Epistemic Status: Personal view about longtermism and its critics.
Recently, there have been a series of attacks on longtermism. These largely focus on the (indisputable) fact that avoiding X-risks can be tied to racist or eugenic historical precedents. This should be worrying; a largely white. educated, western, and male group talking about how to fix everything should raise flags. And neglecting to address the roots of futurism is worrying - though I suspect that highlighting them and attempting apologetics would have been an even larger red flag to many critics.
At the same time, attacks on new ideas like longtermism are inevitable. New ideas, whether good or bad, are usually controversial. Moreover, any approaches or solutions that are proposed will have drawbacks, and when they are compared to the typical alternative (of ignoring the problem) they will inevitably be worse in some ways. Nonetheless, some portions of the attacks have merit.
In 2017, Scott Alexander wrote a post defending the ideas of the Lesswrong community, Yes, We Have Noticed the Skulls. He says, in part, "the rationalist movement hasn’t missed the concerns that everybody who thinks of the idea of a 'rationalist movement' for five seconds has come up with. If you have this sort of concern, and you want to accuse us of it, please do a quick Google search to make sure that everybody hasn’t been condemning it and promising not to do it since the beginning."
Similarly, there is a real concern about the dangers of various longtermist approaches, but it is one which at least the majority of those who engage with longtermist ideas understand. These attacks looked at some roots of longtermism, but ignore the actual practice and the motives, repeated assertions that we are still uncertain, and the clear evidence that we are and will continue to be interested in engaging with those who disagree.
As the Effective Altruism forum should make abundantly clear, the motivations for the part of the community which embraces longtermism still includes Peter Singer's embrace of practical ethics and effective altruist ideas like the Giving Pledge, which are cornerstones of the community's behavior. Far from carrying on the racist roots of many past utopians, we are trying to address them. "What greater racism is there than the horrifically uneven distribution of resources between people all because of an accident of their birth?," as Sanjay noted. Still, defending existential risk mitigation and longtermism, by noting its proximity and roots in global health and other effective altruist causes is obviously less than a full response.
And in both areas, despite the best of intentions, there are risks that we cause harm, we increase disparities in health and happiness, we promote ideas which are flawed and dangerous, or we otherwise fail to live up to our ideals. Yes, we see the skulls. And yes, some of the proposals that have been put forward have glaring drawbacks which need to be discussed and addressed. I cannot speak for others, though if there is one thing longtermism cannot be accused of, it's insufficient attention to risk.
So I remain wary of the risks - not just the farcical claim that transhumanism is the same as eugenics, or the more reasonable one that some proposed paths towards stability and safety have the potential to worsen inequalities rather than address them, but also immediate issues like gender and racial imbalance within the movement, and the problem of seeing effective altruism as a white man's burden. The community has a history of engaging with critics, and we should continue to take their concerns seriously.
But all the risks of failure aren't a reason to abandon the project of protecting and improving the future - they are a reason to make sure we continue discussing and planning. I hope that those who disagree with us are willing to join in productive conversation about how we can ensure our future avoids the pitfalls they see. If we do so, there is a real chance that our path forward will not just be paved with good intentions, but lead us towards a better and safer future for everyone.
I don't find the racism critique of longtermism compelling. Human extinction would be bad for lots of currently existing non-white people. Human extinction would also be bad for lots of possible future non-white people. If future people count equally, then not protecting them would be a great loss for future non-white people. So, working to reduce extinction risks is very good for non-white people.
I agree the racism critique is overstated, but I think there's a more nuanced argument for a need for greater representation/inclusion for xrisk reduction to be very good for everyone.
Quick toy examples (hypothetical):
- If we avoid extinction by very rich, nearly all white people building enough sustainable bunkers, human species continues/rebuilds, but not good for non-white people.
- If we do enough to avoid the xrisk scenarios (say, getting stuck at the poles with minimal access to resources needed to progress civilisation or something) in climate change, but not enough to avoid massively disadvantaging most of the global south, we badly exacerbate inequality (maybe better than extinction, but not what we might consider a good outcome).
