Elon Musk & The Longtermists: What Is Their Plan?

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Correction to what I say at 6 minutes 54 seconds: There's no evidence that Peter Thiel has financially supported the Future of Life Institute. He has merely expressed sympathy for the idea of longtermism. Sorry about that.
Longtermism is a currently popular philosophy among rich people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Jaan Tallinn. What do they believe and what are the pros and cons? I sort it out for you.
Nick Bostrom's 2009 paper can be found in this volume:
escholarship.org/content/qt29...
Nick Bostrom's 2013 paper is here:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/a...
The Greaves and MacAskill paper from 2019 is this:
globalprioritiesinstitute.org...
The toddler's solution to the trolley problem is from this video: • A two-year-old's solut...
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00:00 Intro
00:35 Sponsor Message
01:20 What is Longtermism
07:15 Criticism of Longtermism
11:23 What are we to make of this?
Many thanks to Jordi Busqué for helping with this video jordibusque.com/

[@kiraPh1234k]

"We can ignore the first 100 years..." Yeah, because humans are sooo good at predicting what happens with humans 100 years in the future.

[@Allenar4]

Just because have not succeeded in predicting the future in the past does not mean we should stop trying to predict the future now. That defeatist mentality is worse than Longtermism, as all we will be left with is a dead planet before our children can live a full life if we don't take actions on predictions we have now. I know I'm taking your words and inferring something you didn't say, but it's a pet peeve of mine that people think just because we have failed at something means we should stop trying.

[@TheMarrethiel]

The future? We aren't even good at remembering things that happened a hundred years ago... you know that pesky covid19(18)

[@kiraPh1234k]

@@Allenar4 You completely misunderstand. Did you read that one should avoid predicting the future? No. You read a dig directly at ignoring the first 100 years of consequences which we have a chance of predicting accurately in favor of our predictions of the far future which we have no chance of predicting accurately. Hopefully the difference between suggesting that one should avoid prediction and the suggestion that ignoring predictable consequences for unpredictable reward is unintelligent is clear.

[@sachitdaniel6688]

Like climate change? That is acting on the scale of decades. We will definitely see some of it in the coming decades but the worst of it after 2100. People started raising the alarm in 1970. A whole 130 years in advance. To many people it makes sense to prepare some backup plans for supervolcanoes, astroid impacts, super plagues and AI risk. We already have some minor league experience with plagues and AI: the less said about the cluster fuck response to COVID with its 1% fatality the better. Facebook, KZbin and Twitter AI's were asked to maximize engagement. It tore society apart by spreading hate speech and misinformation. Maybe we should prepare some plan to be ready if some idiotic company or authoritarian government asked the super AI something stupid a hundred years from now... Isn't it bizzare that the people who were able to plan decades in advance and relentlessly work to become billionaires are the people who worry the most about 10 billion people getting killed 200 years from now?

[@geobot9k]

Y'all should read Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. It's like reading current events but it was written in 1916-7.

[@vicmadrid141]

"He makes a living by multiplying powers of 10"😂

[@vicmadrid141]

@AlHasan Sameh @ ~ 5:00

[@gustavocortico1681]

Savage

[@xrfa7422]

That's quite a racket.

[@giomjava]

That was such a burn 🤣👌

[@r.guerreiro140]

If he was a global warming believer he multiply the multipliers

[@valentetorrez3398]

That deadpan delivery about making a living multiplying numbers by the power of 10 is the most savage burn I’ve heard in a while. 😂

[@Nill757]

Great!! That’s what we need from Internet personalities who arrived solely on the credentials of being a scientist: more “savage burns”.

[@leonardoperelli1322]

This one definitely made me laugh

[@rybec]

Longtermism in a single sentence: "The ends justify the means."

[@EmpReb]

Reality is more might makes right and victor writes the history.

[@rvkice23]

Those Oxford intellectuals would surely prefer the Shakespeare version; "For nothing can seem foul, to those that win." Henry IV, Act one, Scene 1

[@krox477]

Yup as long as the goal is reached anything should be done for the goal

[@aldousd666]

"if the future thinks I owe it something, I'll wait till it sends an invoice" Best line ever

[@sachitdaniel6688]

Like climate change? I'll be dead by the time it matters. Yet I do think I owe it to the future

[@jgunther3398]

@@sachitdaniel6688 the person in the video is squinting to read from a prompter and hoping to get followers. My gut feeling is she would say anything

[@RandomAmbles]

@@jgunther3398 That person is Sabine Hossenfelder. She's an excellent physicist and philosopher and deserves respect. I don't like her presentation style either, and I think she hasn't done her research on this topic away from her primary fields of interest. But she's still incredibly intelligent and typically very diligent and rigorous about her work. Have we met?

[@Mandragara]

@@sachitdaniel6688 You're using the term 'owe' fairly loosely. You can feel you have a duty to the future, but to 'owe' something implies you have a debt.

[@Rick_Cavallaro]

@@Mandragara It's very common to say things like "you owe it to yourself to eat healthy". I don't think I'd try to parse "owe" too carefully.

[@tysonbrinacombe]

People will literally invent an entire branch of philosophy to feel good about not having any emotional attachment to real humans.

[@nomizomichani]

What is real?

[@Joe--]

Exactly this!

[@venusianblivet9518]

That’s every philosophy 🙃

[@real_pattern]

@@venusianblivet9518?

[@notanemoprog]

To be fair, it is literally biologically impossible to have an "emotional attachment to real humans" when n(humans) exceeds single digits, or double digits AT BEST.

[@dennisclapp7527]

Thank you Sabine! This episode is, at the same time; enlightening, frightening, and funny. How is that possible? "Pascal's Mugger" made me laugh out loud.

[@mikhailryzhov9419]

Yeah, a nice rephrase of the classical Pascal's wager.

[@wasdwasdedsf]

@@mikhailryzhov9419 yea, not at all

[@michaeltellurian825]

@@wasdwasdedsf yeah, it pretty much is

[@wasdwasdedsf]

@@michaeltellurian825 in the sense that if you isolate all the factors and create a scenario in which the parameters of the pascals wager is met, then the pascal wager is true... and in that sense of the way in which pascals wagers arguments are phrased about virtually infinity potential payoffs being of immense utillity and something one should take into consideration when making grand decisions about a species futuer in the universe... then those aspects of these things are very similar. i know thats not the way whifch you thought they were similar in however, you thought they were because they were both wrong in their assertions. if you could prove why pascals wager is wrong it would help a lot

[@wasdwasdedsf]

@@michaeltellurian825 any argument

[@appa609]

I can't imagine any plausible event that would kill a billion people without also posing an existential risk to humanity.

[@JoeyVol]

Right. If that many people die, the world could easily become so destabilized that nuclear weaponry may appear on the black market without anyone to police the new system that once was a nations military. Leading to, yeah, nuclear Armageddon. I know people don’t like to talk about it or think about it, but it’s still the biggest risk to humanity.

[@globalist1990]

Exactly

[@peterpankert3810]

An all out atomic war. Peter Thiel will survive this for years in his bunker in New Zealand. One of a few thousand people on planet Earth. The bonus: he will get killed by his security team after that because they will realise that he is only exploiting them and they don't need this grifter anymore.

[@getsideways7257]

Well, they are expecting you to accept "longtermism" and either jump out the window yourself or let them prod you "in the right direction". Of course, since they are the only "preventers of existential threats", you kicking them the same direction is an act of gross escalation of the said threat and should be avoided at all costs (by removing you from the equation... just in case).

[@Dingdongwitchisdead]

There is a certain book that speaks of a future where 1/3 of humanity is wiped out. So by the end of the century when population reaches 11 billion there could be a reduction of 3 billion.

[@user-yq2wk6yg8s]

I really love the deadpan comedy used to make serious points. Sabine, you rock!

[@josephvanname3377]

Elon Musk tortures and murders monkeys. Elon musk is like Jeffrey Dahmer but for the monkeys.

[@isaacdunstan6000]

Thanks for adding a voice of reason to youtube Sabine. I feel like those who think critically enough the call rubbish on a lot of what's talked about in the public sphere are drastically underrepresented in public discourse. I hope others add their voices to the discussion and we see a shift in attitudes in society to something a bit more reasonable and evidence based than the simplified mantras and deference to authority figures that we have now.

[@hyperbaroque]

Even if "s.h.t.f." (or as these wealthy wannabe-transhumanist futurists refer to it, "the event" comes to pass,) having these criticisms to consider means perhaps knowing better than to follow their lead and hole-up inside some bunker enclave and instead work with your community to soften the hardship of whatever "the event" entails. There was an interesting article written about this recently, where it was exposed that these "longtermists" are actually paying good money to consultants to be told where is the best place for a giant underground sustainable living bunker and how best to control everyone's mind within it. As it turns out, the author hates the idea and found an expert who basically said the best thing to do if you see a problem developing would be: stop causing the problem to be worse; work with people, together, to mitigate the effects of the problem; maybe solve the problem before it happens (and if this means just going back to the prrvious step, and if it's also likely that the previous step is just repeating the first step, maaayyyybe don't be a superwealthy creepazoid who doesn't care if humanity suffers just so you don'r ever have to.) Basically the expert invests in sustainable food independent communities. His argument is, if s.h.t.f. my response to the barbarians at the gate is going to be to give them food. So before s.h.t f. I'm going to just start putting food production close to urban areas so that when there is a break down in logistics like we have already seen this pandemic, we don't have people starving in the first place.

