> Well, just crunch the numbers: 0.00000000001 percent of 1023 people is 10 billion people, which is ten times greater than 1 billion people. This means that if you want to do the most good, you should focus on these far-future people rather than on helping those in extreme poverty today. As the FHI longtermists Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill—the latter of whom is said to have cofounded the Effective Altruism movement with Toby Ord—write, “for the purposes of evaluating actions, we can in the first instance often simply ignore all the effects contained in the first 100 (or even 1,000) years, focussing primarily on the further-future effects. Short-run effects act as little more than tie-breakers.”

This seems ludicrous as a decision-making guideline. Why should anyone's confidence in what anything will be like in a thousand years be large? Multiply that "I'm helping billions of future people" by a "I have a one in a billion shot of actually predicting out past a thousand years correctly" instead of something like "1%" and suddenly your "short term effect tie-breaker" should return to being the dominant term in your equation.

Is this an inaccurate representation or is it really that much of a faith-based religious thing?

EDIT: it also takes you to potentially all sorts of weird places around murder/birth control/abortion. If someone is murdered before they have children, the murderer cut off their life plus untold future generations. If they use birth control or abortion to avoid having kids, they've still cut off untold future generations. The "one" aspect of that becomes insignificant if you reason about a long enough timeline purely in terms of "future potential"... I don't get it at all. Not even the extremely religious place THAT extreme a value on hypothetical potential life.