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This is: If you value future people, why do you consider near term effects? , published by Alex HT on the LessWrong.
[Nothing here is original, I’ve just combined some standard EA arguments all in one place]
Introduction
I’m confused about why EAs who place non-negligible value on future people justify the effectiveness of interventions by the direct effects of those interventions. By direct effects I mean the kinds of effects that are investigated by GiveWell, Animal Charity Evaluators, and Charity Entrepreneurship. I mean this in contrast to focusing on the effects of an intervention on the long-term future as investigated by places like Open Phil, the Global Priorities Institute, and the Future of Humanity Institute.
This post lays out my current understanding of the problem so that I can find out the bits I’m missing or not understanding properly. I think I’m probably wrong about something because plenty of smart, considerate people disagree with me. Also, to clarify, there are people I admire who choose to work on or donate to near-term causes.
Section one states the problem of cluelessness (for a richer treatment read this: Cluelessness, Hilary Greaves) and explains why we can’t ignore the long-term effects of interventions.
Section two points at some implications of this for people focussed on traditionally near-term causes like mental health, animal welfare, and global poverty. I think these causes all seem pressing. I think that they are long-term problems (ie. poverty or factory farms now are just as bad as poverty or factory farms in 1000 years) and that it makes sense to prioritise the interventions that have the best long-term effects on these causes.
Section three tries to come up with objections to my view, and respond to them.
1. Cluelessness and Long-term Effects
Simple cluelessness
All actions we take have huge effects on the future. One way of seeing this is by considering identity-altering actions. Imagine that I pass my friend on the street and I stop to chat. She and I will now be on a different trajectory than we would have been otherwise. We will interact with different people, at a different time, in a different place, or in a different way than if we hadn’t paused. This will eventually change the circumstances of a conception event such that a different person will now be born because we paused to speak on the street. Now, when the person who is conceived takes actions, I will be causally responsible for those actions and their effects. I am also causally responsible for all the effects flowing from those effects.
This is an example of simple cluelessness, which I don’t think is problematic. In the above example, I have no reason to believe that the many consequences that would follow from pausing would be better than the many consequences that follow from not pausing. I have evidential symmetry between the two following claims:
Pausing to chat would have catastrophic effects for humanity
Not pausing to chat would have catastrophic effects for humanity
And similarly, I have evidential symmetry between the two following claims:
Pausing to chat would have miraculous effects for humanity
Not pausing to chat would have miraculous effects for humanity
(I’m assuming there’s nothing particularly special about this chat - eg. we’re not chatting about starting a nuclear war or influencing AI policy.)
And for all resulting states of the world between catastrophe and miracle. I have evidential symmetry between act-consequence pairs. By evidential symmetry between two actions, I mean that, though massive value or disvalue could come from a given action, these effects could equally easily, and in precisely analogous ways, result from the relevant alternative actions. In the previous scenario, I assume that each of the possible people that will be born are as like...
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