What We Owe the Future
Why we should organize our plans to include the well-being people 10s or even 100s of generations into the future, and how we should go about doing that kind of planning.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
15mentions
14people
2022–2026years
27% recommend67% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > How about "don't go against conventional wisdom unless you have a good reason; the more conventional the wisdom, the better the reason needs to be"? Possibly combined with "be humble and give subject matter experts some credit,
I have a feeling that this is basically the generic talking point to use when your opponent is more radical than you. The opposite would be you accusing your opponent as luddites or whatever because they're too bought into "conventional wisdom". Neither are actually helpful epistemically because the line for "good reason" is entirely arbitrary, and is easily colored by your beliefs.
>an hour on Google Scholar doesn't mean you've learned everything".
>If the conventional wisdom is "don't order research chemicals from a lab in China then self-inject them", then maybe a plan to get a peptide lab to manufacture cheap Semaglutide is dangerous, even if you can't explain exactly why it's dangerous (in this case it's probably pretty obvious).
I think you're painting effective altruism with too broad a brush and giving them too little credit. I'm very skeptical that the typical effective altruist is ordering semaglutide from china or that the typical EA analysis on x-risk is based on "an hour on Google Scholar".
>If, on the other hand, the conventional wisdom is "eat 6 - 11 servings of grain and 3 - 5 servings of vegetables a day", but many nutritionists are recommending less grain and there's new research out saying that much higher vegetable intake is good, maybe a plan to eat more vegetables and less bread is good.
Hold on, all it takes to turn over "conventional wisdom" on nutrition is "many nutritionists" and "new research"? Does some well researched books like "The Precipice" or "What We Owe the Future" suffice here? I'm sure that among all the effective altruists out there, you can find among them "many" to support their claim?
- In the (excellent) What We Owe the Future, William MacAskill discusses some ways of considering and weighing values on different lives, one of which was counting neurons. I don't have the book in front of me, but from my notes at the time:
>There are 8 billion humans and 135 billion farmed animals, but in total humans have 700 million trillion neurons while farmed animals have in total only 20 million trillion. Still, there are maybe 600 trillion wild fish, which collectively have 12 billion trillion neurons. And that isn't even counting nematodes.
- I read MacAskill's What We Owe The Future - it's a great book, and a compelling argument. I recommend you read it.
What I suspect might be happening is that "do gooders" (as research has shown) are often attacked by others because those that do good are a "threat" to the status quo. Rather than living your life as you do, when you encounter a vegetarian, you are reminded that your meat consumption causes suffering in animals. When you encounter an EA (Effective Altruist) giving 10% of their income to charity, you are reminded about how you too could do the same but are choosing not to. So for many people, it is easier to find some shred of hypocrisy or fault in those doing the good and thus have the clean conscience to ignore the good aims.
- But humans thousands of years ago made decisions that make our lives today possible. Aren’t you glad that you had the chance to exist and enjoy your own life?
I highly recommend Ian McCaskill‘s recent book “ what we owe the future.” He makes a compelling rational argument that it makes no less sense to discount future generations than it does to discount physically distant people who are suffering today.
- > I think the notion that any group has rights is problematic at best. Individuals have rights, not groups. Individuals can act collectively as a group, but the idea that that somehow imbues the group with some sort of right seems strange or confused to say the least.
This matches the "individuality thesis" [1] (often debated among philosophers).
For those who haven't explored the territory, I recommend the journey. There is no rush to figure it out. I suggest trying out various viewpoints and taking your time with it: maybe even remaining a bit uncertain for your entire life!
- Uncertainty often takes an unfair beating. Uncertainty is preferable to confused or premature certainty. I would actually go further and say there is deep virtue in uncertainty -- there is an openness there. Absolute certainty closes doors; in a way it closes its eyes to new experience.
- There is value in being uncertain about one's values! For individuals, locking in one's ethics can be unwise. [2] For cultures, value lock-in can be stifling or even oppressive. For AI, value lock-in is sometimes called incorrigibility and can be problematic or worse. Humans have a tendency to grow and change, all the way down to our value systems.
Anyhow, I digress. Here are some relevant selections from Wikipedia's entry on Will Kymlicka:
> In Multicultural Citizenship (1995), Kymlicka argues that group-specific rights are consistent with liberalism, and are particularly appropriate, if not outright demanded, in certain situations.
> For Kymlicka, the standard liberal criticism, which states that group rights are problematic because they often treat individuals as mere carriers of group identities, rather than autonomous social agents, is overstated or oversimplified. The actual problem of minorities and how they should be viewed in liberal democracies is much more complex. There is a distinction between good group rights, bad group rights, and intolerable group rights.
[1]: https://philarchive.org/archive/HABTIT-2
[2]: I learned this from What We Owe The Future by William MacAskill. Did he borrow it from someone else? Maybe Derek Parfit? I'll need to research more.
- In this thread:
Bingo card (and their rebuttals):
– Effective altruists donate money and think it’s the most effective way to do good. [1][2]
– They think that exploiting people is fine if money is given to a good cause. [3][4][5]
– They think they are so much morally-superior/better than us. [3]
– Sam Bankman-Fried is a thief and he self-identified as an EA, so EA must be bad as a whole. [4][6]
– It’s dangerous because it’s an “end justifies the means” philosophy. [4][5]
– If it’s not perfect then it’s terrible and has no merit whatsoever. [7][8][9]
– They think they are so smart but they just stole the idea of donating part of the income from Christians. [10][11]
——————————
[1] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/faqs#objectionsto-effectiv...
[2] “80,000 Hours thinks that only a small proportion of people should earn to give long term”: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/80000-hours-thinks-that-only-...
[3] What We Owe The Future (EA book): “naive calculations that justify some harmful action because it has good consequences are, in practice, almost never correct.” and “it's wrong to do harm even when doing so will bring about the best outcome.”
[4] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1591218028381102081.html / https://xcancel.com/willmacaskill/status/1591218028381102081
[5] The Precipice (EA book): “Don't act without integrity. When something immensely important is at stake and others are dragging their feet, people feel licensed to do whatever it takes to succeed. We must never give in to such temptation. A single person acting without integrity could stain the whole cause and damage everything we hope to achieve.”
[6] “Bankman-Fried agreed his ethically driven approach was "mostly a front".”: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231009-ftxs-sam-bankm...
[7] “It’s perfectly okay to be an imperfect effective altruist”: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/its-perfectly-okay-to-b...
[8] “Mistakes we’ve made”: https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes
[9] “GiveWell's Impact”: https://www.givewell.org/about/impact
[10] There is a large Christian community within EA. “We are Christians excited about doing the most good possible.”: https://www.eaforchristians.org/
[11] Many EAs consider Christian charity to be one of the seeds of EA. “A potential criticism or weakness of effective altruism is that it appeals only to a narrow spectrum of society, and exhibits a ‘monoculture’ of ideas. I introduce Dorothea Brooke, a literary character who I argue was an advocate for the principles of effective altruism -- as early as 1871 -- in a Christian ethical tradition”: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TsbLgD4HHpT5vrFQC/...
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