[@DrDeuteron]

But the authority figures get to decide what is evidence, or did you miss that?

[@Vzzdak]

It is crude to construct some manner of economic present value calculation weighted in human lives. Throw that concept away. Instead, think about the possibility that humans are the absolutely only space-faring species in the universe. How can this be posited? By considering the extreme rarity of Earth being able to sustain life, and that the evolution of that life created vast deposits of energy reserves for us to experiment with. Under this assumption, it is unclear whether our existence matters, except in the sense that we are an opportunity to go forth into the universe. Why? We won't know until we go, and there won't be anyone else to make the attempt.

[@Vzzdak]

That said, it was Frank Herbert with his Dune series who posited the concept of a Golden Path, where extinction of the human race was highly probable, unless care was taken to carefully consider our policy decisions. For example, the Food Pyramid was proposed as a means to improve nutrition, but it was secretly a scheme for manufacturers to sell products. (Resulting in broad health problems across generations.) Or consider the Russian-backed environmentalists who convinced the Germans to shut down their nuclear power plants. Or any government regime or elitist organization that advocates for sacrifices to be made, whilst quietly manipulating policy decisions to retain their privilege and wealth.

[@chriskennedy2846]

@@DrDeuteron And the authority figures - who are actually the muggers in the dark alley (discussed in this video) operate on the premise that they are not the muggers - in fact they are protecting you from the muggers. So they tell you they are robbing your wallet for your own good and with that you can always walk away feeling happy and good about yourself.

[@VinayakaHalemane]

As with everything in life, this too requires a balance. A balance between planning for the long term and thriving in the short term.

[@tommortensen]

I'd actually recommend 'What We Owe the Future' - especially after watching Sabine's excellent video highlighting the issues of longtermism. It touches on other interesting ideas apart from improving the odds for long-term survival of the human race, e.g., the idea that the future must be worth living. If the morals and societal structures we pass on to the future are totally fine with sacrificing a billion people, there is a real risk that such a future would not be worth living in for most people. My main takeaway from the book is that we need to both avoid getting ourselves killed as a species AND pass on values that bring out the best in humans. If we succeed at the first and fail at the second, we will have done more harm than good to the universe.

[@lethanhminh8001]

Honestly a good take rather than just BILLIONS DOLLAR MAN LIKE IT THEN IT MUST BE BAD

[@krox477]

Is present really worth living? We have all kinds of human problems

[@Murdock444]

​​@@krox477 You're asking the wrong question. The fact is that life is probably an inevitable result of the laws of this universe, just like stars or planets are. You, or someone else, or something else, will live on despite anyones personal opinion on the matter. Life just goes on, and on, and on. So it's better to focus on how to live well, and live on, regardless of the situation we find ourselves in. 🤷🏻‍♂️

[@HakunaMatata-os1og]

Longtermism, meet the Butterfly Effect. Every time we devalue life in the present, it doesn't bode well for the future. Maybe longtermists should count themselves as one of those existential threats we'll have to face along our path to the future.

[@quantumblur_3145]

They know they're existential threats; why do you think they insulate themselves behind money and layers of bureaucracy?

[@HakunaMatata-os1og]

"Thank for being my active fan you have been selected for today's giveaway session hit me up" So I looked ^this^ up on net, and apparently some use KZbin and Telegram to get folks to send $, and even go in for second helpings, pretending to be recovery agents, so they can $ you a second time. This is similar to those emails that wind up in your inbox from a Prince in Timbuktu. Beware and be educated.

[@HakunaMatata-os1og]

I get the longtermist mindset of finding actual modern (and past) masses of humans disappointing, or even disgusting at times, but still loving the concept of humanity for its inspiration, possible uniqueness (or at least extreme rarity), and its potential to evolve and eventually do great things. Here is the thing that longtermists don't seem to get, however. The very thing that makes modern society, modern humans, so unattractive, is the very same thing that these longtermists are advocating more of. When you neglect the care, comfort, and nurturing of today's humans, because you have chosen to write them off, you invariably set up a vicious cycle, creating a "hell on Earth", a bleak hopeless dystopia, that dooms future generations to repeat those same patterns. This is common to many of the modern day "-isms", whether it is communism, socialism, capitalism, authoritarianism, fascism, absolutism, evangelism, fundamentalism, and now you can add longtermism to the list. All of these have something in common; they all preach that their teachings are more important than the comfort, nurturing, health, or lives of individual humans. They all hold that adherence to their ideology is worth the suffering and sacrifice of humans (never of themselves, interestingly), for the supposed future fruits that their ideology magically promises to the future. I, for one, would be terrified to live on some isolated Martian colony, with Elon Musk as its "fearless leader", and my total dependence on him in that desolate alien environment, where no one can hear me scream.

[@VikingTeddy]

The whole -ism is something someone pulled out if their ass to justify their horrible practices. Just more wool over our eyes. These re not smart people. It makes me sick to see so many people in the comments praising these slave drivers. Sabine thinks too highly of her audience, should have underlined how horrible these people are. Most of us aren't very smart and now we have people who think Musk is somekind of humanitarian (*shudder*) I do understand that she'd want to be "apolitical" and be as inoffensive as possible, but that's unfortunately not how it turns out.

[@HakunaMatata-os1og]

@@VikingTeddy In all fairness, Musk has his positive aspects, in helping to promote technologies that humans should at least consider adopting. But being a humanitarian, or compassionate leader of humankind is definitely not something for which I would count on him.

[@seth_sesu]

To paraphrase the great philosopher, Dolly Parton: when confronted with the dilemma of saving a life today or saving 10 lives in the future; always do what is right in the here and now. And the future has a way of working itself out. - Holographic Dolly Parton, The Orville season 3

[@dubiousName]

This!

[@bobsmith-dn1xw]

Longhand for "screw the future, live for the day".

[@seth_sesu]

@@bobsmith-dn1xw you’re straw manning. “always do what is right in the here and now” doesn’t mean screwing the future. … unless you can’t read

[@bobsmith-dn1xw]

...and the future has a way of working itself out. Meaning only regard the present, do not give regard to the future as it will work itself out. How is that strawmanning the quote?

[@seth_sesu]

@@bobsmith-dn1xw by all means, continue being dumb 🙂

[@JimmyTulip1]

It's always a pleasure to hear about the need to make sacrifices for the greater good from a few people owning half the world. I think "Longtermism" is just a fancy word for a major god complex personality disorder.

[@alphamorion4314]

Yeah, kinda like the whole "What's YOUR carbon footprint?" shtick invented by the very same companies that put out 90% of the pollution nowadays. Just shifting the blame and manipulating perception on the matter, so they always come out of it "clean". These people tell us to make sacrifices for the greater good, while being the very same ones that are destroying everyone's future.

[@toi_techno]

Sci-fi is full of dynastic corporations. These nasty entrepreneurial nerds have got this into their monomaniacal heads.

[@pslanez]

This sums it up. Unfortunately when people gain success their egos inflate. It's funny that when anyone earn over a billion dollars it's almost inevitable they believe they can control the universe and determine the next millennia.

[@michoxi]

Elon still works twice as hard as you and sleeps on the factory floor. It's a similar pleasure to justify your own potential ignorance with the fact others have more influence

[@pslanez]

@@michoxi Elon probably works 1000 times harder than me but so did a scientist called Thomas Midgley Jr. a man who was accidentally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. Hard work and financial success does not automatically mean you are a positive influence for humanity even if your ideology says you are.

[@GaryBickford]

It might be useful to apply the amortization principle to the longtermist approach. The value of future benefits must be devalued in an inverse power function, as the benefit generated by any present or near-term individual may have positive long term effect, so the loss of that individual has greater impact than that of a future indvidual.. This alters the longtermist equation to value the near-term positive actions and prevention of near-term catastrophes.

[@Marewig]

That was the exact thing that ran in my head when I heard the completely out-there idea! The billionaires undoubtedly assess potential investments by their present value, which is the future value times the discount factor. Yet when it comes to lives saved, they emphasise future value. These future lives also happen to be located at some unspecific aeons in the future. ...would they gladly invest a good chunk of their wealth on an investment proposal that woolly and bare in details? That would only earn back in at least 1000 years? I think not. I smell a scam.

[@esterhudson5104]

Hey Gary, that’s pretty good…

[@esterhudson5104]

@@Marewig let’s take that a step further…maybe they aren’t really billionaires, at present. Lol👍 and if they’re not…they’re just influencers…

[@joseph-jg2ie]

Well said!

