
Why the long-term future of humanity matters more than anything else - robertwiblin
https://80000hours.org/articles/why-the-long-run-future-matters-more-than-anything-else-and-what-we-should-do-about-it/
======
grondilu
In the long term, we're all dead.

Call me selfish, but I personally don't worry about the future of humanity in
thousands of years. I'm sure most people don't either.

A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me. Sure, people can feel
concerned about his fate, just as people can feel concerned about a stranger
in a foreign country, but most people just don't. We're all selfish bastards.

~~~
hwillis
I genuinely feel horrified by that. Like, it legitimately alarms me in the
same way I'd be alarmed to find out everyone else in a room with me is a
psychopath. I'm not very personally frightened to think that most people would
be fine with me being hurt- it's not an imminent threat.

I still feel a deep discomfort from the idea that people could just be okay
with people suffering. Obviously this is more acute with people in other
countries than people who do not yet exist, and I have some allowance for
laziness. But... people are genuinely fine with the idea that people starve to
death? That's horrifying.

~~~
mmirate
On the contrary. I can't imagine experiencing the emotions of all the people
in 10000AD; at our current population growth rate, 10000AD will witness an
_unfathomable_ number of human beings! Being concerned about all those people
is far too much emotional stress for any one mind.

(Of course, experiencing others' emotions can in general be debilitating.
Obviously, then, experiencing trillions of others' emotions would be
trillionsfold worse.)

~~~
hwillis
I mean for people you havent and never will meet; I can somewhat understand
for people that dont actually exist yet.

I'm not thinking of personally being aware of them and i can even rationalize
not finding strangers to be tangible. I understand the bystander effect and
all that. There are any number of ways I can accept not _doing_ anything, but
the idea that someone could legitimately just not care is deeply unsettling.

Like, for the bystander effect to apply a person has to care and then think
"someone should do something". Its the idea that someone can instead just not
care even superficially that is disturbing.

~~~
notyourday
> Like, for the bystander effect to apply a person has to care and then think
> "someone should do something". Its the idea that someone can instead just
> not care even superficially that is disturbing.

To me, the idea that someone think "someone should do something" about that
"something" is disturbing.

But this is HN, the place where those that make $100k/year a more wax
poetically about the plight of poor people in third world countries while
munching on the cheese and drinking the wine thinking that it is the waxing
that counts.

------
conjectures
Baffled by Ord's defence of discount rates. The transcript reads like a primer
on the pure theory of discounting.

In practice it's a cargo cult ritual that leads to the conclusion that we
should give within epsilon of zero fucks about anything that happens N years
from now for sufficiently large N (which you get to choose as the author of an
analysis).

That's partly because there's no mathematical difference in exponential
discounting for the role played by 'pure rate of time preference' and the
'good' discount rate. It's always just 3.5% for no particular reason other
than that's what in the back of the Treasury handbook written before 2008
during the Great Moderation.

Oh, and is 3.5% a reasonable number? Sounds kinda like inflation/mortgage
rates, right? But if you look at CPI $100 dollars in 1817 is, equivalent to
roughly $2k dollars in 2017. But would I rather spend this 'same' amount of
money in 1817 or 2017? It's a no-brainer as long as I prefer penicillin and
smart phones to legal opiods and vintage mustache waxing. This is _really_
hard stuff to model, which is a clue that _it doesn 't get done_.

If Ord and Wiblin could pick one easy fight to change about government policy
making and promote longtermism it would be savaging the use of discounting in
long term policy decisions rather than beating around the bush.

~~~
robertwiblin
We're pretty negative about discount rates in the scheme of things. We have a
paper on this which outlines why we think discount rates are worth using in
some kinds of situations:
[https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/sites/givingwhatwecan.org/fi...](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/sites/givingwhatwecan.org/files/attachments/discounting-
health2.pdf)

~~~
conjectures
Apologies if I missed the nuance but in the paper's conclusions:

> Instead we will try to:

> 1\. discount money in the normal way to take account of inflation and
> opportunity costs.

This is one of the problems with discounting though. Inflation is measured
very badly over time due to technological change. If you go back to a policy
maker in 1817 would have no idea that 2017 dollars could treat
schistosomiasis, or any number of other medical conditions, so they would
undervalue a 2017 dollar. I think it's fair to assume this process will
continue to some extent over the next few hundred years.

