The main fallacy here, one that destroys the entire premise, is that we cannot realistically assume the position of "beings at the end of time".
Everyone who has ever worked with data and modeling knows that extrapolations are inaccurate and unreliable; the further outside the domain of the actual data, the more unreliable.
Longtermism is basing your views (or worse, decisions) on decidedly unreliable assumptions of "what it is I think will be good in the hypothetical long term".
Theoretically this is flawed. Practically this is worse than flawed: very often it means pushing one's own dubious (or hideous) agenda by wrapping it in fancy paper. Had we heeded "longtermists" who predicted our ecological doom in, when? 1990? 2000? 2020? we would have been much worse off than we are now.
I agree that always thinking immediate gratification is flawed, too. We need a balance. But flawed as it is, immediate gratification is at least grounded in reality. Assuming you're at the end of time is not.
In response to the other comments citing lack of consensus / tractability / difficulty of predicting how trends will continue - I feel like these are easily incorporated into a Strong Longtermist view by understanding the same is true for many presentist concerns and perspectives.
Isolating to a hypothetical where we are deciding who should be on a colony ship - all else equal it’s much better to have people who do not wish to propagate factory farming on their new colony world, thereby predictably influencing the future. Tractability and lack of consensus concerns can be folded into probabilities before deciding what action to take, much the same way they are in any other rationalist framework.
The thing I keep tripping on with strong Longtermism isn't the aggregation math and isn't the tractability question. It's underneath both.
Every longtermist actor holds a different picture of what the far future should look like, and what each considers important, what each hopes for, what each intervenes toward is not unified across the community. When multiple long-term interventions are running concurrently, which is already the situation we're in, they don't add up cleanly. They interfere. The further out you look, the more the aggregate looks like noise rather than signal.
So the essay's imperative, focus on making the far future go better, describes what a single actor plans. It doesn't describe what actually reaches the year 1 trillion AD. What reaches 1 trillion AD is whatever emerges from thousands of divergent plans grinding against each other, which is not the same object as any of the plans.
I've been circling this for months in my own writing, around how institutional systems process heterogeneous inputs into outcomes nobody chose. It shows up in psychiatric diagnosis, in ESG rating, in attention allocation. The Longtermist thesis has the same structural problem those systems have, but in better clothes.
The main fallacy here, one that destroys the entire premise, is that we cannot realistically assume the position of "beings at the end of time".
Everyone who has ever worked with data and modeling knows that extrapolations are inaccurate and unreliable; the further outside the domain of the actual data, the more unreliable.
Longtermism is basing your views (or worse, decisions) on decidedly unreliable assumptions of "what it is I think will be good in the hypothetical long term".
Theoretically this is flawed. Practically this is worse than flawed: very often it means pushing one's own dubious (or hideous) agenda by wrapping it in fancy paper. Had we heeded "longtermists" who predicted our ecological doom in, when? 1990? 2000? 2020? we would have been much worse off than we are now.
I agree that always thinking immediate gratification is flawed, too. We need a balance. But flawed as it is, immediate gratification is at least grounded in reality. Assuming you're at the end of time is not.
In response to the other comments citing lack of consensus / tractability / difficulty of predicting how trends will continue - I feel like these are easily incorporated into a Strong Longtermist view by understanding the same is true for many presentist concerns and perspectives.
Isolating to a hypothetical where we are deciding who should be on a colony ship - all else equal it’s much better to have people who do not wish to propagate factory farming on their new colony world, thereby predictably influencing the future. Tractability and lack of consensus concerns can be folded into probabilities before deciding what action to take, much the same way they are in any other rationalist framework.
The thing I keep tripping on with strong Longtermism isn't the aggregation math and isn't the tractability question. It's underneath both.
Every longtermist actor holds a different picture of what the far future should look like, and what each considers important, what each hopes for, what each intervenes toward is not unified across the community. When multiple long-term interventions are running concurrently, which is already the situation we're in, they don't add up cleanly. They interfere. The further out you look, the more the aggregate looks like noise rather than signal.
So the essay's imperative, focus on making the far future go better, describes what a single actor plans. It doesn't describe what actually reaches the year 1 trillion AD. What reaches 1 trillion AD is whatever emerges from thousands of divergent plans grinding against each other, which is not the same object as any of the plans.
I've been circling this for months in my own writing, around how institutional systems process heterogeneous inputs into outcomes nobody chose. It shows up in psychiatric diagnosis, in ESG rating, in attention allocation. The Longtermist thesis has the same structural problem those systems have, but in better clothes.