[@jumpingturtle8830]

That's been discussed in longtermist literature. A pretty strong counterpoint IMO- even a 1% yearly drop in value, applied in reverse, would imply that King Tut mattered about 50,000 times as much as every modern-day human put together. It would mean we should be happy to force everyone today to lose 50 years of healthy life in exchange for pharaoh boy living an additional 9 hours. Probably the best approach I've heard to avoid the sort of extreme results that crop up whenever people attempt to think about population ethics is "moral uncertainty". Basically, you look at a problem from every perspective you can think of, weight the results according to how convincing that perspective is, and look at the combined perspectives' recommendation. When some theories say something is very important the compromise says to spend effort on it, but when something is abhorrent to some theories you avoid it or find non-abhorrent workarounds. Eg, there's many ethics formulations that focus on the people around you to the exclusion of the wider world. There's many that say the greater number of people matter more. Moral uncertainty would generally say to split your resources between the two focuses. Similarly, it would generally tell you the greater good is very important, but you should avoid strategies that involve doing bad things to achieve it. It would also tell us to put a lot of effort into making sure neither the current world or the long term future is a dystopia.

[@atg6432]

Sabine has a keener philosophical mind than many famous philosophers today, and an unwaveringly humane approach to each topic on this channel. Also an impeccable sense of humor. Thank you.

[@parsahasselhoff7986]

Trained scientists often make better philosophers than literary people. But unfortunately most philosophy departments lean towards a literary disposition.

[@cwtrex]

Eh, I find sometimes she misses the obvious - this video is a perfect example of that. IMO, the perfect position is usually in the middle and this is no different. Neither extremes of short-termists vs longtermists are correct. What good does a million more lives tomorrow do if we are all gone in 10 or 100 years? Additionally, I also do not agree that simply having more brains living and breathing equates to a positive outcome of brain power. Long term planning on some level needs to be performed to ensure both human longevity as well as efficient resource use. Immediate massive impacts should obviously be addressed unless of course it dooms the population as a whole, but human kind on both a global and group level (country, state, etc) need to consider appropriate time based goals to ensure some kind of long term thinking is maintained (yearly, per decade, per quarter century, per century, per millennium). Practice in planning along those lines may not improve our ability to predict the future, but could help us respond better regardless of what gets thrown at us while hopefully not losing sight of the short term. Balance wherever possible should be preferred.

[@Pincer88]

My thoughts exactly!

[@makuru_dd3662]

@@cwtrex I am pretty sure she thought of this but telling that would crash the pasing in to a black hole, going ever deeper but somehow never going further

[@stylis666]

@@parsahasselhoff7986 _"Trained scientists often make better philosophers than literary people. But unfortunately most philosophy departments lean towards a literary disposition."_ I've thought about that a lot and I think I have an idea why that is, especially the first part. Literary people tend to extrapolate on words and ideas and get lost in them without ever testing any of it to see if they're still on a functional path. Scientists on the other hand are more like:" You know, it still also has to work for it to, you know, work."

[@ideafood4U]

Your videos keep getting better and better. Sophistication meets humor. Keep on . . . for the long term.

[@dkblack1289]

I really would like to thank Sabine and her team. She simply reminds me of the best of Germans....Max Plank, Leibniz...and hey, that philosophy wildman, Nietzsche and so many more. She combines science, philosophy, humour and honesty in away that is difficult to describe.

[@davidemelia6296]

I appreciate that you didn't bring Heidegger up 😂

[@dkblack1289]

@@davidemelia6296 Why don't you think Heidegger belongs to the German geniuses? How can a genius like Heidegger be judged on his political correctness? You are simply wrong my man. Perhaps you don't understand Heidegger as he is very impenetrable.

[@Unknown-jt1jo]

@@dkblack1289 Heidegger was a bit of a Nazi, is one problem with him.

[@1258-Eckhart]

Patronistic nonsense

[@humphrey307]

Describes the channel perfectly and then says it's difficult to describe.

[@joseph7858]

Sabine, I like this format way better than the other one you‘ve just started… ❤

[@getrandom4]

Maybe the longtermists can be crashed by asking "What is the existential risk of longtermists killing us all by making the wrong decision?"

[@mreese8764]

If the risk is bigger than 10^-20 we should kill 1 billion longtermists. If it's bigger than 10^-26 we should kill 1000 longtermists. It's simple math. The longtermists will be all to willing to go.

[@clown134]

con men like Elon musk don't care about long-term decision making. capitalists like him are only concerned about short-term profit gains

[@DanielRMueller]

I am a time traveller from the only timeline that lives long enough for humans to develop time travel, and in my timeline, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel give all their money and wealth to a government-controlled regenerative energy investment fund by 2025 and then donated their bodies to medical research. I am from 2 billion years in the future and we've settled several galaxies already on trillions of planets, and we've figured out how to stop the heat death of the universe and are also spinning up new universes that we can settle or experiment with, as we see fit. Everything worked out pretty well so far. We used some of our early experiments with new universes (when we could only observe, not settle them yet) to show that any alternation where Musk and Thiel don't make this generous donations, humanity never gets that far. You might think that I'm lying, but notice how there are no time travellers that contradict my story, so time travel might be impossible, or there are no timelines at all where humans advance enough to build a time travel machine and are concerned about what Thiel or Musk do with their money and life. But if I am not lying, everything works out for longtermism if Musk and Thiel provide their generous donations. Their donation and sacrifice will ensure the existence of trillions of people. So clearly they should do this.

[@UserHuge]

Huh? The decision most long-termists take now is to reduce greedy use of technology and making technology safer. There seem no risks arising from such a decision.

[@manguy01]

PRECISELY

[@RichardRoy2]

Thank you, Sabine. Well covered. Isn't there always someone who offers a promise without substance for the sake of suffering in the present. It's like an old scam that keeps on getting rehashed.

[@MrClockw3rk]

I don’t think Elon musk is scamming society. He’s running multiple companies that build important tech.

[@stephenfrenger5000]

Mao and Stalin were, obviously, longtermists. Great company to fine oneself among.

[@RichardRoy2]

@@MrClockw3rk You're entitled to that thought.

[@wasdwasdedsf]

what the f are you talking about??

[@wasdwasdedsf]

@@RichardRoy2 and you people are entitled to strawman this thing into whatever you want while knowing nothing about it, so that you can feel superior telling these successful people theyre wrong

[@iloveaviation-burgerclub-a8145]

Sabine, it feels good having you here in the internet keeping the science flag of causality and evidence. If only all content - no matter what topic it has - could be a bit more on this side. Cheers from 🇩🇪

[@Nill757]

You see that rant of mocking contempt for others she disagrees with as an example of “causality and evidence”? WtF? Sure, cheers from Germans.

[@teilzeitkommunist2222]

The child dealing with the trolley problem killed me

[@MedlifeCrisis]

Imagine if the amount of (entirely justified) snark contained in this video (the powers of 10 line is incredible) increased with each subsequent generation of humans. Snark would eventually comprise 99% of all matter in the universe and reality as we know it would collapse into a sarcastic singularity. This is true longtermism.

[@pajaf0341]

Love it, when my most favourite black-humored realists comment on each others most delicious takedowns. I'm no native speaker but taking all the hot air out of sth. to get it down to earth could be called a takedown, couldtn't it?

[@randomthoughts6625]

Lol people I follow follow each other

[@Andrew_Fernie]

A wise man once said: 'It's hard to make predictions. Especially about the future.'

[@katherineg9396]

Sounds like Yogi Berra.

[@Andrew_Fernie]

@@katherineg9396 Dr Karl Kruszelnicki

[@JeffCaplan313]

Did he predict that?

[@spiritualanarchist8162]

.It's certainly easier in hindsight.