This suggests that money is the wrong way to weigh up long term decisions.
While problematic in their own way, something like QALYs and functions of
QALYs could serve much better as a unit of account because their meaning is
not relative with time. But you'd have to model how many you get in the future
explicitly.

~~~
robertwiblin
It's a very subtle issue I can't go fully into here. I agree with a lot of
your concerns. Personally I would usually go for cost-welfare analysis rather
than cost-benefit analysis, which resolves many of the problems you're
concerned about.

~~~
conjectures
Sure, I was just hoping to move you a little towards the position that lazy
exponential discounting is generally not compatible with longtermism.

In terms of behaviour change, giving a mixed message is just going to excuse
people falling back into the default method. This is what thoughtless
acceptance of the default means:

[http://www.heritage.org/environment/report/discounting-
clima...](http://www.heritage.org/environment/report/discounting-climate-
costs) [http://www.heritage.org/government-
regulation/report/questio...](http://www.heritage.org/government-
regulation/report/questions-epas-cost-estimates-waxman-markey-climate-change-
legislation)

So I think there's a real cost and risk associated with not taking a clear
position on this.

------
xenadu02
This is my philosophy on the future. Feel free to adopt or reject it as you
see fit.

Trying to reason about the future on cosmic scales is beyond our current and
any foreseeable capabilities so let's discount that right away; we don't quite
know if the universe will end in heat death (though we have some hints). We
don't know if it is possible to create or move to other universes or even
whether such a concept makes sense. As long as such things haven't been ruled
out we can assume they're true: if life survives to the end of this universe
it will have accumulated enough knowledge and technology to create or move to
a new one.

Back in the present every species on earth is doomed. Whether an asteroid
strike or the sun turning into a red giant eventually this planet will become
uninhabitable.

It is not known whether intelligent life is a common result of evolution or
we're a fluke. We do know it takes a very long time if it happens at all. It
is possible we are the only highly intelligent species that will ever appear
on this planet.

The primary responsibility of humanity then is to balance resource consumption
with the creation of an interplanetary society first, then eventually an
interstellar one. We must protect the earth's resources and preserve as many
species as we can reasonably preserve... but we must also preserve modern
technology and pursue the establishment of permanent self-sufficient colonies
on other worlds in the solar system. Once we do so we must take and spread as
many species from earth as we can. In the medium term (next million years)
this isn't so important but once we can achieve some form of interstellar
movement spreading life to other systems is key to ensuring it isn't wiped out
(or reset back to single-cell organisms).

We are the only natural process capable of preserving life and so far as we
are aware ours may be the only instance of life (or intelligent life) in the
universe. What future iterations of life will make of such an opportunity we
can only guess, but if we don't do it in all likelihood no one else ever will.

If no intelligent life survives then our existence is pointless and will be
erased when the sun's red-giant phase scours every last trace that any living
thing has ever existed from the face of the earth.

------
Havoc
In part I think this is why Musk is such a bigger than life figure. His whole
spiel about making humanity a multi-planet specie makes for good PR but as far
as I can tell it also genuinely matter to him & provides drive.

~~~
dharma1
Once the first colony dies on Mars I think we'll forget about that distraction
for a while. Near term future of humanity is on this planet and there won't be
any long term future if we fuck things up here

------
AnimalMuppet
It matters... but not more than anything else. What matters even more is that
we retain our humanity.

Notice that this idea is only one step removed from "the long-term future of
the _race_ matters more than anything else". Think about what horrors have
been done in the service of _that_ idea. Let us be very careful, then, that we
commit no horrors in the service of _this_ idea. ("Nothing matters more than
X" easily becomes "therefore it's OK - even good - to trample on people in the
service of X".)

------
blhack
Man this is a sad thread.

Humanity is the most incredible thing in what we know of the universe. Stars
and gas clouds sure are beautiful too, but unless you are very religious, the
those are simple an artifact of statistics, there was no intention there.

Without the humans, the universe is empty.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _Without the humans, the universe is empty._

Max Tegmark adds a twist to that statement: without consciousness (subjective
experience), the universe is pointless.

~~~
jelll
Would you mind expanding?

~~~
Neeek
Not familiar with the source from the parent, but the "point" to anything
depends on a form of consciousness assigning that definition. There is no
point to a water logged ball of rock, orbiting a giant ball of hot gas unless
there is someone on that rock to say "the point of this rock is so I may
exist.". Ignoring some cosmic creators with some purpose for us to exist
(which would just be another form of consciousness), the whole point is
decided by us. So without us, there would be no point.

------
Swizec
"Why the long-term future of humans matters more than anything else"

Because humans care about humans more than anything else _and that 's fully
sufficient_. Let's not kid ourselves, _we_ care about us, most everybody else
is kinda meh. Symbiotic species like us too, I guess.

------
dogma1138
Because otherwise everything up to this point would've been pointless do we
really need an article explaining why the survival of our species is
important?

