If the probability of success goes small enough, then yes, you give up on the long-term future. But I don’t think we can realistically reach that point, even if the situation gets a lot more dire than it looks today. It matters what the actual probabilities look like (e.g., 1 in 20 and 1 in 1000 are both very different from 1 in googolplex).
None of this implies that you should disregard your own happiness, stop caring about your friends, etc. Even if human brains were strictly utilitarian (which they’re not), disregarding your happiness, being a jerk, etc. are obviously terrible strategies for optimizing the long-term future. Genuinely taking the enormous stakes into account in your decision-making doesn’t require that you adopt dumb or self-destructive policies that inevitably cause burn-out, poor coordination, etc.
To be clear:
If the probability of success goes small enough, then yes, you give up on the long-term future. But I don’t think we can realistically reach that point, even if the situation gets a lot more dire than it looks today. It matters what the actual probabilities look like (e.g., 1 in 20 and 1 in 1000 are both very different from 1 in googolplex).
None of this implies that you should disregard your own happiness, stop caring about your friends, etc. Even if human brains were strictly utilitarian (which they’re not), disregarding your happiness, being a jerk, etc. are obviously terrible strategies for optimizing the long-term future. Genuinely taking the enormous stakes into account in your decision-making doesn’t require that you adopt dumb or self-destructive policies that inevitably cause burn-out, poor coordination, etc.