welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
This is: A practical guide to long-term planning – and suggestions for longtermism, published by weeatquince on the effective altruism forum.
Over the last two years I have been researching and advising numerous government officials on how to do long-term thinking well. Now you are probably not going to be shocked to hear me say it but: making long-term decisions is difficult. Most institutions don’t do it very well and the feedback loops to tell us what works are, as you would expect, long. Yet, that said, it is neither a new challenge nor an uncommon challenge. Many groups of people have faced this problem before and developed tools, strategies and approaches that seem to be working. I have been trying to pull all of this together to paint a rough picture of what best practice in long-term thinking looks like, and advise governments accordingly.
To do that work well I did of course engage in some depth with relevant academic work, including the research on longtermism both from within academia and on this forum. And lo and behold it seemed to me like the space was divided into two distinct camps: longtermist theorists and long-term practitioners. The theorists wonder why policy makers do not listen to them and the policy practitioners wonder why academics are not producing work relevant to them. As a practitioner, it seemed that on some days I would say something that was obvious to me and a researcher would be excited by how novel and useful it is, yet on other days I just could not understand the things longtermist researchers were doing and why it mattered. This post is an attempt to bridge this divide.
The post is in three parts:
Section A is descriptive. I invite you to look around my world, at the politicians, policy makers and risk planners who think long-term. I draw examples from fields as diverse as defence, forestry, tech policy and global development looking for common threads and patterns that give us some idea of how we should be making our long-term plans and decisions. My hope is to both be informative about current best practice in long-term planning but also to give a sense of where I am coming from as a practitioner thinking about the long-term.
Section B is applied. There are of course differences between how a UK government policy official will think about the long-term, and how longtermists might think about the long-term. I take some of the ideas described in Section A and try applying them to some longtermist questions. I don’t have all the answers but I hope to suggest areas for future research and exploration.
Section C is constructive. I reflect on how my experience as a practitioner of longtermism shapes my view of the academic longtermist community. I then make some recommendations about how longtermists can better produce useful practical research.
Section A: Welcome to my world, let me show you around
Imagine that you are a politician or policy maker. You believe that the future matters a lot and that preventing existential risk is important, but you are uncertain about how best to achieve long-term goals. So for a starting point you look for existing examples of good long-term planning and long-term decision making.
At first good examples of long-term policy thinking can be hard to spot. Political incentives that push policy-makers towards short-term plans [1] or towards making long-term decisions primarily based on ideology [2]. There are however places where there is seemingly good long-term policy making to learn from, especially a step away from the most politicised topics. And if we look across enough institutions we start to get a picture of a best practice approach to long-term thinking.
Now I don’t want to claim that current best practice represents the only way to do long term thinking. But I do think it makes sense to set common sen...
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