And so forth. So the more nuanced argument might be we (a) need to avoid extinction, but (b) want to do so in such a way that we don't exacerbate inequality and other harms. We stand a better chance of doing the latter by including a wider array of stakeholders than are currently in the conversation.
It seems odd to me to criticise a movement as racist without at least acknowledging that the thing we are working on seems more beneficial for non-white people than the things many other philanthropists work on. The examples you give are hypothetical, so they aren't a criticism of what longtermists do in the real world. Most longtermists are focused on AI, bio and to a lesser extent climate risk. I fail to see how any of that work has the disparate demographic impact described in the hypotheticals.
Thanks Halstead. I'll try to respond later, but I'd quickly like to be clear re: my own position that I don't perceive longtermism as racist, and/or am not claiming people within it are racist (I consider this a serious claim not to be made lightly).
Do you mean to say that
vs
are serious claims that are not to be made lightly?
(Non- sequitur below, may not be interesting)
For what it's worth, my best guess is that having the burden of proof on P1 is the correct decision procedure in the society we live in, as these accusations have a lot of associated baggage and we don't currently have a socially acceptable way to say naively reasonable things like "Alice is very likely systematically biased against X group to Y degree in Z sphere of life, so I trust her judgements less about X as applied to Z, but all things considered Alice is still a fine person to work or socially interact with."
But all else equal, a society where having the burden of proof on P2 would be slightly better, as it is a more accurate representation of affairs (see eg for an illustration of what I mean).
In particular, I think it is an accurate claim that most humans and most human institutions in most times and places are at least somewhat racist* (though I think the demographic ... (read more)
For what it's worth, I got the opposite impression. I think neither side is particularly truth-seeking, and much more out to "win" rather than be deeply concerned with what is true. My own experience during the whole SSC/NYT affair was to get very indignant and follow @balajis* (who I've since muted), a tech personality with a crusade against tech journalism, and reading him only helped amplify my sense of zealotry against conventional media. On reflection this was very far from my ideals or behaviors I'd like to have going forwards, and I consider my behavior then moderately large evidence against my own truth-seeking.
I think the SSC/NYT event was a fitting culmination of the Toxoplasma of Rage that SSC itself warned us about, and some members of our movement, myself included, was nontrivially corrupted by external bad faith actors (on both sides).
* To be clear this is not a condemnation of him as a person or for his work or anything, just his Twitter personality.
I don't think there's anything particularly interesting here. The short compression of my views is that different people have competing access needs, and I don't feel like I have a safe space outside of a very small subset of my friends to say something pretty simple and naively reasonable like
without basically getting embroiled in a proxy culture war. I feel like many people (even ones I naively would have thou... (read more)
First, I agree that racism isn't the most worrying criticism of longtermism - though is the one that has been highlighted recently. But it is a valid criticism of at least some longtermist ideas, and I think we should take this seriously. Sean's argument is one sketch of a real problem, though I think there is a broader point about racism in existential risk reduction, which I make below. But there is also more to longtermism than preventing extinction risks, which is what you defended. As the LARB article notes, transhumanism borders on some very worrying ideas, and there is non-trivial overlap with the ideas of communities which emphatically embrace racism. (And for that reason the transhumanist community has worked hard to distance itself from those ideas.)
And even within X-risk reduction. it's not the case that attempts to reduce existential risks are obviously on their own a valid excuse for behavior that disadvantages others. For example, a certainty of faster western growth that disadvantages the world's poor for a small reduction in risk of human extinction a century from now is a tradeoff that disadvantages others, albeit probably one I would make, were it up to me. But essential to the criticism is that I shouldn't decide for them. And if utilitarian views about saving the future are contrary to the views of most of humanity, longermists should be very wary of unilateralism, or at least think very, very carefully before deciding to ignore others' preferences to "help" them.