[@RagnarVonLodbrok]

How can you not love her logic & humor 🤣

[@HeavyMetalMouse]

The main fallacy in both the Longtermist ideal and Pascal's Mugger is the assumption that the probability of those future events is static regardless of the specifics of your plans or the terms offered. In point of fact, the probabilities involved are *dynamic*, and change based on the actions taken by those involved in direct ways, creating feedback that needs to be taken into account. In the case of Pascal's Mugger, the probability that you won't receive a payout is not solely the probability that the mugger is lying, but also depends on whether or not they are even physically capable of performing the payout - if they are offering a payout of 1 trillion to 1 on your wallet, there are probably less than 10 people on the entire planet that *can* make good on that promise - what is the probability that this random person is one of them? Probably much less than 10 out of 8 billion. *then* you can consider whether, if they are one of those people, you can trust them to make good on that promise. Suddenly, the expected payout is much less than the loss of your wallet by orders of magnitude... and if the Mugger proposes a payout that is higher to compensate for that lower probability of payout, *that changes the probability*, because now there are even fewer (perhaps even zero!) people in the world who could successfully make that payout, even if they wanted to, and even if they are one of those rare people, the probability within that given that they would give that extreme amount of money to someone at random is even smaller. As such, the response to the decline the Mugger's offer, under most circumstances, is entirely rational - you just have to correctly note that the probabilities involved *are not static*. A similar response can be made against 'pure longtermism' that disregards the short term wellbeing of currently living humans in order to ensure the longevity of the species as a whole. In this case, one major fallacy comes from neglecting that *the long term is made of the short term*. Your long term probabilities are not independent of the choices you make in distributing your resources - by neglecting the short term, you are *less likely* to have the kind of future that you are basing those long term calculations on, that you want to support. If you do not take care of the people who exist now, many of the future people whom you want to protect are likely to never exist. A second major issue with the argument is the assumption that it merely the *amount* of human life that matters, and not the *quality* of that life. Diverting half a longtermist's resources away from long term existential threat prevention towards short-term altruism might reduce the possible total number of future lives by half, roughly, but (if spent wisely) will certainly ensure that the lives current people can build for future people are much more than twice as high quality, increasing the net quality of life in the world as time goes on. Since quality of life increases steadily with resources up to a certain point, before leveling out to diminishing returns after a certain reasonable level, their will be in inflection point between the two somewhere - there should be some optimal division of resources between short term and long term (perhaps a division that changes over time) that could maximize, or nearly maximize, total quality of life in the long term. Finding that value is... obviously difficult, but it clearly isn't 'all or nothing'.

[@earthenscience]

Like most mainstream philosophies, longtermism seems to be another incomplete and poorly posed philosophy that doesn't provide much value. We should hope that the programmer of this simulation *does* pull the plug. Let the misery end. If there is no aforementioned plug, then at least I agree with the longtermists that extinction should be avoided...for the time being that is. You see, the goal should always be to increase quality of life...not to mindlessly spread to planets like a contagion. Of course none of these technocrats probably have the tech to actually build civilizations on other planets yet, except maybe Mars at most. They haven't done it of course because they don't have the technology to... for these big tech corporations tend to be artificial monopolies, not monopolies that grew naturally. So, to be more specific, one of the goals should be to increase IQ, and another to increase quality of life. These two goals aren't necessarily aligned, since increased IQ might result in more boredom and lower quality of life. However, the goal to increase IQ is necessary and I will explain why. There needs to be humans with enough IQ to determine the truth of reality, from there to determine if it is overall worth it to continue existence, or discontinue existence. Humans are not intelligent enough to make that decision currently, so... for the time being... I agree with the longtermists that extinction should be avoided. And with the IQ, only a small portion of humans would be required to have super intelligence, the rest could live happily hedonistic lives. There is a chance that the super geniuses determine that existence is objectively better than non-existence, in which case we should double our efforts to avoid extinction. However, longtermists, afaik, have no such backing to their claims and just stand up and tautologically posit that existence should be sustained. In summary, if the primary goal of longtermism is to avoid extinction, it isn't the best platform for that goal. Survival traditionally has been about the short-term, so some short term philosophy might be better equipped to ensure human survival than longtermism. Then there is thriving...once survival is secured, then the next step is thriving. Longtermism seems somewhat nihilistic, and, at least from what I've seen from this video, doesn't seem to offer much of thriving either. An attitude of not caring about billions of humans doesn't seem mathematically condusive to long-term human survival either. Ironically, some of these longtermists seem to be building AI, perhaps the greatest probability to cause human extinction besides global warming. Note: I am in favor of AI, I just find that to be somewhat ironic. ____

[@itzyourmom2646]

I don't think any reasonable longtermist is going to hold that the short term is meaningless or isn't the cause of the future. If for the sake of argument we take longtermism to be taking part in a sort of hedonic calculus it is still in a longtermists best interest to, for example, live life at a reasonable standard to satisfy themselves just enough that emotional issues don't impact their research towards, for example climate change. The problem is when people aren't thinking about what's going to happen to the world if a meteor strikes or it's strongly arguable that resources aren't being properly allocated towards good causes. Here's an example of a longtermist argument I agree with. Premise 1: We can survive for a very, very long time, & if we do, there is the potential for trillions of sentient life being produced P 2: If misaligned ai, corrupt government, or something else doesn't plunge us in to a dystopia or destroy us, technology will improve our well-being over time Conclusion: Ensuring the future and stability of civilization will cause the most well-being.

[@Abmotsad]

Your analysis is effing brilliant. I enjoyed reading it. I was a Philosophy grad student, in the master's program at BU. It was amazing (and troubling) to me the degree to which philosophers get caught up in their little pet ideas and *utterly fail* to even consider the actual consequences. The three paragraphs you wrote are a far better consideration of this issue than I've sometimes seen in 400-page dissertations. One guy's entire dissertation was based on the idea that there was no such thing as objective truth. "Oh really," I responded, "Is it objectively true that there is no such thing as objective truth?" He just blinked at me. I had intended to go on to PhD studies, but after hearing the umpteenth hour-long conversation about whether or not physical objects *actually* exist, I just took my master's and became a carpenter.

[@GetUpFalcon]

ROFL!!

[@nathanlonghair]

Thanks for writing that, now I don’t have to spend hours dodging my boss while trying to frame it myself 😉

[@jameslouder]

The numbers bandied about by longtermists are of such magnitude that without the aid of supercomputers we wouldn't be able to contemplate them at all. But behind that, it appears we have just gone back two centuries, to the days of Malthus and Ricardo, only with bigger toys.

[@anandsharma7430]

It seems they all took Asmiov's Foundation character Hari Seldon too seriously, and now want to be the first Hari Seldon in real life.

[@jujukawa8049]

I think by ensuring everyone currently lives a good healthy life with access to contraception and education, future outcomes will be better. I don't value the quantity of lives, but the quality. I also don't value future hypothetical lives as much as I value current lives. I value my little brother way more than I value my potential to have kids in the future.

[@luciadegroseille-noire8073]

The quality of mercy is not strained.

[@piernikowyloodek]

Yes, this.

[@kisfekete]

Is this the philosophical equivalent of 'Hey, if you don't eat anything for the next 10 years and you'll be able to buy all the cool things with the money you saved!' ?

[@Hubris030]

Incredibly important contribution. Thank you Sabine!

[@robertpearson5410]

There may be a very basic reason for this philosophy among the rich. It allows them to act with impunity in the present. It's okay if they hoard wealth while making others poor because it serves the greater future good, which only they can unlock the potential of. It justifies their methods and absolves any semblance of guilt they might have had. It justifies their wealth. I doubt any of them really care about the future, except maybe to contain their legacy.

[@br3nto]

It justifies them in treating the population as indentured slaves to imagined future debts.

[@TheMarrethiel]

Seeing of course that they are rich and deserve it. They must then be more able to see the real problems. You know, serious things like revamping a meaningless social media platform that only media companies and bots use.

[@davidturner9827]

Other people being rich doesn’t make you poor. In fact it’s quite the opposite: the more rich people, the better off everyone else is. This is because wealth is *created* by human activity. It’s not a fixed quantity that gets (re-)distributed, which if you think about it for more than five seconds is plainly obvious.

[@jgunther3398]

are you actually a sentient being?

[@ittaiklein8541]

@@davidturner9827 wonderful! Now you've said it, now rigorously show us how that's true. Rigorously! Not just handwaving! Oh yes! and no gobbledygook please. The platform is yours. Good luck.

[@erikitter6773]

For Longtermism the problem is not just assigning proper costs to the events they claim to be concerned about, but also (and I think more fundamentally so) that we need to assign some believes about their competency to predict the future as a whole in a proper stochastic way, which is I think what Pinker points to. A very easy objection might be pointing out that one of the people lost in the irrelevant misteps might have come up with a solution to one of the later exestential threats -- that others won't find. I however don't claim to be able to put a number on it.

[@minikawildflower]

Agree. I think thinking long term is good. I think ELON being the guy making longterm decisions is not a good idea.

[@donwinston]

The probability that humans will become extinct in the future is 1.0. It is not debatable.

[@christophhenrikweber]

I think there's an even earlier problem with the logic. If humanity's popuplation, plotted over time, is under a curve, it's not rational to assume that we are in the tiny slope, early at the beginning. Wouldn't Bayesian reasoning suggest if we know nothing else, we have to assume we're under the bulk - probably near the peak of the total curve? That takes care of the weights, even without a moral argument. And THEN you have to add cost and compentency assumptions...

[@ArawnOfAnnwn]

"A very easy objection might be pointing out that one of the people lost in the irrelevant misteps might have come up with a solution to one of the later existential threats -- that others won't find" - technically there's an easy counterargument to this as well. Unless that solution is magical in requiring some sort of chosen one (in which case it isn't scientific), that solution COULD be invented by a lot of other people. Stipulating that others won't find it is itself a prediction, and a requirement for this argument to work. There's no reason to believe others won't find it, so just getting as many people alive and working on that issue as possible maximizes the chances that said solution will be discovered by one of them and the threat averted. This is essentially the same fallacy as when people argue against abortion by listing some set of characteristics and then asking if you'd abort the fetus - then if you say yes, triumphantly announcing that you've just killed Beethoven (or some other famous historical figure). Yeah no, it could've been anyone.

