#long-termism

[xenofact]

It's Imaginary Children All The Way Down

Imaginary Children play a huge role in America's "extractive politics." By extractive politics I mean those that use people and their resources as fuel, usually returning nothing, and often causing them great damage. One way to get people to go against their own interests is to invoke imaginary children.

We've seen this with evangelizing charities promising to help children in other countries - of course middlemen took their cut, evangelized, and ignored the real causes of suffering in the world. But everyone got to pat themselves on the back while surprisingly little got done. You might see pictures of real children in need, but there was always an abstraction in the pitches and grifting that made them less than real.

Then there's abortion in America, which historically was just a way to get votes without resorting to old racism routines. People are wound up by politicians and preachers to absolutely get distraught over imaginary children while ignoring the plight of very real human beings. You never see someone say "I worry about the children so I am against abortion and for universal health care" or something. So people vote anti-choice and then suddenly find they can't get IFV, medical treatments, and so on and everything is worse. No real children or people are helped, but those maybe-babies are somehow safe.

(Of course, you'll notice racist crap keeps coming into the anti-choice side when they argue things like we need more babies so we're not replaced with some kind of non-white people. Anti-Abortion politics always had racial fear in it.)

Further along the grift-on-imaginary is the Satanic Panic crap over the centuries that morphed into the entire QAnon/Save the Children insanity of the 2010s-2020s. Evil forces were doing awful things to children in rituals, draining their blood to make drugs, and other things fevered grifters and sanity-challenged posters could come up with. Just like other Satanic Panics there was no evidence, because it was all just a mix of grift and attempts to call political opponents child-victimizing pervert Satanists. It was all about imaginary children, and it led to real-world consequences from conspiracy theorists.

Oh, and of course, those propagating these conspiracy of child-consuming cabals somehow ignored real children, real suffering, and questionable sexual behavior among their heroes. Because of course they did.

By the time you get to imaginary evil cults victimizing imaginary children it imaginary scenarios it feels like you've hit peak made-up-child-for-grift. Where can you go when you resurrect anti-Semetic tropes, witch-hunts, bonkers consiracy theories, and pathological politics and voltron them together? It feels like there's no where else to go in the field of finding ways not to give a shit about real kids.

Wrong, you can go into the future and take the Imaginary Kids to the final fronteir.

We see this in weird futurists, startup grifters, and long-termist pseudo-philosophers. They have to think about the kids of the future! Those Future Kids are just as important as kids these days if not more so! Also this justifies them getting rich doing cryptocurrency startups for nutritional supplements and not paying their taxes. Someday all that money they have will be used to make a better future, and not just wasted in a midlife crisis after their fifth divorce and an FTC investigation.

The Imaginary Kids have gone cosmic, and assholes can justify being part of an exploitative economy and abusing people because they might help Future Kids. It's not a grift or daddy issues, really!

Conspiracy bullshit, religious fanaticism, and futurist greed-excusing are all the same. They rely on Imaginary Kids to get you to buy their crap and excuse their abuse.

Its up to us to focus on real people, not empower these assholes, and shove their face into the suffering they excuse and cause.

Xenofact

[w-ht-w]

Will MacAskill, What We Owe the Future, Chapter 1.

MacAskill on his desire for legacy via his writings on moral philosophy.

It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever. (1)

Other examples of long-termist texts: Thucydides’ Pelopponesian War; Founding Fathers’ documents.

“[The Constitutions’] founding was of enormous longterm importance, and many of the Founding Fathers were well aware of this. John Adams, the second president of the United States, commented, “The institutions now made in America will not wholly wear out for thousands of years. It is of the last importance, then, that they should begin right. If they set out wrong, they will never be able to return, unless it be by accident, to the right path. (1)

it’s not just that rates of economic growth are historically unusual; the same is true for rates of energy use, carbon dioxide emissions, land use change, scientific advancement, and arguably moral change, too. (1)

1. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/G7XBTGNTrPWoKFmep/p/rdigzNQqDgiou5AmZ

[aquitainequeen]

Oh rant journal, we're really in it now.

[industrialangel]

[aheartofdawn]

What is really scary is Web 3 tech bros and their vision for the future.

"We are going to build a city powered by the blockchain and governed by AI. Yes, some of you may die, but that's a small price to pay for the benefit to the countless trillions yet to be born in the future."