It seems strange to criticise longtermists on the basis that hypothetical actions that they might take (but haven't taken) disadvantage certain demographic groups. If I were going to show that they were racist (a very serious and reputation-destroying charge), I would show that some of the things that they have actually done were actually bad for certain demographic groups. I just can't think of any example of this.
It also seems strange to defend longtermists as only being harmful in theory, since the vast majority of longtermism is theory, and relatively few actions have been taken. That is, almost all longtermist ideas so far have implications which are currently only hypothetical.
But there is at least one concrete thing that has happened - many people in effective altruism who previously worked on and donated to near-term causes in global health and third world poverty have shifted focus away from those issues. And I don't disagree with that choice, but if that isn't an impact of longtermism which counterfactually harms the global poor, what do you think would qualify?
I just want to highlight your second point― resource allocation within the movement away from the global poor and towards longtermsism― seems to be a big part of what is concretely criticized in the Current Affairs piece. Quoting:
This doesn't seem to me like a purely hypothetical harm. If you value existing people much more than potential future people (not an uncommon moral intuition) then this is concretely bad, especially since the EA community is able to move around a lot of philanthropic capital.
Yes but the counter-argument is that longtermists don't accept the antecedent - they don't value current people more than future people. And if you don't accept the antecedent then it could equally be said that near-termist people are inflicting harm on non-white people. So, the argument doesn't take us anywhere
Fair enough; it's unsurprising that a major critique of longtermism is "actually, present people matter more than future people". To me, a more productive framing of this criticism than racist/non-racist is about longtermist indifference to redistribution. I've seen various recent critiques quoting the following paragraph of Nick Beckstead's thesis:
The standard neartermist response is "all other things are definitely not equal, it's much easier to save a life in a poor country than a rich country", while the standar... (read more)
On the first para, that doesn't seem to me to be true of work on AI safety or biorisk, as I understand it.
On the second para, the first thing to say is that longtermists shouldn't be the target of particular criticism on this score - almost no-one is wholly focused on improving the welfare of the global poor. If this decision by longtermists is racist then so is almost everyone else in the world.
Secondly, no I don't think it counterfactually harms the global poor. That only works if you take a person-affecting view of people's interests. If you count future people, then the shift is counterfactually very beneficial for the global poor and for both white and non-white people.
I don't think it's necessarily very good for the global poor as a changing group defined by their poverty, depending on how quickly global poverty declines. There's also a big drop in the strength of evidence in this shift, so it depends on how skeptical you are.
Plus, person-affecting views (including asymmetric ones) or at least somewhat asymmetric views (e.g. prioritarianism) are not uncommon, and I would guess especially among those concerned with the global poor and inequality. Part of the complaint made by some is about ethical views that say extinction would be an astronomical loss and deserves overwhelming priority as a result, over all targeted anti-poverty work. This is a major part of the disagreement, not something to be quickly dismissed.
I'm a longtermist and I don't reject (asymmetric) person(-moment-)affecting views, at least not those that think necessary ≠ only present people. I would be very hard-pressed to give a clean formalization of necessary people though. I think it's bad if effective altruists think longtermism can only be justified with astronomical waste-style arguments and not at all if someone has person-affecting intuitions. (Staying in a broadly utilitarian framework. There are, of course, also obligation-to-ancestor-type justifications for longtermism or similar.) The person-affecting part of me just pushes me in the direction of caring more about trajectory change than extinction risk.
Since I could only ever give very handwavey defenses of person-affecting views and even handwaveier explanations of my overall moral views: Here's a paper by someone that AFAICT is at least sympathetic to longtermism and discusses asymmetric person-affecting views. (I have to admit I never got around to read the paper.) (Writing a paper on how an asymmetric person-affecting view obviously also doesn't necessarily mean that the author doesn't actually reject person-affecting views)
Your definition of problematic injustice seems far too narrow, and I explicitly didn't refer to race in the previous post. The example I gave was that the most disadvantaged people are in the present, and are further injured - not that non-white people (which under current definitions will describe approximately all of humanity in another half dozen generations) will be worse off.