~~~
okket
There is still the real possibility that life is actually pointless. And there
is no real justification why humans should rule this instead of any other
species. Except made up ones, of course.

~~~
turc1656
There is a scientific theory out that has yet to be proven, but addresses the
actual purpose of life. [https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-
theory-o...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-
the-origin-of-life-20140122/) TL;DR (with my philosophical interpretations
included) - his claim is that life occurs as a natural process to help
dissipate concentrations of energy. This occurs because the universe is on a
never-ending march toward higher entropy and life is a tool to help it achieve
that goal - the goal being maximum entropy and the effective end of the
universe as we know it, a situation where all matter is in its most stable
state and no energy can be obtained from anything anymore. So we are here to
help the universe and all life die.

~~~
contras1970
life cannot exist without (outside / away from) energy gradients. is the
purpose of life to speed up destruction of its environment? even if the answer
is yes which i disagree with, it's only an approximative answer: it's
immediately followed by "ok but why is it so?"

imo, life has as much purpose as stars have: none. it's the wrong question to
ask. life is simply there, just like stars are there. it "materializes" when-
and-where there are the right conditions (a narrow spectrum of energy
gradients), just like stars do (the spectra are extremely far apart, of
course).

------
simonsarris
> Robert Wiblin: Are there some approaches that you think are just obviously
> too broad?

> Toby Ord: Good question. I think just saying, “Okay, what about improving
> science?” my guess is that because this begets technology, which begets some
> of the risk, it’s unlikely that just pushing on that is a plausible thing to
> particularly help.

> ... They probably wouldn’t even know about asteroid risk, or super volcano
> risk, or various other natural risks.

I think talking about these kind of risks is a mistake. They're not the
biggest thing on our plate and people will always be able to foresee them as
too distant and too small.

~~~~~

> Robert Wiblin: We’ve talked a lot about reducing risks to the future. What
> about thinking about the opposite of that, which is extremely large upsides?
> Are there any practical ways that people might go about not so much
> preventing extinction or something horrible, but also trying to create
> something that’s much more positive than what we have reason to hope for?

> Toby Ord: It’s a good question. I’m not sure.

If you want a specific technology, work on electric transportation. Fossil
fuel transportation in agriculture allowed us to scale up humanity to 7.5+
billion people, but it created a time-bomb because as soon as its too pricey
to move food around, we can no longer create it as scale, and there's no
_going back_ to agrarian pastoral society without killing almost all the
humans. Over the long term, we have a moral imperative to advance ourselves
beyond fossil fuels for transportation. This is what I believe to be the most
moral technology we could work on.[1]

"Humanity has a bug. We think of the future too little, and too often we think
technology propels itself, that the future will simply unfold automatically.
Or worse, many seem to have suffered a loss of faith in any real vision of the
future. I wish this was not so."

[1] [https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/the-moral-
technology-6413ca...](https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/the-moral-
technology-6413ca8449c9)

------
taurath
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they
shall never sit in.

------
AtomicOrbital
What is paramount is to support the force which brought humanity here, not
humanity itself. We are an instantiation of a process, not the process. To
best support that force we as a planet of people need to realize we are not
the end-all-be-all and our species time will come and go. When our successor
supersedes humanity we should celebrate that beautiful expression of a yet
more well adapted carrier of the torch ... do not fight progress on this more
supra anthropocentric perspective, embrace it, celebrate it

------
NiklasMort
It should be "Why the long-term future of the global ecosystem matters more
than anything else". Not humanity. Humans cause nothing but destruction and
suffering on an unprecedented scale. 80000hours and the EA community are not
better than any other anthropocentric interest group. Seriously what's with
this obsession about humanity? How shortsighted are people?

------
yters
If there is no standard of value outside this world, then nothing inside this
world ultimately matters either.

------
hartator
I have troubled finding exemples in history where we made the "right"
decisions for the future of humanity when we wanted too. Think religion
oppression, communism, etc. Why today will be different?

~~~
jbreckmckye
As an experiment, I think communism was absolutely worthwhile. Why not?
Societies with private property have all sorts of problems, so let's see what
happens when we change that variable.

The problem is when experiments continue despite failure.

~~~
jrs95
> Why not?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes)

~~~
boomboomsubban
If that's your qualification for a "failed experiment," the Atlantic slave
trade proved Capitalism a failure before these people were born.

~~~
theseatoms
In what world are capitalism and slavery coexistent, even hypothetically?
They're opposites. Capitalism is freedom.