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Is Your Leadership Aligned or an Illusion? and How to Bridge the Strategy Gap?

Why Most CEOs Fail to Implement Real Strategic Principles and What You Can Do About It? As a long term researcher of technical leadership and excellent, one of my hobbies is to explore fresh voices and unique perspectives from thought leaders from different cultures. While browsing my reading feed today, I came across and article with a beautifully narrated voice.  The title of article…

[battleangel]

FUCK AN ELECTION!

Fuck an election.

Fuck “anticipatory despair”.

Fuck nihilism.

Fuck “being depressed about the election”.

Its about a struggle. Long termism. 500 years. The blood of our ancestors.

Liberation. Revolution. Palestine. Genocide. Ecocide. War crimes. White supremacy. Police brutality. Mass incarceration.

No reparations. Hearts on fire. Lynchings. Mass rapes. Terror campaigns. Forced famines & starvation.

War machines. Two shots in the dark. Duopoly. Monopoly.

Struggle. Resist. The blood & tears of our ancestors being avenged.

Whats left my conscience said?

Revolution!

Redemption…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Silicon Valley ideology says safeguarding intelligence in the future is more important than its systems systematically crushing and killing black and brown people right now. Long-termism grabs attention back from people being harmed, who were beginning to make too much noise.

-Maria Farrell

[bravecrab]

I was just listening to a podcast about the Peter Thiel backed Enhanced Games, a proposed alternative Olympics in which doping would not only be allowed but be the whole point. It's not an original idea, as long as doping has been in the conversation about the Olympics, there's always been people flippantly saying that they should just do something like the Enhanced Games, see how far we can push it. What's the harm?

There are plenty harms related in using cocktails of drugs to push the human body past it's natural limits, and there are plenty people who have made these comments in regards to the Enhanced Games. However a harm that I haven't seen mentioned yet, is the normalisation of pharmaceutical drug use and associating it with "peak physical performance". The Enhanced Games would be more than just an exhibition of sport, it would be a marketing platform for the pharmaceutical industry. Each athlete would have their own team to build them into the perfect athlete, more like Formula One, although who knows if the athletes will have to wear the brand logos on all their gear, so the audience know who sells the best steroids.

Let's not beat around the bush, an event that focuses on finely tuning the human body into a "perfect" form, is eugenics. The proponents of the Enhanced Games will deny it, but they want it to be successful and influential. They want it to be more successful than the Olympics. And that will require a normalisation of Eugenics.

A philosophy of domination is behind both the Enhanced Games and the Olympics. It's always been about peak fitness, as well as geopolitical bragging rights. A mindset of domination has always been used to justify eugenics, domination theology stating that God created the Earth for human consumption, and that of all creatures, Man is closest to God. That's been weaponized as white supremacy and as patriarchy, amongst many other oppressive norms, making claims through pseudo-science, that white, cis, straight men are the pinnacle of humanity. Both events are an exhibition of dominance, and while the Enhanced Games is definitely worse, the Olympics still promotes an idea that the winners are just Great Athletes, and their winning has nothing to do with factors like national wealth and resources.

Another concern I have over an event that normalises enhancing bodies beyond human limits, is that it will attempt to normalise it in work places. Despite advances in automation, a lot of physical work is still done by humans, and will remain that way as long as it is cheaper. If one of the biggest sporting events endorses performance enhancers, it's not a stretch for them to become popularly used in physical workplaces. I've done many years of warehousing work, and guys in those jobs are very much into the idea of being the biggest and strongest. Employers will definitely be happy to exploit this.

I think an event like Enhanced Games is easy to overlook. The concept has been the curiosity of a lot of people as soon as they're aware of doping. However it's the involvement of ghouls like Peter Thiel, people with a TESCREAL philosophy (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effect Altruism, Long-termism), who want to control the future of all humankind, that make this worrying. These are billionaires who want to sell you your greatest sci fi fantasies, while maintaining a firm grasp on the controls. A future in which Peak Human Performance requires you to buy a steady supply of performance enhancing drugs, is one in which the Pharmaceutical industry is perpetually wealthy.

I'd also like to include that there is also the potential of a backlash to an event like Enhanced Games, it which all forms of alterations and modifications to the human body are labelled as evil and impure, which will likely be used to endorse transphobia.