As I said above in a different comment thread, it seems clear we're talking past one another.
Yes, being racist would be racist, and no, that's not the criticism. You said that "there are some popular views on which we would discount or ignore future people. I just don't think that they are plausible." And I think part of the issue is exactly this dismissiveness. As a close analogy, imagine someone said "there are some popular views where AI could be a risk to humans. I just don't think that these are plausible," and went on to spend money building ASI instead of engaging with the potential that they are wrong, or taking any action to investigate or hedge that possibility.
My point is that many people who disagree with the longtermist ethical viewpoint also spent years thinking about the issues, and dismissing the majority of philosophers, and the vast, vast majority of people's views as not plausible, is itself one of the problems I tried to highlight on the original post when I said that a small group talking about how to fix everything should raise flags.
And my point about racism is that criticism of choices and priorities which have a potential to perpetuate existing structural disadvantages and inequity is not the same as calling someone racist.
Also, the demographic criticism also applies to EAs who are working on global development: people in that area also skew white and highly educated.
People who work on farm animal welfare are not focused on the global poor either, but this seems to me an extremely flimsy basis on which to call them racist.
Note: I did not call anyone racist, other than to note that there are groups which embrace some views which themselves embrace that label - but on review, you keep saying that this is about calling someone racist, whereas I'm talking about unequal impacts and systemic impacts of choices - and I think this is a serious confusion which is hampering our conversation.
Perhaps I have misunderstood, but I interpreted your post as saying we should take the two critiques of longtermism seriously. I think the quality of the critiques is extremely poor, and am trying to explain why.
I agree that knowing someone's personal motives can help you judge the likelihood of unproven claims they make, and should make you suspicious of any chance they have to e.g. selectively quote someone. But some of the language I've seen used around Torres seems to imply "if he said it, we should just ignore it", even in cases where he actually links to sources, cites published literature, etc.
Of course, it's much more difficult to evaluate someone's arguments when they've proven untrustworthy, so I'd give an evaluation of Phil's claims lower priority than I would evaluations of other critics who don't share his background (all else being equal). But I don't want them to be thrown out entirely.
When Phil shares this material, I often see comments (on Twitter, Aeon, etc.) from people saying things like "yes, this is also how I feel" or "this experience you said someone had is similar to the experience I had". You could argue that these people probably have false beliefs or biases of their own, but they don't seem mystified, and they probably don't share Phil's personal background. He seems to represent a particular viewpoint/worldview that others also hold for non-vengeful reasons.
It seems like this is a central point in David's comment, but I don't see it addressed in any of what follows. What exactly makes it morally okay for us to be the deciders?
It's worth noting that in both US philanthropy and the international development field, there is currently a big push toward incorporating affected stakeholders and people with firsthand experience with the issue at hand directly into decision-making for exactly this reason. (See participatory grantmaking, the Equitable Evaluation Initiative, and the process that fed into the Sustainable Development Goals, e.g.) I recognize that longtermism is premised in part on representing the interests of moral patients who can't represent themselves. But the question remains: what qualifies us to decide on their behalf? I think the resistance to longtermism in many quarters has much more to do with a suspicion that the answer to that question is "not much" than any explicit valuation of present people over future people.
In terms of:
I'm curious why this is so. I feel like I get the intuitive pull of suspicious demographic composition is all-else-equal evidence of something wrong, but I have trouble formalizing that intuition into something large and concrete. I guess I just feel like the Bayes factor for such warning signs shouldn't be very high. Obviously intersectionality/interaction effects are real, but if we vary obvious parameters for a social movement's origin I don't feel like our movement should counterfactually be noticeably less concerned. Consider the following phrases:
... (read more)I think all these groups need to be concerned, but about different things:
Some of these concerns can be easily dismissed (the NAACP doesn't need to try especially hard to not become a black supremacist cult because... (read more)
Mostly endorsed.