~~~
jbreckmckye
You can have private trade without civil rights and personal freedoms. Was
segregation-era America not capitalist?

~~~
theseatoms
Not if certain people aren't allowed to privately trade.

~~~
jacalata
At that point you're just arguing that capitalism has never existed, so
perhaps you should use another term for your "true Scotsman" version to reduce
confusion when talking to people who use the common definition.

------
dsfyu404ed
There is no long term future if there is no short and medium term future. It's
very hard to create a better tomorrow if something is broken today.

~~~
robertwiblin
That's one of the topics we discuss! :)

------
purplezooey
This sounds like the musings of the idle rich, who can spend their days
worrying about such things. No thanks.

------
ucontrol
God, it annoys me to see so many people spouting Rick & Morty-tier nihilistic
verdicts on life and it being "pointless". Seriously, go outside and read some
more books, and synthesize your experiences and observations.

Even without going into rigorous philosophical discussion, if you still
confidently claim that all of it is fatally worthless even after having seen
as much of what there is to life, I think you seriously lack perception.

It's just shallow pessimism, not a thoughtful outlook on conscious existence.

------
crimsonalucard
Nobody cares about humanity 600 generations from now. We're only truly
concerned about our immediate family. I'd sacrifice my life for my son, but I
could give a shit about my great great great great great great great great
great great grandson.

I would say 90% of our environmental problems stem from this one fact. I mean
we all drive cars and are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifice to stop.

~~~
chriswarbo
> Nobody cares about humanity 600 generations from now. We're only truly
> concerned about our immediate family.

Please don't project your own personal thoughts and opinions on to the entire
human population. It's possible that some, even _many_ people do not think
this way. I would claim to be one, although of course I can offer no evidence
other than my word.

> I would say 90% of our environmental problems stem from this one fact. I
> mean we all drive cars and are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifice to
> stop.

Again, that seems like a projection of yourself on to the whole population.
This ones easier to refute though, since it's an objective fact that I don't
drive a car (and haven't even bothered learning). Concern for the environment
is certainly a large part of the reason.

~~~
crimsonalucard
Sometimes humans talk in terms of self evident generalities derived from
common sense instead of solely relying on scientifically verified facts. This
is actually a very typical scenario when you communicate with other humans.

~~~
bjl
Except your generality is not at all self-evident.

~~~
crimsonalucard
I agree, it is not at all self evident to anyone who isn't human or doesn't
have normal human communication skills.

------
bambax
> _a sense of wonder about the universe we find ourselves in_

If we have a sense of wonder about the universe or our planet, then what we
should really do is rid it of us, because all we have ever done is ruin it,
make it hideous, inflict pain and destruction on it.

I have kids. My behavior is not consistent with my beliefs. In that I'm very
human.

~~~
Jaecen
I don't understand this point of view. My interpretation of it is that there
is some idealized, perfect form of earth (and apparently the universe) that
doesn't include humans. Everything in it is perfect except for the humans,
which ruin and devalue it.

What confounds me about this view is that humans are as much a product of the
earth/universe as any other part of it. What is so unique about humanity in
the universe that gives us the exclusive agency to tarnish it? Why are the
products of humanity somehow excluded from the perfection of the other
productions of the universe?

~~~
bambax
Excellent questions. The issue is speciesism. Humanity wasn't a problem for
most of its existence. But it has now started to consume every ressource,
spread on every tiny bit of land, and exterminate every other form of life.

If, as you say, _humans are as much a product of the earth /universe as any
other part of it_, what is the justification for speciesism? What gives us the
right to take everything for ourselves, kill and decimate other forms of life?

The rate of the extinction of species that the earth is going through right
now is unprecedented _in all of earth 's history_, to say nothing of the
torture we inflict on farm animals. And this is not an accident. We are doing
it on purpose and we're proud of it; we call it "development", when the right
word should be: destruction.

~~~
Jaecen
Speciesism is a new concept to me. Thank you for introducing me to it. Since
you seem to be familiar with the concept and its application to the discussion
at hand, perhaps you can clarify a point.

Are humans, among the species on earth at least, uniquely capable of
speciesism? Are rats or ants guilty of it too, to the extent that they
exercise speciesism until they run up against limitations of their
environment? Or is speciesism a moral ideal, similar to murder, meaning rats
and ants can't be guilty of it because they can't reason and act with intent?