[mitigatedchaos]

Election 2024

EigenRobot's opinion for you all this election eve.

I expect that whoever wins this election, I'm going to have to shift my writing towards the other side.

Unless Kamala suddenly becomes assertive and independent-minded, very much unlike what we've seen so far, and starts disciplining the left coalition, the capability of institutions is likely to continue to decline under a Harris administration, with something like an amnesty grant making direct future challenges less feasible. Today's left are off-the-charts conformist - I've never seen anything like it - and with this, there is a tremendous disregard for inconvenient reality in the face of social opinion. (It's anti-agentic, which is bad for the meta-rational thinking needed to update formal systems.)

Their selection criteria for personnel disregard merit in favor of credentials, and use credentials as political rewards. With each round the quality of personnel will get worse. This is not sustainable, so it will not be sustained - alternative institutions will have to grow in the shadow of declining state capacity.

If Trump wins, and they start cutting back on agencies, there is likely to be more economic growth, but Republicans don't have a good stack for actually replacing all of these agency personnel with highly agentic, highly intelligent, mission-driven individuals. In a sense, this limits the potential damage, as they'll have to continue hiring a lot of blues due to manpower shortages, just as they already do.

However, the reduction in agency power may lead to increased corporate power, leading to increased influence suppressing the re-emergence of agency power on a correct trajectory and lead to a cyberpunk dystopia. Today's US left aren't set up to even discuss how to prevent a cyberpunk dystopia, because they're all-in on censorship, to the point that they can't even consider the implications of the science fiction stuff happening all around them.

There are two big changes to the dimensions of human life coming down the pipes during the next 20 years.

The first is the obvious one, artificial intelligence. AI increases the dimensionality, the richness of the response, of machines in production systems. This makes capital, as controlled by AI, more like labor.

It is the opinion of Samo Burja that automation will not arrive fast enough to outpace tightness of labor supply caused by collapsing birthrates, which are falling all over the world.

The second big change is genetic engineering.

While people weren't paying attention, the FDA have approved multiple monogenic gene therapies. The costs are staggering now, running a range from around $500,000 to $3 million dollars, but if it's anything like gene sequencing costs, which fell from $100M to $1,000 per genome over about 25 years, it will fall rapidly towards the price of surgery.

If the price does fall, this means that a gene is no longer a life sentence. Something that's genetic will be more likely to be something that can be changed. Most major ideologies right now are based on the assumption that genes can't be changed. Gene therapy has not yet reached the periphery of people's social networks, so, mentally, people still treat it as "sci-fi."

So that's my assessment. The blue candidate is low-variance short-termism. The red candidate is high-variance medium-termism. You have to decide how comfortable you are with risk. You have to estimate what you think the current rate of burn is.

If you can't bring yourself to accept either of them, you can still vote and leave the "President" portion of the ballot blank.

The good news is, both vice presidential candidates are smarter and more civilized than both presidential candidates. For what it's worth, my read is that Vance is smarter and more focused on long-term issues than Walz.

[pieratt]

What we need most are temporal structures that stabilize life. When everything is short-term, life loses all stability. Stability comes over long stretches of time: faithfulness, bonds, integrity, commitment, promises, trust. These are the social practices that hold a community together. They all have a ritual character. They all require a lot of time. Today’s terror of short-termism — which, with fatal consequences, we mistake for freedom — destroys the practices that require time. To combat this terror, we need a very different temporal politics. In “The Little Prince,” the fox wants to be visited by the little prince always at the same hour, so that his visit becomes a ritual. The little prince asks the fox what a ritual is, and the fox replies: “Those also are actions too often neglected. … They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours.”  Rituals can be defined as temporal technologies for housing oneself. They turn being in the world into being at home. Rituals are in time as things are in space. They stabilize life by structuring time. They give us festive spaces, so to speak, spaces we can enter in celebration.  As temporal structures, rituals arrest time. Temporal spaces we can enter in celebration do not pass away. Without such temporal structures, time becomes a torrent that tears us apart from each other and away from ourselves.

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han: Information Without Narrative Disrupts Democracy

[mariacallous]

The United States is doubling down on its support for Ukraine with a new long-term security deal, to be unveiled at this week’s G-7 summit in Italy. The 10-year deal commits Washington to supporting the Ukrainian military long-term, according to U.S. officials, and comes ahead of a contentious U.S. presidential election that has unnerved European allies over the prospect of former President Donald Trump’s reelection.

