I appreciate the discussion, but I can’t help but be distracted by the specifics of the example scenario. In this case, it just seems obvious to me that the correct answer is to bury the waste and then invest in developing better processing solutions. There’s no such thing as waste that can’t be safely processed, even in principle, with a century of lead time to prepare. When I read the first few sentences, I actually thought the counterargument was going to be about uncertainty in long term impact projections.
Yes, that’s the first thing that was talked about in my group’s discussion on longtermism. For the sake of the argument, we were asked to assume that the waste processing/burial choice amounted to a trade in lives all things considered… but the fact that any realistic scenario resembling this thought experiment would not be framed like that is the central part of my first counterargument.
I appreciate the discussion, but I can’t help but be distracted by the specifics of the example scenario. In this case, it just seems obvious to me that the correct answer is to bury the waste and then invest in developing better processing solutions. There’s no such thing as waste that can’t be safely processed, even in principle, with a century of lead time to prepare. When I read the first few sentences, I actually thought the counterargument was going to be about uncertainty in long term impact projections.
Yes, that’s the first thing that was talked about in my group’s discussion on longtermism. For the sake of the argument, we were asked to assume that the waste processing/burial choice amounted to a trade in lives all things considered… but the fact that any realistic scenario resembling this thought experiment would not be framed like that is the central part of my first counterargument.