What “longtermism” gets wrong about climate change

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• Interesting article. My comment it that it's not how many people there are it is how they treat their only precious, unique and fragile world. The only one we know. As far as simulations go i.e. digital people longterminism is science fiction. I agree with you that it is a needless distraction in that climate is an immediate existential threat. You are spot on! . Weak AI is indispensable in everyday living anything from robotic surgery to facial pattern recognition. Strong AI is an illusion. It is written in Microsoft PowerPoint :). Doesn't exit simply because the brain appears to be non computational in nature. It has been proposed to have been shown to be true indirectly by Kurt Godel in 1931.

• Longtermism is bunk and is based in a narcissistic, egoic consciousness, severed from Soul/Self. The Titanic has already struck the iceberg and there is no long term future for humanity, we are rushing headlong to certain near term extinction from abrupt exponential climate change, which is accelerating much faster and with much more severity than scientific predictive models forecast. Do the math and the research. Read the aggregate of the peer reviewed scientific literature. Another point is that Earth can sustain a population of 4-5 billion and now has 8 billions. Something does not come from nothing. Earth's resources cannot sustain population growth. That's a delusion of the billionaires and unbridled capitalists whose fortunes are dependent upon population growth. Earth's population will in fact drastically decline in the next 3-4 years...maybe sooner. Human's future on Earth is finished. Homo Colossus, embodied by the likes of Trump, Musk, and Murdoch, is going extinct. It's an abomination and the epitome of the Injustice of unbridled capitalism, which is also going to collapse. It's simple. Whatever is false and inauthentic has no real ontological basis. Billionaires, separated from Soul, believe they have the vision and the future mapped out for humanity. This is their narcissistic grandiosity and nothing more. Soon they will discover that their identity, being, and value has absolutely nothing to do with their bank accounts. Watch them scramble and gnash their teeth as civilization collapses, they are left penniless, and they discover that they long ago lost their Soul.

• Great article. Glad to see this kind of pseudo intellectual nonsense getting at least some kind of check.

• Longtermism seems absurd to me, as I believe that the geopolitical stresses created by climate change will make nuclear war inevitable. Worrying about our future centuries hence is futile when our chances of surviving this century are low. Climate change is already wreaking global damages approaching a trillion dollars a year; Once the annual damages imposed by climate change exceed the annual growth of global GDP, humanity is doomed to a future of ever-increasing poverty. Such conditions make people desperate enough to take extreme measures.

• Émile P. Torres claims:

  It’s impossible to read the longtermist literature published by the group 80,000 Hours (co-founded by MacAskill), Halstead, and others without coming away with a rosy picture of the climate crisis.

  This characterization is clearly contradicted by Torres’ own sources. The first, by 80,000 hours, writes:

  … climate change’s impacts will still be significant – it could destabilise society, destroy ecosystems, put millions into poverty, and worsen other existential threats such as engineered pandemics, risks from AI, or nuclear war. If you want to make climate change the focus of your career, we include some thoughts below on the most effective ways to help tackle it [emphasis added].

  The second, by John Halstead on the Effective Altruism forum, writes:

  In my view, climate change is one of the most important problems in the world, but other problems, including engineered viruses, advanced artificial intelligence and nuclear war, are more pressing on the margin because they are so neglected [emphasis added].

  The third, by ozymandias on the Effective Altruism forum, writes:

  In conclusion, climate change will be very very bad. Lots of people will die. Many people– disproportionately the global poor– will go hungry, get sick or injured, not have access to clean water, or suffer from treatable or preventable illnesses. There will be many natural disasters. There will be global geopolitical instability, perhaps including wars and refugee crises. We will damage or lose many ecosystems that people value, such as coral reefs. The Amazon may become a grassland. But scientific consensus is that it will not result in human extinction or Earth becoming Venus [emphasis added].