As part of the deal, the United States will continue to help train Ukraine’s forces and provide them with weapons. Importantly, unlike NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense clause, the U.S.-Ukraine security pact does not require Washington to send U.S. forces to defend Ukraine in the event of a future attack; however, it does commit Washington to hold high-level consultations with Kyiv within 24 hours of any future attacks.

The agreement would also not be a formal binding treaty, which leaves the door open for Trump to potentially pull out of the deal if he returns to the White House.

The pact is one of at least 31 bilateral security agreements that various countries have signed or are slated to sign with Ukraine in the coming months. Western officials tout these agreements as a sign of their countries’ enduring commitment to help Ukraine in its war against Russia, but Ukraine’s strongest supporters say those bilateral arrangements can’t replace Kyiv’s ultimate goal of joining NATO.

The new arrangement is also part of a raft of measures that are aimed at “Trump-proofing” the NATO and Western commitment to Ukraine—including the alliance establishing a common defense fund for Ukraine worth billions of dollars—though it’s unclear how effective those arrangements would be if Trump regains office.

“No one really wants to be fighting Russia 10 years from now, but a sense of short-termism or an ephemeral commitment from the United States should be banished through the format of this agreement,” said Kristine Berzina, an expert on the U.S. security posture and U.S.-European Union strategic ties at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

It’s unclear what exactly Trump’s approach to Ukraine would be if he won. Trump hasn’t specified what his Ukraine strategy would look like, leaving room for doubts over U.S. commitments to what many NATO allies see as an existential war for European security. Trump has pushed Europe to take on more of the burden of defending Ukraine against Russia and said he would encourage the Russians to do “whatever the hell they want” if European NATO allies don’t meet their 2 percent defense spending targets. “Even a treaty doesn’t necessarily seem good enough as a guarantee in a Trump administration,” Berzina said.

However, Trump notably dropped his opposition to Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s effort to push through a major national security funding package that included billions of dollars of military aid to Ukraine—thereby allowing the package, which had been stalled for months due at least in part to his previous objections, to finally pass.

“While the loudest supporters of Trump in Congress and in the media are talking about ending American support for Ukraine, Trump has been notably silent on that,” said John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine now at the Atlantic Council. “He essentially gave a yellow light, if not a green light, for Johnson to push the aid package through.”

The new security deal is also meant to send a few other messages. “It’s primarily a signaling effort to show Russia and China in particular that the G-7 remains united in its bid to stay in this for as long as it takes,” said Emily Benson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the director of its Project on Trade and Technology. It’s also partly an attempt by the Biden administration at “reaffirming leadership” in the wake of limited but impactful far-right party gains in last week’s European Parliament elections that could chip away at European support for Ukraine, she added. “So I think an additional effort to provide security guarantees is good and anticipated.”

Leaders at the G-7 summit are also expected to condemn the Kremlin’s growing ties with North Korea and warn Chinese banks that they will face more Western sanctions if they help Russia evade sanctions, as Foreign Policy reported.

Perhaps most notably, the G-7 will also announce a new initiative to grant $50 billion in loans to Ukraine, funded by the interest on seized Russian assets in Western banks. That loan agreement is likely to be more impactful and longer lasting, although several logistical and legal questions over its implementation still remain.

And though the new U.S.-Ukraine security agreement and those Kyiv has signed with other European countries fall well short of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s ultimate goal of joining NATO, they do seem like a step in that direction. “This agreement is part of what the administration has been calling Ukraine’s bridge to NATO,” Berzina said. “There are concrete steps that when put together will make Ukraine ready to join NATO.”

[w-ht-w]

Karnofsky on unsustainable growth

Why can't this (growth) go on?

Let's say the world economy is currently getting 2% bigger each year.5 This implies that the economy would be doubling in size about every 35 years.6 If this holds up, then 8200 years from now, the economy would be about 3*1070times its current size. There are likely fewer than 1070 atoms in our galaxy,7 which we would not be able to travel beyond within the 8200-year time frame.8 So if the economy were 3*1070 times as big as today's, and could only make use of 1070 (or fewer) atoms, we'd need to be sustaining multiple economies as big as today's entire world economy per atom. (1) 8200 years might sound like a while, but it's far less time than humans have been around. In fact, it's less time than human (agriculture-based) civilization has been around.