[@wasdwasdedsf]

existential risk reduction theory is merely the philosophy of adding a dimension of time on the analysis of the most effecient way to produce good in the world. like asking the question of whether a thousand lives a thousand years from now is better than saving one tomorrow, and how much better. a life has different value depending on where in the universes timeline its lived? by that logic, your life today is worth less than the life of a roman citizen thousands years ago. what you then arrive at is the obviousness that, given the playing field we have been born into, which is the insane scale of theuniverse, the thing that has exponential value creation is improving the pobabillity of us to colonize it. highlighted well in philosopher bostrums research papers if one were to beinterested in reading more

[@f0xygem]

Sabine, this is your best video ever! You have explained to me something I have been wondering about--what is the philosophical underpinnings that make these Mega billionaires tick. With my new understanding of their philosophy I now see that they seem to be the secular version of those religiosos who sacrifice their entire life as it is today for their supposed afterlife. The long-termists are making that self-same error. I think there should be a renaissance of the Utilitarians of the 18th century. Their philosophy works on all levels--judging the past, fully experiencing the present, and extrapolating for the future.

[@elainehammond7456]

I think it's also useful to look at people and groups like Eliezer Yudkowsky and MIRI in seeing how Effective Altruism has been twisted into longtermism. These are the people who had existential crises over Roko's Basilisk. It only gets crazier.

[@stewitr]

Sabine, you are bloody awesome. Thank you for another great and honest video.

[@adamflux2]

Every anthropology curriculum includes a section where we study the eugenicists and the contributions of the discipline to that movement and it seems to me that the mathematicians need something similar.

[@pmcgktr]

It’s incredible how much you’ve grown as a creator. Love your videos. From 🇬🇧🇮🇪

[@Abmotsad]

One more thing: I've been watching Dr. Hossenfelder's videos for years. This is the best one EVER. I love that she made no effort to hide the sneering contempt she has for these nut jars.

[@Nill757]

Oh yes, yes, that’s what’s great about listening to the “Dr”, “sneering contempt” on the internet. That way, it’s legit to feel superior to others, right, because Sabine is a Dr? Peer reviewed contempt, so it must be correct.

[@Abmotsad]

@@Nill757 Are you OK? You seem upset. 😃

[@Nill757]

@@Abmotsad Am I? I thought you were into “sneering contempt” for “nut jars” so I tossed out some more, as I’m here just to serve you. You recall who wrote those words, or forgot already?

[@Abmotsad]

@@Nill757 How would I know if you're upset? I was asking you. Again, I'm concerned, are you OK? You seem to be babbling incoherently.

[@dougsinthailand7176]

Very good subject, Sabine! I’m thinking that if one’s short term plan is so blind that it excludes helping the poor or reducing suffering, then one’s long term plan may be assumed to be as blind as well.

[@sachitdaniel6688]

Just like with climate change? As a person who lives in the third world it's blatantly obvious that nearly every problem we have can be made better right now with more fossil fuels: more coal means more electricity and cheaper steel and concrete. We could afford better houses and in factories maybe steel will become cheaper than lives instead of the other way round. More petroleum means cheaper everything because of the crippling transport costs that are added to everything we buy. More natural gas means cheaper fertilizer which most of our farmers can barely afford but desperately need. Hell, if global fossil fuel extraction was more, we could spend less on our import costs and use the savings to buy other things. Or maybe if people didn't keep fear mongering about a few dozen people getting radiation poisioning ten thousand years in the future, hospitals can afford to spend more on treating thousands of patients today. How? By spending less on the ridiculous quantities of expensive diesel to make up for the daily power cuts. Yet we all agree make sacrifices now for the future.

[@ooooneeee]

​@@sachitdaniel6688 climate change and habitat loss are hitting and will hit third world countries the hardest. Extreme weather, desertification, soll degradation, zoonotic pandemics, resource wars, refugees etc. Sure, cheap fossil fuels can boost your economies in the short term, but in the long term delaying decarbonisation and lowering CO2 emissions for too long will hurt your economies and societies more than cheap fossil fuels will help them. Also, third world countries are given more leeway to emit more in the short term than Western countries to make up for your much lower emissions in the past.

[@chriskelly6574]

It is safe to assume, I think, that these people do not have the same values and views as us peasants.

[@opossumlvr1023]

@@ooooneeee Increased CO2 content in the atmosphere makes plants more drought resistant, satellite data shows the edges of deserts turning green. We need more CO2 not less.

[@sachitdaniel6688]

@@ooooneeee yes, it will. But the pertinent thing to this discussion is that it will hit the hardest in few decades from now when many people who are alive now will be peacefully dead and gone. Yet these people worry about and work towards a better long term future for humanity. Despite the fact that it has large immediate negative consequences. A lot of these people live in places that are unlikely to face severe consequences. A lot of them don't even have children of their own. It's a bit misleading to rely on a snappy comeback about the future sending an invoice when you think climate change is a problem

[@coolcat23]

The video playing starting from 14:47 is just gold. A simple solution to the age-old ethics train switch problem. :)

[@esausantibanez3702]

The egos of these rich guys is frightening. To think that just because you are rich it is your duty to “save humanity” is just… I mean, if you have the means to help people, go for it. But it doesn’t mean you are the solution.

[@MarshallMathersthe7th]

I don't think it is because they are rich, but because people who are rich tend to be smart. Idk the other 2 guys.. But Elon Musk has a pretty high iq. Smart people tend to overthink alot.

[@esausantibanez3702]

@@MarshallMathersthe7th they may be very smart. But they can do what they are planning because of their wealth. They know they can do it because of the amount of money they have.

[@TacticusPrime]

@@MarshallMathersthe7th Ha! Calling Mr. Blew His Money Buying a Bankrupt Social Media Company smart. He used his daddy's money to make some investments that panned out for him. He isn't smart or skilled at all.

[@justwannabehappy6735]

With great power comes great responsibility. If rich people don't care about the future, what chance does the average Joe have ? Wether we like it or not, it's better to have one rich guy trying to improve the world's future than a thousand poor activists with no real power.

[@esausantibanez3702]

@@justwannabehappy6735 just because that spiderman saying exists doesn’t mean it holds true.

[@mrm1987]

Since I am no accademic, just a worker, left alone to self teach me about the world and everything, by reading books and papers or watching videos like yours, I'll go for that. Grabbing a bag of chips and continue on with watching videos about interesting stuff. Thanks for the chanel. Love your ironicaly undertone.

[@Thomas-gk42]

I´m a hand worker too, and her channel and books are the best way to upgrade my thinking, knowledge and understanding.

[@aeomaster32]

You give me hope for academia with this expose, Sabine. Too many of the elite have an authoritarian streak in them, that has the potential to turn ugly. Who wants to live in a future built on sacrifices of the past, in the name of their "noble" ideal?

[@thornelderfin]

They count only quantity of Humans, not quality. Civilization that treats people as numbers and sacrifices billions is not worth saving.

[@sachitdaniel6688]

Yes, exactly! Like Climate change! Why are we sacrifing the lives of the poor today who don't have fuel, fertilizer and machine made goods just for some vague future generations we won't even be alive to see? Food prices in the third world are so high because of limited diesel to run trucks, coal to make steel and natural gas to make fertilizer! You can show some fancy math about green energy being cheaper but clearly no one in the developing world can afford it yet. However A lot of us agree to suffer now to preserve the world for the future and think it's perfectly reasonable to suffer for a hundred years if it means that every SINGLE ONE OF of our descendants are driven extinct. That is what long termism is. Not wanting every single one of our descendants to be killed because we were too short sighted and selfish to suffer for a few decades.

[@bobsmith-dn1xw]

What sacrifices?

[@RandomAmbles]

@@thornelderfin No, no, that's not quite right. The quantity of positive qualities is closer.

[@RandomAmbles]

@@thornelderfin Not worth saving ay? Sounds like a classic case of neglect bias.

[@KeenanV]

You hit the nail on the head by bringing up Pascal's mugging.

[@br3nto]

It might have relevance if the mugger said: if you don’t give me money now, I’ll hunt down your family and friends and kill them all. I think Roko’s Basilisk might be the better fit here. Pascal’s mugging only provides one way to possibly get the future reward. Now, maybe it’s easy to think that Longtermism dictates only a single way to get the future reward of less existential threat, but that simply doesn’t hold up logically. There will be infinite ways to deal with future existential threats. Using Pascal’s Mugging, just establishes a false dichotomy of either “all or nothing” logic, or disregarding Longtermism entirely. This doesn’t make any sense, because there are valid reasons we should think about the future, but it doesn’t have to be an “all of nothing” approach where we are indentured slaves to the future. There are many ways to handle existential threats. We don’t want to close down the discussion, but rather open it up to “how else can we balance current needs and future needs”. We do this all time both on an individual level and a collective level.

