Re:The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk”
by joe_the_user on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @06:52PM
(#28055242)
That's fair, actually. This is an argument in the article. I would summarize it as "focusing on long-term risks necessarily means un-focusing on short-term ones, and that's bad". Would you agree?
-- I'd agree with the addition "risks so long term that any calculation of their value is wholly implausible, risks such as the risk of humanity 'not colonizing the galaxy'"
-- And yeah, the article pretty explicitly puts the situation as, this is the long view taken to the level of absurdity.
The latter part however ("and that's bad") is not well supported at all. That's what the article argues by emotional appeals. For a counterexample, most of the harms of climate change are still in the future, so addressing it is focusing on longer-term risks. And wouldn't it have been easier if we had started addressing it 20 years ago?
To use the same example, extreme harm from climate change (e.g. thousands dead from heatwaves) is very likely, but ultimately still hypothetical -- it has not happened yet. The only difference with existential risks is the degree of hypotheticalness. And when the harm is high enough, why not take the somewhat supported hypotheticals seriously?