Is it imaginable that we could develop the technology to support multiple equivalents of today's entire civilization, per atom available? Sure - but this would require a radical degree of transformation of our lives and societies, far beyond how much change we've seen over the course of human history to date. And I wouldn't exactly bet that this is how things are going to go over the next several thousand years.

It seems much more likely that we will "run out" of new scientific insights, technological innovations, and resources, and the regime of "getting richer by a few percent a year" will come to an end.

Though interesting, I think the above calculation strawmans the pro-growth arguments. Advocating for more growth in this century / lifetime is not equivalent to advocating for an eternal growth narrative. Growth / denser energy + resource harvest might be necessary in this generation if it helps more people meet their basic needs. Of course, another way to do this might be to simply redistribute what we already have.

Logic trains from the rationalist community do their reasoning / calculations in a freeform manner. This enables them more freedom / creativity with their thought process (no bureaucracy to deal with), but also risks being less grounded in empirical evidence and modeling (which is more accessible to institutions, not individuals). Freeform reasoning isn’t enough to develop scalable solutions. You need a grasp of relativity, too.

I think there should be some people in the world who inhabit the Business As Usual headspace, thinking about how to make the world better if we basically assume a stable, regular background rate of economic growth for the foreseeable future.

And some people should inhabit the This Can’t Go On headspace, thinking about the ramifications of stagnation, explosion or collapse - and whether our actions could change which of those happens.

But today, it seems like things are far out of balance, with almost all news and analysis living in the Business As Usual headspace.

One metaphor for my headspace is that it feels as though the world is a set of people on a plane blasting down the runway:

We're going much faster than normal, and there isn't enough runway to do this much longer ... and we're accelerating. (1)

1. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/G7XBTGNTrPWoKFmep/p/pFHN3nnN9WbfvWKFg

[tinnictheguardian]

Shadowrun could be the future of Silmarillion verse

Random thought that occurred to me today: the Shadowrun verse could be a future "age" of the Silmarillion verse.

The Silmarillion fandom has people from every generation. Certainly, some of the older fans and even some of the younger fans can be "Western medieval purists" when it comes to the Silmarillion and Tolkien's world in general. So, there is a resistance to futurism.

However, the very concept of Dagor Dagorath suggests that the world is not going to be "medieval" when Morgoth returns.

Now, in Shadowrun, the lore is that at some point, non-humans start to appear in the human world. The explanation in the Shadowrun verse is "unexplained genetic expression (UGE)". But that can be easily modified to a "return/reconnection".

If you think about the "last age of Arda" in Tolkien's verse, it stands to reason that the last age will be kicked off with the return of the dwarves. Technically, the dwarves are supposed to be still here but too deep underground for humans to reach. So reconnecting with the dwarves would be a big indication that the end is nigh!

Secondly, Morgoth is supposed to attack Aman first because that's still where the entrance into Arda from the everlasting darkness exists.

The implication/prophecy says this time around, the Valar and the elves will be wearied enough that Aman will be devastated. So you can see a situation where knowing what's to come, the Valar and Maia reembody every single elven fea that's ever been born, including Feanor and his sons, put them on boats and sends them to Middle Earth, i.e. to us, while they hold the line against Morgoth as long as possible.

However, the Valar and the Maia fail. They have wearied as the song of Arda has gone on. They no longer have the strength to win against Morgoth. They lose, and Aman becomes the staging ground for Morgoth's invasion of Middle-Earth.

So, the straight road becomes cursed because that's what Morgoth is using to send his minions to attack humans, elves, dwarves, and hobbits.

Also, Morgoth would absolutely love corporatism! He is totally someone who would use capitalism fully to just devastate nations and people. He wouldn't even have to trick people because short-termism is so baked into corporate culture that way too many corporate executives would totally side with him.

In the meantime, I could see the returned elves find places for themselves and found new nations and kingdoms. Valar can and have created land out of nothing. So, I think one of their last acts would be to create an elven continent in the Pacific Ocean so the elves don't have to go into a resource conflict with humans immediately.