[@GregBakker]

Great video Sabine.

[@eddyimpanis]

The best long term strategy is to ensure that the next generation has the knowledge, morals and desire to survive at least as much as us.

[@TheMaginor]

One additional big problem with longtermism is the assumption that one small elite (or anyone at all) are going to be able to predict what sacrifices in the present are going to increase the likelihood of the survival of humanity that far into the future. Human history shows again and again that these kind of predictions fail as a rule when you go further than 100 years into the future except some times when one random person gets something right by accident. Of course, preventing global warming or trying to de-escalate tensions between nuclear powers are probably pretty safe bets since those are very immediate threats. But if you start talking about sacrificing a billion people in order to make human history go down the exact path you have predicted, then it quickly starts to sound like Stalinism, and we know how that turned out.

[@useodyseeorbitchute9450]

I'd not even consider as safe bet serious curbing global warming as it means slowing down industrial development. (I consider it as rather pick your poison situation)

[@bobsmith-dn1xw]

What sacrifices have they made so far?

[@TheMaginor]

@@bobsmith-dn1xw Who are "they"?

[@pyropulseIXXI]

It is pretty arrogant, because it involves imposing your will on that entire future of humanity, and if you are arguing that they are more important, then you should sit back and not impose your will on them, and let them make the decision of what they find important. Longtermism is literally insane. Just another game the super elite play. Who cares if a billion billion peons die; we elites will keep humanity going! (Of course, the elite will never sacrifice themselves; they sacrifice everyone else, and it is a sacrifice they are willing to make)

[@Rogue_Leader]

Well, it sounds more like Eugenics - famously associated with Nazis - but you go nuts with your McCarthyism.

[@charlesbeaudelair8331]

Very interesting and enlightening. Danke, Sabine.

[@ozorg]

Thx for the upload! ;)

[@josiahclagett7369]

How am I just finding out about Sabine??? Thank you algorithm gods - you've done it again.

[@josephdviviano]

Great research and very funny, I can't wait to watch the rest of your videos!

[@zetsubouda]

I don't particularly NEED science without the gobbledygook since I studied math and engineering but what I do need it with is your measured approach to addressing complex and often sensitive aspects of science. You make science great by first sticking to proven logical, mathematical, scientific methods only when you evaluate any topic. Second you make it great because you don't neglect to remember that science collides with emotion in real life and it's critical not to forget all the complexity that brings to trying to solve any problem, no matter how scientific. Last you keep a dose of cautious optimism that is so much nicer than doom and gloom.

[@BennyJohnson935]

𝚃𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚔𝚜 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚊𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐𝙳𝚘𝚗'𝚝 ꜰ᷈ᴏ᷈ʀ᷈ɢ᷈ᴇ᷈ᴛ᷈ ᴛ᷈ᴏ᷈ ʜ᷈ɪ᷈ᴛ᷈ ᴛ᷈ʜ᷈ᴇ᷈ ꜱ᷈ᴜ᷈ʙ᷈ꜱ᷈ᴄ᷈ʀ᷈ɪ᷈ᴘ᷈ᴛ᷈ɪ᷈ᴏ᷈ɴ᷈ ʙ᷈ᴇ᷈ʟ᷈ 🔔ᴛ᷈ʜ᷈ᴀ᷈ɴ᷈ᴋ᷈ ʏ᷈ᴏ᷈ᴜ᷈ ᴀ᷈ɴ᷈ᴅ᷈ ɪ᷈ ᴡ᷈ɪ᷈ʟ᷈ʟ᷈ ᴀ᷈ʟ᷈ꜱ᷈ᴏ᷈! ɴ᷈ᴇ᷈ᴡ᷈ ꜰ᷈ɪ᷈ɴ᷈ᴅ᷈ɪ᷈ɴ᷈ɢ᷈ꜱ᷈🤫 ᴡ᷈ɪ᷈ᴛ᷈ʜ᷈ ʏ᷈ᴏ᷈ᴜ᷈ ɪ᷈ɴ᷈ ᴀ᷈ ᴍ᷈ᴏ᷈ᴍ᷈ᴇ᷈ɴ᷈ᴛ᷈*# 𝚙𝚛𝚒𝚟𝚊𝚝𝚎𝚕𝚢🕵️‍♀️ 💬💬💲ㄚ✶ᚓ║█♱𝟭𝟰𝟬𝟰𝟮𝟬𝟴𝟳𝟮𝟭𝟰📲█║❍✭✧♣️⍟☚☚♥️ ❗❎𝚗᷈𝚘᷈ 𝚆᷈𝚑᷈â𝚝᷈𝚜᷈ä𝚙᷈𝚙᷈❗📲█║❍✭✧♣⍟☚☚ ❗ɴ᷈ᴏ᷈ ᴡ᷈ʜ᷈âᴛ᷈ꜱ᷈äᴘ᷈ᴘ᷈❗

[@rufuscoppertop330]

Another wonderful, informative and entertaining video.

[@JonBogdanove]

Thank you Doc! Well said!

[@Astronist]

I agree with your conclusion (if I understand you correctly). Arguing that the present generation is "expendable" in the cause of reducing future risks is both moral and practical nonsense. I for example am keen to see the expansion of our civilisation to Mars, and ultimately to the stars, thus diversifying it and making it vastly more robust against any possible threat. But in order to get this growth, I absolutely need the most prosperous and peaceful possible conditions on planet Earth right now, with the best opportunities for all its 8 billion or so people to fulfil their intellectual and career potential. This is because further growth out into the Solar System, and managing the risks of that growth (machine intelligence, artificial biospheres, nuclear weapons, global development, and so on), is in fact a horrendously difficult project. There is no contradiction between short-term good and long-term good, rather we need the former as the basis on which to build the latter.

[@EleneDOM]

I think you've nailed it.

[@alanlight7740]

It's really about balance - and this speaker ought to know it. She has only knocked down a straw man of her own creation.

[@PrincessStabbityStabb]

"If the future thinks I owe it, I'll wait for it to send me an invoice." 🤣🤣 Instant classic.

[@DonQuiKong]

That was a bit polemic in my opinion. Whats the point in fighting climate change, despite "owing" it to the future? (Future as both far future *and* near future here)

[@wysskey1]

No Shit.

[@arieltroncoso9088]

​​@@DonQuiKong Nobody says 'children are the future' anymore, weirdly, but Sabine comes off as someone who believes "our future belongs to the children" - why else would she break down science news without the gobbledygook? To be blunt, the reason we should be fighting is for human benefit and the benefit of the youth - children, nieces, nephews, brothers and sisters. We don't owe it to the 'future', we owe it to them, here and now. We owe it to ourselves and to the planet. The future is only a time, not a place, it's not going to send us any invoices any time soon. But planet Earth certainly is. And the people at top are not paying up.

[@DonQuiKong]

@@arieltroncoso9088 You are just arguing meaningless semantics here while essentially agreeing with me (or me with you vice versa).

[@arieltroncoso9088]

@@DonQuiKong Yes, it is arguing semantics - you asked a question, even if it was rhetorical, and I answered semantically mostly to express disagreement that Sabine's delivery was polemic, I think it was a bad reading of her sentiments there. But on the actual point, I agree with you, though this is still a public forum and I wanted to say something more than just "I agree".

[@EnemyOfEldar]

You're great, Sabine!

[@Zuiyo1974]

Thanks for your videos. I enjoy them thoroughly. Top 5 KZbinr in my book.

[@christopherknight4908]

I think a good reason to never give Pascal's Mugger your money is that the probability that the mugger is lying scales with how much money they are promising to give you in the future. I.E. at the limit of the mugger offering you an infinite return, it is 100% likely that they are lying.

[@notanemoprog]

What if it's God who is mugging you and is testing your faith? Call it _Pascal Mugger's Wager_

[@rainbowkrampus]

@@notanemoprog If it's the god of the Bible, you should throw that evil MFer in jail if you see it.

[@andyk2181]

@@notanemoprog Faith in what? God, if you want to stick a label on something you don't understand, does everything. If it's always god doing everything what difference does it make in this particular situation.

[@notanemoprog]

@@andyk2181 "what difference does it make in this particular situation." I don't know, ask Blaise Pascal, it's his thought experiment

[@kaikaun1]

There is an analogy that can be made with longtermism: efforts to fight existential risk can also create existential risk. Existential risk can scale with efforts to fight it. This can be due to technology (e.g. a system that can redirect asteroids away from Earth can also redirect them to Earth), politics (e.g. a polity with enough power to stop rogue AIs is itself also a threat), philosophy (longtermists seem to be oddly unconcerned with killing!), etc.

[@live_free_or_perish]

I've heard people espouse this philosophy before but I never knew it had a name and formal support through institutions. This channel always teaches me something interesting no matter what the subject is.

[@alquinn8576]

see also Derek Parfit's "repugnant conclusion"

[@RedBatRacing]

Been around for a long time. It's called Machiavellian

[@Seraphim262]

@@RedBatRacing Where did you get this idea? And is it more than a knockout argument or do you have insights on why giving future people moral weight qualifies for this statement?