Or perhaps more simply, if a small, non-representative group disagrees with the majority of humans, we should wonder why, and given base rates and the outside view, worry about failure modes that have affected similar small groups in the past.
I really love this article, thank you for taking the time to put it together. Obviously, I am biased, but I think a potentially strong second conclusion is that we should continue to take seriously building a community that has strong norms around making sure we attract and retain the best possible people from a diversity of approaches and expertise. I worry much more about our failure mode being we inadvertently form an echo chamber and miss or overlook how to weigh the importance or likelihood of potential ways we might be wrong/ potentially doing harm than I worry about overt bad faith.
I want to note not just the skulls of the eugenic roots of futurism, but also the "creepy skull pyramid" of longtermists suggesting actions that harm current people in order to protect hypothetical future value.
This goes anywhere from suggestions to slow down AI progress, which seems comfortably within the Overton Window but risks slowing down economic growth and thus slowing reductions in global poverty, to the extreme actions suggested in some Bostrom pieces. Quoting the Current Affairs piece:
Mind you, I don't think these tensions are unique to longtermism. In biosecurity, even if you're focused entirely on the near-term, there are a lot of trade-offs and tensions between preventing harm and securing benefits.
You might have really robust export controls that never let pathogens be shipped around the world... but that will make it harder for developing countries to build up t... (read more)
Thanks - I largely agree, and am similarly concerned about the potential for such impacts, as was discussed in the thread with John Halstead.
As an aside, I think Harper's LARB article was being generous in calling Phil's current affairs article "rather hyperbolic," and think its tone and substance are an unfortunate distraction from various more reasonable criticisms Phil himself has suggested in the past.
I think most social movements can be traced to some sort of unsavory historical precedent. For example:
I provide these examples not to criticize these movements but because I think these historical connections are nearly irrelevant for assessing whether a present-day movement is valid or what it should be working to improve on. (I'll allow that examining history is essential if we want to adopt the framing of redressing past harms.) What's more productive is to look at problematic behavior in the present and look at resolving that, and I don't see what history-based critiques add if we do that.
I think the standard apologetic response for an organization involved in a social movement would be to make a blog post describing these unsavory historical precedents and then calling for more action for diversity, equity, ... (read more)
I think that ignoring historical precedent is exactly what Scott was pointing out we aren't doing in his post, and I think the vast majority of EAs think it would be a mistake to do so now.
My point was that we're aware of the skulls, and cautious. Your response seems to be "who cares about the skulls, that was the past. I'm sure we can do better now." And coming from someone who is involved in EA, hearing that view from people interested in changing the world really, really worries me - because we have lots of evidence from studies of organizational decision making and policy that ignoring what went wrong in the past is a way to fail now and in the future.
It seems pretty bizarre to me to say that these historical examples are not at all relevant for evaluating present day social movements. I think it's incredibly important that socialists, for example, reflect on why various historical folks and states acting in the name of socialism caused mass death and suffering, and likewise for any social movement look at it's past mistakes, harms, etc., and try to reevaluate their goals in light of that.
To me, the examples you give just emphasize the post's point — I think it would be hard to find someone who did a lot of thinking on socialist topics who thought that there were no lessons or belief changes should happen after human rights abuses in the Soviet Union were revealed. And if someone didn't think there were lessons there for how to approach making the world better today, that it would seem completely unreasonable.
I also don't think the original post was asking longtermist orgs to make blog posts calling for action on diversity, equity, and inclusion. I think it was doing something more like asking longtermists to genuinely reflect on whether or not unsavory aspects of the intellectual movement's history are shaping the space today, etc.
Really appreciate and resonate with the spirit of this post. Something that's always intrigued me is the distance between the EA-flavored futurism that permeates the current longtermism community, and Afrofuturism. Both communities craft visions of the future, including utopias and dystopias, and consider themselves 'out of the norm.'
I suspect it's in part because the EA community generally does not talk much/explicitly about race and racial justice.
I'd like to see how this "skull critique" will develop now that UN has adopted a kind of longtermist stance.