The new continent, let's go with Mu which an established lost mythical continent. Unless New Zealanders are happy to share their country with elves because the continent of Zealandis is real and if raised would easily support New Zelanders (there is only like 5 million or so of them) + all elves (calculations say that elvish population at their height was around 3 million, throw in baby boom during the long peace and even then I can't see there being more then 10 million elves). Anyway, point is elves establish new nations in their new continent and begin preparation for war with Morgoth and war comes quickly. Any surviving Maia would also seek refuge among the elves.

I can totally see the reborn Feanor totally embracing technology and mixing tech with magic and just leaning really into "magiktech". Sons of Feanor too would just be a bunch of Deckers, Riggers and Celegrom would be a physical adept... am I unfair in how I think Celegrom is just a meathead? 🤔

In conclusion, I totally think that Shadowrun verse is fully compatible with Tolkien verse, and the world of Shadowrun may well be what the last age of Arda looks like because Shadowrun is what would happen if elves, dwarves and magic suddenly returned to our world of technology. While the concept of the final battle with Morgoth implies that magic and magical races like the elves will return to our world before the end...

But mostly, I just want to see the sons of Feanor + Fingon as Shadowrun archetypes!

[female-malice]

Over the past two decades, a small group of theorists mostly based in Oxford have been busy working out the details of a new moral worldview called longtermism, which emphasizes how our actions affect the very long-term future of the universe – thousands, millions, billions, and even trillions of years from now. This has roots in the work of Nick Bostrom, who founded the grandiosely named Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) in 2005, and Nick Beckstead, a research associate at FHI and a programme officer at Open Philanthropy. It has been defended most publicly by the FHI philosopher Toby Ord, author of The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (2020). Longtermism is the primary research focus of both the Global Priorities Institute (GPI), an FHI-linked organisation directed by Hilary Greaves, and the Forethought Foundation, run by William MacAskill, who also holds positions at FHI and GPI. Adding to the tangle of titles, names, institutes and acronyms, longtermism is one of the main ‘cause areas’ of the so-called effective altruism (EA) movement, which was introduced by Ord in around 2011 and now boasts of having a mind-boggling $46 billion in committed funding.

It is difficult to overstate how influential longtermism has become. Karl Marx in 1845 declared that the point of philosophy isn’t merely to interpret the world but change it, and this is exactly what longtermists have been doing, with extraordinary success. Consider that Elon Musk, who has cited and endorsed Bostrom’s work, has donated $1.5 million dollars to FHI through its sister organisation, the even more grandiosely named Future of Life Institute (FLI). This was cofounded by the multimillionaire tech entrepreneur Jaan Tallinn, who, as I recently noted, doesn’t believe that climate change poses an ‘existential risk’ to humanity because of his adherence to the longtermist ideology.

Meanwhile, the billionaire libertarian and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who once gave the keynote address at an EA conference, has donated large sums of money to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, whose mission to save humanity from superintelligent machines is deeply intertwined with longtermist values. Other organisations such as GPI and the Forethought Foundation are funding essay contests and scholarships in an effort to draw young people into the community, while it’s an open secret that the Washington, DC-based Center for Security and Emerging Technologies (CSET) aims to place longtermists within high-level US government positions to shape national policy. In fact, CSET was established by Jason Matheny, a former research assistant at FHI who’s now the deputy assistant to US President Joe Biden for technology and national security. Ord himself has, astonishingly for a philosopher, ‘advised the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister’s Office, Cabinet Office, and Government Office for Science’, and he recently contributed to a report from the Secretary-General of the United Nations that specifically mentions ‘long-termism’.

The point is that longtermism might be one of the most influential ideologies that few people outside of elite universities and Silicon Valley have ever heard about. I believe this needs to change because, as a former longtermist who published an entire book four years ago in defence of the general idea, I have come to see this worldview as quite possibly the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today. But to understand the nature of the beast, we need to first dissect it, examining its anatomical features and physiological functions.

(continue reading)

–

Rather than solve climate problems now, governments are focused on putting humanity in sci-fi virtual reality pods in 500,000 years.

We've seen this over and over again throughout history. Crazed emperors use up their nation's resources hunting for immortality. Hunting for the philosopher's stone.

Longtermism is our modern day philosopher's stone.

[poinsciuri]

mad about effective altruism and especially long-termism

you know how you can fucking help the most possible future people?? by making society better you stupid rich cowards