[@RedBatRacing]

@@Seraphim262 I thought of it myself. Ideas are great like that. I am not questioning the goal of considering future generations, but when it is at the expense of the current generations just because there are less of them, then the choices made need to be put under a microscope. As you have questioned me, so should people with power be questioned. Whether that power is gained through democracy, totalitarianism or mega wealth. I do see similarities in the thinking behind longtermists and Machiavelli. Machiavelli is a warning from history

[@philipm3173]

@@Seraphim262 that's the guise it has but it's really just about justifying horrible acts of violence in the present. Letting masses of people starve or die of neglect is not worth anything and will only ensure constitutional ruin. To create a worthy future, we need to live consciously now, not do unconscionable things in the name of a myth. That's as slippery a slope as it gets.

[@alternative1999]

Sabine you have the best sense of humour. Just woke up to your lecture @5am. Asked God why am I still here. Then you grounded me and I'm now vertical. Thank you!

[@nicholasmaione5694]

Oh Sabine. Always making me laugh while making my brain explode 😅

[@westownsend8228]

I'm always worried about what you'll say in these videos but you are always quite reasonable.

[@maxweber06]

Oh my gosh, Sabine was spitting fire in this video. I love it!

[@crowemagnum1337]

"if the future thinks I owe it something I'll wait for the invoice" 😆 love it.

[@Pec0sbill]

Sabine at her finest. This is why I love her channel. I don’t think wit can get sharper.

[@januslast2003]

The Longtermists don't mind if a 1-year-old Albert Einstein was one of the lives that were sacrificed for the Future, because, given enough time, there'll always be someone else who will look at the available data, and come up with Quantum Physics and Relativity. I calculate that this introduces a time lag in their equations, slows the rate of change, and delays the attainment of Utopia by a billion, billion, billion, billion times. Fantastic video, Dr H, as always.

[@nosuchthing8]

Yes, good point. Given the long termists views, the allies should never have allowed Einstein and other luminaries to work on the a bomb in America

[@bobpurcell5662]

"If the future thinks I owe, then I'll wait until it sends an invoice." Nailed it, Sabine.

[@tcveatch]

In principle the future can never repay the past. That’s not a cute, snappy, effective comeback, that’s the actual problem. Future disaster becomes simply a ignoreable economic externality. If you don’t care, then on your argument, if it pays you today, go ahead and turn the future world into a toxic sludge. Those people who could have lived in a better future world can’t pay you back for doing better by them. So screw them. Your self satisfied and repulsive conclusion: ignore world-destroying technologies. I say on the contrary, destroying the world is a bad idea, and keeping a sharp eye out for world-destroying technologies is a responsibility.

[@pedroaraujo1266]

Yeah, screw the reality of global warming. Let's just do whatever in the present, and we can deal with future consequences once the future arrives. [hint: irony]

[@ArawnOfAnnwn]

​@@pedroaraujo1266 Climate change is about a known and expected problem a few years from now. Longtermism is about oft unclear, and typically highly unlikely, problems centuries or more from now. They sidestep that issue by simply arbitrarily scaling up the expected payoff to ludicrous levels so that even the tiniest chance seems worth obsessing over.

[@pedroaraujo1266]

​@@ArawnOfAnnwn That's not really true. Biorisk and AI risk belong in the present century. They are recognized by their respective fields - I've seen it because I'm interested in the literature, and in working on AI safety. They are likelier to happen than what it would be considered to be "negligible" (as in the case of a big asteroid hitting the planet) - unfortunately. When people neglect such risks because of their "weirdness", or because they find it difficult to relate to them in the present year, they're no different from climate denialists, and I mean it in a nonconfrontational way. Billionares such as Musk and Thiel are self-interested people, and it's a pity that the longtermist community has come to be associated with these figures, but there are real professionals with real concerns on this topic, and we'd do well to listen to them. AGI, especially, will come, and while we're still alive. The implications are big - for lives in the planet and elsewhere. I don't want our planet to go to rack and ruin, and that's why I care about climate change. That's also why I care about biorisk, AI risk, and any other "weird" risk that might prove worthy of consideration. I care, too, because of the prospect of saving lives in other planets from the suffering imposed by nature (and everything is natural, even human societies and our artifices), since I abhore suffering wherever, whenever and however it happens. That being said, I think "nonexistent lives that are guaranteed, or likely enough, to exist" matter a lot more in my considerations than "nonexistent lives that aren't going to exist unless I create them". Either way, I don't think neglecting the present is the way to go to reach that future, and I'm sure most people interested in longtermism don't either. To me, the present is connected with the future (which comes off as an obvious statement), and we also can fight for present and future causes simultaneously, the way we already do when it comes to the climate. I hope I've made a good case, and if you think there's anything worth pointing out, I'm willing to listen.

[@vibrato]

Excellent channel! I have been watching many discussions featuring Sabine. She does not shy away from making tough arguments. I also have to say that her videos are unexpectedly (but pleasantly) funny! Hope to see you on Lex Fridman soon!

[@violjohn]

Interesting, amusing, informative, important. What more can we want? Sabine for President!

[@dnswhh7382]

Thank you, Sabine & team! I very much appreciate your videos. A kind of lighthouse of sanity, with a nice sense of humor.

[@pobembe1958]

It's fine and perhaps beneficial that some people are dedicated to the Longtermist view, the vast majority are not.

[@edgeeffect]

I loved the video clip of the tiny child and the trolley problem!

[@MurCurieux]

Got my chips and clicking on another one of your videos! Doing my part :)

[@jmileshc]

What about 800000 hours and committing your working career towards humanity's future? Not read the book yet either, but just got it as it sounded interesting and forward looking, but am now wondering otherwise... Can't we have a balance of both altruism and thinking long term too? By valuing now and tomorrow. Thank you Sabine.

[@sachitdaniel6688]

As Sabine clearly is trying to hide it from everyone, quite successfully in fact by looking at the comments, long termists are also personally pretty serious about global poverty. They only want a small fraction of current resources to be invested as insurance against nuclear war, rogue AI, preventing pandemics, asteroid impacts etc in decreasing order of urgency. In fact pretty much any cursory reading of any of their writings will tell you this. I used to hugely respect her and was fooled into believing her videos but this is the first time her true colours were revealed to me. I have read a bit about what long termists and their opponents have written and she blatantly misrepresented it all. Even that stuff about the death of billions being a minor set back is twisted out of context. It says that that the death of a billion is a minor setback COMPARED to the tragedy of the death of every last one of the ten billio people and all their possible descendants. I'm so pissed because I feel betrayed that I got conned all along by her unscrupulous ways and now don't know what other rubbish she's mislead me about all this time.

[@wasdwasdedsf]

uh they are the same thing

[@ArawnOfAnnwn]

80,000, not 800,000. Most people would support "valuing now and tomorrow", including Sabine. She says as much at the end of the video. Even climate change is about that, pushed out to a few decades from now. But the longtermist concern isn't about tomorrow, it's about 1000 or more years from now, and about dangers whose likelihood no one knows. So they just try to brute force that issue away by arbitrarily scaling up the expected payoff to ludicrous levels so that even the tiniest chance seems worth obsessing over.

[@jmileshc]

@@ArawnOfAnnwn Have you read the book ?

[@danielwoods7325]

“… where he makes a living from multiplying powers of 10.” Savage 😆😆

[@GREGATHOME2]

In the case of the mugger, the risk assessment has to be made anew with every update in the promised return. For most of us I suspect the risk goes up faster than the potential return.

[@onehappystud]

Very snarky episode. Loved it.

[@Ant3_14]

Agree with conclusion at the end. Future is very important as going wrong path for countless generations means lots of lost value. Also we have to be rationally sensitive for pain of people whatever form, because that way to go makes good future more likely. So I agree with focusing on existential problems like bad AI or life on Earth being killed by smth, but ignoring present makes us lose present for ever.

[@memeplex1]

It seems to me that the conclusion concedes the point to longtermists by just saying that they should be more nuanced because the present is more important for long-term prospects than they're willing to accept, but that still looks like a longtermist standpoint, only a different optimization strategy.

[@annacrow9716]

@@memeplex1 it's worth noting that longtermists care quite a lot about good governance and better epistemics for precisely the fact that what happens now has substantial potiental to impact the long run future. William McAskill and other long termists discuss questions like "are we living at a pivotal time in history" precisely because of the effects of the present on the future.

[@michakulczykowski5511]

Sounds like they read Dune Saga too many times and kinda thought that "Yeah, that murderous God Emperor had a point"

[@DerrickJLive]

Thank you for this video.

[@robinartelt5220]

"Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice - run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master." - Ellsworth Toohey in "The Fountainhead"

[@tomjay63]

Pascals Mugging seems to describe the thought processes people put into religious faith: put up with some personal sacrifice (or the ultimate sacrifice) for a promise of blissful eternal life. Unverifiable promises are just one way we get hoodwinked by organized religion… and longtermism sure sounds like a religion.

