I've noticed that the EA community has been aggressively promoting longtermism and longtermist causes:
- The huge book tour around What We Owe the Future, which promotes longtermism itself
- There was a recent post claiming that 80k's messaging is discouraging to non-longtermists, although the author deleted (Benjamin Hilton's response is preserved here). The post observed that 80k lists x-risk related causes as "recommended" causes while neartermist causes like global poverty and factory farming are only "sometimes recommended". Further, in 2021, 80k put together a podcast feed called Effective Altruism: An Introduction, which many commenters complained was too skewed towards longtermist causes.
I used to think that longtermism is compatible with a wide range of worldviews, as these pages (1, 2) claim, so I was puzzled as to why so many people who engage with longtermism could be uncomfortable with it. Sure, it's a counterintuitive worldview, but it also flows from such basic principles. But I'm starting to question this - longtermism is very sensitive to the rate of pure time preference, and recently, some philosophers have started to argue that nonzero pure time preference can be justified (section "3. Beyond Neutrality" here).
By contrast, x-risk as a cause area has support from a broader range of moral worldviews:
- Chapter 2 of The Precipice discusses five different moral justifications for caring about x-risks (video here).
- Carl Shulman makes a "common-sense case" for valuing x-risk reduction that doesn't depend on there being any value in the long-term future at all.
Maybe it's better to take a two-pronged approach:
- Promote x-risk reduction as a cause area that most people can agree on; and
- Promote longtermism as a novel idea in moral philosophy that some people might want to adopt, but be open about its limitations and acknowledge that our audiences might be uncomfortable with it and have valid reasons not to accept it.
I think that makes you a longtermist though... having read What We Owe the Future anyway, unless I missed something:
I think a longtermist would say that the effects on future moral people should dominate our moral calculus due to their vast number, not necessarily that they can right now. But we should keep an eye out for how to impact the longrun future positively and take such a chance if we ever see it. Some people think they see the chance now, so they are taking it.* Maybe you will never see something plausible-to-you within your lifetime. But that doesn't mean a chance will never occur.
For example if we could run amazing simulations to test longrun outcomes, I think a longtermist, if they believed in the tech, would want to give the best-predicted longterm action a go (like, the best sum of experiences had over time, summed at the end), using neutral moral weights for beings living today vs 3 years from now vs 1000 years from now. Of course there will be wider ranges and larger confidence intervals but you'd factor those too, as to what option you'd want to do. By contrast a neartermist would add moral weight to the consequences and experiences for beings existing in the nearterm on top of the differing ranges and confidence intervals which are just sensible to use for both neartermists and longtermists.
*I'll note that some extinction risks seem low enough percentage chance of happening to me that they may not be worth working on unless you do add neutrally-weighted future generations into the calculus. But it depends on the moral discount rate you'd use, like if your expected rate of population growth is large if everything goes well, and your moral discount rate is gradual enough, you might still end up preferring a "longtermist" intervention, even though you might not really be a true "longtermist" philosophically because you are still claiming that future generations are morally worth less (regardless of confidence), but focusing on the longterm just passed your bar anyway because of the scale.