I disagree with the claim that the argument for shaping the far future is a Pascalian wager.
I thought some of our disagreement might stem from understanding what each other meant, and that seems to have been true here. Even if the probability of humanity surviving a long time is large, there remain entropy in our influence and butterfly effects, such that it seems extremely unlikely that what we do now will actually make a pivotal difference in the long term, and we could easily be getting the sign wrong. This makes the probabilities small enough to seem Pascalian for most people.
It’s very common for people to say, “Predictions are hard, especially about the future, so let’s focus on the short term where we can be more confident we’re at least making a small positive impact.”
It’s very common for people to say, “Predictions are hard, especially about the future, so let’s focus on the short term where we can be more confident we’re at least making a small positive impact.”
If by short-term you mean “what happens in the next 100 years or so,” I think there is something to this idea, even for people who care primarily about very long-term considerations. I suspect it is true that the expected value of very long-run outcomes is primarily dominated by totally unforeseeable weird stuff that could happen in the distant future. But I believe that the best way deal with this challenge is to empower humanity to deal with the relatively foreseeable and unforeseeable challenges and opportunities that it will face over the next few generations. This doesn’t mean “let’s just look only at short-run well-being boosts,” but something more like “let’s broadly improve cooperation, motives, access to certain types of information, narrow and broad technological capabilities, and intelligence and rationality to deal with the problems we can’t foresee, and let’s rely on the best evidence we can to prepare for the problems we can foresee.” I say a few things about this issue here. I hope to say more about it in the future.
An analogy would be that if you were a 5-year-old kid and you primarily cared about how successful you were later in life, you should focus on self-improvement activities (like developing good habits, gaining knowledge, and learning how to interact with other people) and health and safety issues (like getting adequate nutrition, not getting hit by cars, not poisoning yourself, not falling off of tall objects, and not eating lead-based paint). You should not try to anticipate fine-grained challenges in the labor market when you graduate from college or disputes you might have with your spouse. I realize that this analogy may not be compelling, but perhaps it illuminates my perspective.
I thought some of our disagreement might stem from understanding what each other meant, and that seems to have been true here. Even if the probability of humanity surviving a long time is large, there remain entropy in our influence and butterfly effects, such that it seems extremely unlikely that what we do now will actually make a pivotal difference in the long term, and we could easily be getting the sign wrong. This makes the probabilities small enough to seem Pascalian for most people.
It’s very common for people to say, “Predictions are hard, especially about the future, so let’s focus on the short term where we can be more confident we’re at least making a small positive impact.”
If by short-term you mean “what happens in the next 100 years or so,” I think there is something to this idea, even for people who care primarily about very long-term considerations. I suspect it is true that the expected value of very long-run outcomes is primarily dominated by totally unforeseeable weird stuff that could happen in the distant future. But I believe that the best way deal with this challenge is to empower humanity to deal with the relatively foreseeable and unforeseeable challenges and opportunities that it will face over the next few generations. This doesn’t mean “let’s just look only at short-run well-being boosts,” but something more like “let’s broadly improve cooperation, motives, access to certain types of information, narrow and broad technological capabilities, and intelligence and rationality to deal with the problems we can’t foresee, and let’s rely on the best evidence we can to prepare for the problems we can foresee.” I say a few things about this issue here. I hope to say more about it in the future.
An analogy would be that if you were a 5-year-old kid and you primarily cared about how successful you were later in life, you should focus on self-improvement activities (like developing good habits, gaining knowledge, and learning how to interact with other people) and health and safety issues (like getting adequate nutrition, not getting hit by cars, not poisoning yourself, not falling off of tall objects, and not eating lead-based paint). You should not try to anticipate fine-grained challenges in the labor market when you graduate from college or disputes you might have with your spouse. I realize that this analogy may not be compelling, but perhaps it illuminates my perspective.