding existential risk than is currently available for the task. It may suggest less effort than strong longtermism, but only to the extent that we have very strong epistemic reasons for thinking that very large short term sacrifices are effective.
What now?
I am unsure that there is anything new in this post. At the same time, it seems that the debate has crystallized into two camps which I strongly disagree with - the "anti-longtermist" camp, typified by Phil Torres, who is horrified by the potentially abusive view of longtermism, and Vaden Masrani, who wrote a criticism of the idea, versus the "strong longtermism" camp, typified by Toby Ord and (Edit: see Toby's comment) Will MacAskill, (Edit: See Will's comment.) who seems to imply that Effective Altruism should focus entirely on longtermism. (Edit: I should now say that it turns out that this is a weak-man argument, but also note that several commenters explicitly say they embrace this viewpoint.)
Given the putative dispute, I would be very grateful if we could start to figure out as a community whether the strong form of longtermism is a tentative question about how to work out a coherent position that doesn't have potentially worrying implications, or if it is intended as a philosophical shibboleth. I will note that my typical mind fallacy view is that both sides actually endorse, or at least only slightly disagree with, my mid-point view, but I may be completely wrong.
- Note that Will has called this "very strong longtermism", but it seems unclear how a line is drawn between very strong and strong forms. This is true especially because the definition-based version he proposes, that human lives in the far future are equally valuable and should not be discounted, seems to lead directly to this very strong longtermist conclusion.
- (Edited to add:) In contrast, any split of value between near-term and long-term value completely changes the burden of proof for longtermist interventions. As noted here, given strong longtermism, we would have a clear case for any positive-expectation risk reduction measure, and the only possible response to refute it is a claim that the expectation in terms of reduced risk is negative. With a weaker form, we can perform cost-benefit analysis to decide whether the loss in the near-term is worthwhile.
The reason we have a deontological taboo against “let’s commit atrocities for a brighter tomorrow” is not that people have repeatedly done this, it worked exactly like they said it would, and millions of people received better lives in exchange for thousands of people dying unpleasant deaths exactly as promised.
The reason we have this deontological taboo is that the atrocities almost never work to produce the promised benefits. Period. That’s it. That’s why we normatively should have a taboo like that.
(And as always in a case like that, we have historical exceptions that people don’t like to talk about because they worked, eg, Knut Haukelid, or the American Revolution. And these examples are distinguished among other factors by a found mood (the opposite of a missing mood) which doesn’t happily jump on the controversial wagon for controversy points, nor gain power and benefit from the atrocity; but quietly and regretfully kills the innocent night watchman who helped you, to prevent the much much larger issue of Nazis getting nuclear weapons.)
This logic applies without any obvious changes to “let’s commit atrocities in pursuit of a brighter tomorrow a million years away” just like it applies to “let’s commit atrocities in pursuit of a brighter tomorrow in 2 years”. Literally any nice thing somebody says you could get would “justify atrocities”, in exactly the same way, if you forgot this rule. If you admit the existence of thousands of American schoolchildren getting suboptimally nutritious lunches, it could, oh no, justify abducting and torturing businessmen into using their ATM cards so you could get more money for the schoolchildren. Obviously then those children must not exist, or maybe they don’t have qualia so their suffering won’t be important, because if they existed and mattered that could justify atrocities, couldn’t it?
There is nothing special about longtermism compared to any other big desideratum in this regard. It is 100% unjustified special attention because people don’t like the desideratum itself. The same way that people ask “How can we spend money on AI safety when children are starving now?” but their mind doesn’t make the same leap about “How can we spend money on fighting global warming when children are starving now?” or say “Hey maybe we should critique total spending on lipstick advertising before we critique spending on rockets.”
As always, transhumanism done correctly is just humanism.
Agreed, and that's a very good response to a position that one of the sides I critiqued has presented. But despite this and other reasons to reject their positions, I don't think the reverse theoretical claim that we should focus resources exclusively on longtermism is a reasonable one to hold, even while accepting the deontological taboo and dismissing those overwrought supposed fears.
I'm not sure this is the case. E.g. Steven Pinker in Better Angels makes the case that utopian movements systematically tend to commit atrocities because this all-important end goal justifies anyting in the medium term. I haven't rigorously examined this argument and think it would be valuable for someone to do so, but much of longtermism in the EA community, especially of the strong variety, is based on something like utopia.
One reason why you might intuitively think there would be a relationship is that shorter-term impacts are typically somewhat more bounded; e.g. if thousands of American schoolchildren are getting suboptimal lunches, this obviously doesn't justify torturing hundreds of thousands of people. With the strong longtermist claims it's much less clear that there's any sort of upper bound, so to draw a firm line against atrocities you end up looking to somewhat more convoluted reasoning (e.g. some notion of deontological restraint that isn't completely absolute but yet can withstand astronomical consequences, or a sketchy and loose notion that atrocities have an instrumental downside).
There’s nothing convoluted about it! We just observe that historical experience shows that the supposed benefits never actually appear, leaving just the atrocity! That’s it! That’s the actual reason you know the real result would be net bad and therefore you need to find a reason to argue against it! If historically it worked great and exactly as promised every time, you would have different heuristics about it now!