[@user-hi7zk9um2l]

𝚃𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚔𝚜 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚊𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐𝙳𝚘𝚗'𝚝 ꜰ᷈ᴏ᷈ʀ᷈ɢ᷈ᴇ᷈ᴛ᷈ ᴛ᷈ᴏ᷈ ʜ᷈ɪ᷈ᴛ᷈ ᴛ᷈ʜ᷈ᴇ᷈ ꜱ᷈ᴜ᷈ʙ᷈ꜱ᷈ᴄ᷈ʀ᷈ɪ᷈ᴘ᷈ᴛ᷈ɪ᷈ᴏ᷈ɴ᷈ ʙ᷈ᴇ᷈ʟ᷈ 🔔ᴛ᷈ʜ᷈ᴀ᷈ɴ᷈ᴋ᷈ ʏ᷈ᴏ᷈ᴜ᷈ ᴀ᷈ɴ᷈ᴅ᷈ ɪ᷈ ᴡ᷈ɪ᷈ʟ᷈ʟ᷈ ᴀ᷈ʟ᷈ꜱ᷈ᴏ᷈! ɴ᷈ᴇ᷈ᴡ᷈ ꜰ᷈ɪ᷈ɴ᷈ᴅ᷈ɪ᷈ɴ᷈ɢ᷈ꜱ᷈🤫 ᴡ᷈ɪ᷈ᴛ᷈ʜ᷈ ʏ᷈ᴏ᷈ᴜ᷈ ɪ᷈ɴ᷈ ᴀ᷈ ᴍ᷈ᴏ᷈ᴍ᷈ᴇ᷈ɴ᷈ᴛ᷈*# 𝚙𝚛𝚒𝚟𝚊𝚝𝚎𝚕𝚢🕵️‍♀️ 💬💬💲ㄚ✶ᚓ║█♱𝟭𝟰𝟬𝟰𝟮𝟬𝟴𝟳𝟮𝟭𝟰📲█║❍✭✧♣️⍟☚☚♥️ ❗❎𝚗᷈𝚘᷈ 𝚆᷈𝚑᷈â𝚝᷈𝚜᷈ä𝚙᷈𝚙᷈❗📲█║❍✭✧♣⍟☚☚ ❗ɴ᷈ᴏ᷈ ᴡ᷈ʜ᷈âᴛ᷈ꜱ᷈äᴘ᷈ᴘ᷈

[@incognitotorpedo42]

The kid has a unique take on the trolley problem.

[@wendylafolle]

😂

[@alanlight7740]

A good take, but I'm not so sure it's unique. ;-)

[@keep-ukraine-free528]

Longtermism has at least two flaws. 1) it takes a purely numerical view that ignores the types of people/life we should encourage/help to thrive. It assumes that a billion ignorant people are the same as a billion educated people. It simply looks at "a billion people", and assumes they'll produce more generic people later. It ignores psychological fact, that a billion ignorant people are more likely to be warlike and annihilate themselves, than a billion educated people. 2) It assumes that past performance can be used to predict. It assumes complexity (and e.g. chaos) in systems (population systems, humanity/cultural systems, information systems) remain moderate/low -- as they've remained for millennia. If AI (especially ASI=Artificial Super Intelligence) emerges in the next 50-200 years, longtermist romanticists WILL be blind-sighted. Because ASI will surpass/nullify all human abilities to direct our future.

[@pjh2599]

As always Sabine, marvellously informative and humerous. there's a bad typo in the subs at around 14.something- *'did' v 'didn't'. thanks a lot for your work.

[@DougSweetser]

The biggest issue with longtermist is the here-now. People struggling with survival here-now do go to reasonable extremes just to survive. This can be seen with immigration. There are farmers in South America who have to survive on plots of land that cannot support crops anymore. Such people leave at extreme risks to them and their families. They are not motivated by any other goal but near-term survival. We need to do the work to limit the number of people who feel this immediate need. If too many people feel huge survival risks, modern culture will collapse.

[@Chazulu2]

💯🗽

[@vinegar10able]

I think we should save as many people as possible in the present so that they too have a chance of becoming longtermists

[@westganton]

This town ain’t big enough for more longtermists

[@bilbobaggins2022]

How can the value of future lives be greater than the value of current lives? It seems to me to be a creative way of relieving people from guilt for not being concerned with the suffering of other people. “Oh, I care about people. Just not these people, who are alive when I am.” Yeah. Right.

[@fabiankempazo7055]

Longtermism is definetly an important topic and important for humanity to survive. But of course uncertainity is key in the discounting rate. It is realistic to pin a specific probability on long run events or developents. (Butterfly effect)

[@InteractiveDNA]

What is great about Sabine is her jokes! Smart and to the point!

[@thebooksthelibrarian8530]

The first 7 minutes are amongst the most hilarious video's I've ever seen.

[@rogerrabbit3200]

I almost pissed myself when she said, where he makes a living from multiplying powers of 10. That was such a wicked burn. And then she goes on... fatality...

[@chriskennedy2846]

Speaking of which - I just tried to compact my kitchen trash into a black hole. Turns out there wasn't enough and now I have a brown dwarf next to my refrigerator.

[@rogerrabbit3200]

@@chriskennedy2846 also beautiful. Eagerly awaiting her Netflix Special.

[@MykePagan]

It’s the deadpan delivery

[@commieRob]

A minor side point. I would argue that there is a more numbers-oriented way of defeating the 'Pascal's mugger' conundrum. However unlikely it is that a mugger would return your money doubled in a week, it is even less likely that he would return it tripled. So as the promised reward increases, the likelihood of the reward arriving decreases. Therefore it never reaches a point where the size of the promised reward makes the risk worth it.

[@pattheplanter]

There is also the possibility that the mugger would have remembered where they put their knife before your next meeting.

[@SgtLion]

I mean, if they offer infinity fold, so long as you're not 100% certain they're lying (which it is of course, impossible to be), it's a statistically good deal.

[@commieRob]

@@SgtLion but if they offered to multiply it by infinity, you WOULD be 100% certain (infinity certain) that they were lying. Because that is completely impossible.

[@xponen]

@@pattheplanter see, that's why the thought experiment is misleading because in real world people who offers x1000 return will make themselves appear trustworthy so that people took his offer. 'Pascal's mugger' tries to coax us into thinking people don't take such offer.

[@tkseetho]

There is no conundrum actually. If the mugger were to return twice the amount in 2 weeks time then surely he would return 1.5x the amount in half a week. It is then obvious that the mugger should return exactly 1x the amount at the moment of the mugging. No knives or actual handing over of cash is necessary. The mugged walks away happy not losing anything, and the mugger is happy he's done his job and even kept his promise. Nothing changes and the space-time continuum remains intact. Even longtermists remains satisfied.

[@eyesyc]

Thank you for the sanity check. I have always had a dissonance with Bostrom's arguments.

[@ninjam77]

I think one interesting challenge for Longtermists is nuclear extortion. Let's say one leader/country with a generally non Longtermist philosophy wants to take over the world and has a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons. They say (and are not lying) "we're willing to take a small risk of nuclear apocalypse for taking over most of the word"). A Longtermist leadership would be forced to surrender because that would put the odds of extinction through nuclear apocalypse at close to 0 while otherwise it might be 5% or so. So essentially if the US/NATO was a Longtermist they'd give Putin/Russia everything they wanted and if they came back for more they'd still give in up until complete surrender, just because their risk tolerance is minimal and their enemy can tolerate a small risk for extinction.

[@mksensej8701]

The idea is that these "smart people" own very large businesses where people put their money. So for them a "longtermist" is the best options so they will have access to their fortunes for long time. So it might be a good persuasion for the investors to keep the money for long term in these enterprises. It is doubtful that they have some mathematical idea like in The Foundation trilogy where events that bring chaos on shorter terms should precipitate in order to bring order for longer term. Actually some of these enterprise own by "longtermist" might bring more chaos than order .

[@Celeste-in-Oz]

Longtermists don’t seem as enthusiastic about sacrificing themselves as they are about sacrificing others.

[@Joe--]

Pretty much 😆👍

[@SedulousTurtle]

Thanks Sabine for adding your voice to this. I was an organizer within Effective Altruism for many years and think its perhaps the most important set of ideas/movement I've ever known. However, the people/trends related to longetermism have, I feel, lost the way straight and narrow path, partially for the reasons that you bring up. Peter Singer has the wisdom, Nick Bostrom is lost.

[@JohnChampagne]

There's a jump being made, I think, to the idea that there is in fact an option that would save a billion lives now, but that would certainly reduce the chances for long-term survival. The opposite may be true. An option that saves a billion lives now may promote the long-term prospects for humanity. I think we could save lives now AND promote sustainability / long-term health by charging high fees to industries that emit pollution, deplete resources or destroy wildlife habitat, then sharing fee proceeds to all people.