Not saying anything new here: Longtermism is just more grift for the mill. Just another ism that conveniently dismisses the need to spend money on addressing issues of today so that we can instead pour money into MIRI.
If you wanna talk about long term, except for a small percentage of people, everyone’s conscious contributions to the future (directly or indirectly through donating etc.) will be outweighed completely by the sum total of their plastic usage. The microplastics alone could get into people’s eyes and cause them a quanta of inconvenience!!! Think of the eyes!!! (Also their brain, but who cares about that)
My brain does. Stupid brain.
“Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None, I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.”
CEO Nwabudike Morgan, “The Ethics of Greed”
This actually brings up a good point, which we are sleeping on a bit. As a person who is a bit more ‘we should sacrifice a little bit so the future can still have good things’ side. The whole ‘but why should we, in a scarcity environment, sacrifice this much for a post-scarcity one’ thing had not really occurred to me.
Ow god I did a Rationalism, I evaluated how my own bias was holding me back. Am I out of touch? No, it’s the Rationalists who are wrong.
Let’s push it further!
10^80 minds is not the only possible outcome of bullshit sci-fi. Why not consider the obvious and inevitable (my crap-cassandra-muse is pre-comitted) future of humanity melding into the Single Mind Collective ?
Why should we 8 billion souls make sacrifices to improve the life of a single one?
(Bad UI made me accidentally delete my other comment instead of editing it)
I have also encountered the comment deletion problem. Which would not be a problem if we were a hivemind. So that is quite a few negative utilitrons removed if we go all hivemind. Just saying.
Learn to overcome the crass demands of flesh and bone, for they warp the matrix through which we perceive the world. Extend your awareness outward, beyond the self of body, to embrace the self of group and the self of humanity. The goals of the group and the greater race are transcendent, and to embrace them is to achieve enlightenment. — Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Essays on Mind and Matter”
(I did get a message because you deleted your message btw, it even linked back to this post)
Unrelated edit: while copy pasting the quote I found out that at tvtropes they have some angry atheists. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/SidMeiersAlphaCentauri look at the ‘lords believers’ quote links (not the only example). They think ‘The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress.’ is her saying that she is anti progress. So many of the links are good examples of gamers not getting it.
Let’s push it further!
10^80 minds is not the only possible outcome of bullshit sci-fi. Why not consider the obvious and inevitable (my crap-cassandra-muse is pre-comitted) future of humanity melding into the Single Mind Collective ?
Why should we 8 billion souls make sacrifices to improve the life of a single one?
I guess the logical response is that this presupposes the inevitable existence of a post-scarcity environment, when such a state is arguably not a certainty, or even a likelihood. We’ve been hovering at a kind of societal tipping point since the Cold War where a few different decisions could have effectively hit the reset button on society - and there’s no guarantee that any survivors in the aftermath would have sufficient access to coal, iron ore, fossil fuels etc. to rebuild even our current level of society, let alone a utopian one.
So I think given our awareness of the relative fragility of human society, taking steps to secure it’s stability and growth is a rational choice to secure the possibility for the post-scarcity world to exist. Then it’s a question of certainty - if were 80% sure that our distant descendants will live in bliss, we could calibrate our personal sacrifices accordingly and justify more consumerist behaviour in the present.
Through this lens the excessive consumerism of previous generations can be forgiven, as what they lacked was awareness of the consequences of their actions - they didn’t act immorally, just ignorantly. But now that we “know better” there’s a moral responsibility to do better. As much as that sucks.
Sure trying to improve things is good. But that isn’t what I’m talking about here.
My issue is with throwing all the poor people into the capitalist meatgrinder so we can have our iHeaven which giving utilitarian consideration to all possible posthumans leads to.
A pretty optimistic picture of the future there