  Sincere critiques, whether or not they turn out to be valid can be made of the Effective Altruism's approach to climate change. For instance, mch3k has argued on the Effective Altruism forum that EA does neglect climate change, including by focusing on whether climate change is an existential risk, more than on the risks that are agreed to be huge if not existential (an argument Torres has retweeted). For instance, despite its clear and stark conclusion, the latter-quoted article was titled "Climate Change Is, In General, Not An Existential Risk."
  However, sincere critique is only possible by first accurately describing the object of critique. It is egregious misrepresentation to describe the picture of climate change as leading to the poverty of millions, hunger, lack of clean water, political instability, refugee crises, death, suffering, etc., to be “rosy.”

  • To this, I will add my own "sincere criticism" of MacAskill's What We Owe the Future.

    MacAskill says, "my best guess is that global agriculture would still be possible even during this extreme transition: even with fifteen degrees of warming, the heat would not pass lethal limits for crops in most regions." Torres is right that this is nonsense. To see in more detail how it is nonsense, MacAskill ignored the main point of his own source*: the main issue is not "lethal limits" (~45–47°C), but "near-complete loss of yield" due to heat stress at flowering time (~30–34°C). It matters little that your corn or rice plant lived if it yielded no corn or rice.

    *https://www.csap.cam.ac.uk/projects/climate-change-risk-assessment/

• How'd this guy get $10,000,000 to promote his book? Your article was painful to read, in that this unscientific, non-researched fantasy book is being promoted at the UN. I heard a 80,000 hours ad, where they said they would help me find the right charity to give to. Right. These folks are like the Q-Anon folks, Their belief is grounded in their character disorder, as in mentally unhealthy. The real question is: who does this benefit? Jeff Bezos read sci fi in high school, ( I read it) also poorly supported by actual science. 'The fantasy that its easier to live off-planet allows for a chance to save the ego, avoid the real problems here on Earth, and fantasy our way not oblivion.
  This is an extremely unhealthy social movement to take root. Everybody gets a platform. Again, who is paying for this?

• I have pointed out to the editors that a core claim in this piece is false, and we told them so before the article was published. It is extremely poor form to allow this claim to be included in the piece, and subsequently to tweet it. The Bulletin asked us about five researchers who Torres claims were never consulted. Four of these people were contacted, as we told the Bulletin. One of them was contacted but didn't have time to provide advice, and was mistakenly included in the acknowledgements: this was an honest mistake. For context, we asked 106 experts for feedback on the book.

  The claim that five of the experts were not consulted false and should be removed: we told you this before the article was published. What is the point of asking us if you are going to leave the false claim in the piece? The Bulletin should also produce a tweet correcting their earlier false tweet.

• The Bulletin tweeted the false claim that 5 of the experts in our acknowledgements were not consulted. This isn't true as we explained in advance of the publication of this piece

• You quote from the philosopher Peter Singer. I'm not sure if you know that he, too, is a supporter of "effective" altruism. For example, at http://bostonreview.net/forum/logic-effective-altruism/ Singer praises one of his students, a promising philosopher, for accepting a job on Wall Street, "working for an arbitrage trading firm". .. One year after graduating, his student "was donating a six-figure sum—roughly half his annual earnings—to highly effective charities."

  I have long thought Singer is grossly over-rated as a thinker, and when I read this it strengthened that opinion. Angus Deaton provides a very good critique of Singer's ridiculous naivete in the same issue of the Boston Review: http://bostonreview.net/forum/logic-effective-altruism/angus-deaton-response-effective-altruism.

  Deaton concludes: "Like Singer, I am privileged to teach at Princeton. I too see students who want to relieve suffering in the world. Should they go to Dhaka or Dakar? Focus on bed nets or worms? I tell them to go to Washington or London and to work to stop the harm that rich countries do; to oppose the arms trade, the trade deals that benefit only the pharmaceutical companies, the protectionist tariffs that undermine the livelihoods of African farmers; and to support more funding to study tropical disease and health care. Or they could go to Africa, become citizens, and cast their lot with those they want to help. That is how they can save the lives of African kids."

  Reducing world poverty is not easy; maybe harder than Deaton thinks .. but orders of magnitude more difficult than espoused by Singer, and, I think MacAskill.