JWS's Quick takes

Many people find the Forum anxiety inducing because of the high amount of criticism. So, in the spirit of Giving Season, I'm going to give some positive feedback and shout-outs for the Forum in 2023 (from my PoV). So, without further ado, I present the 🎄✨🏆 totally-not-serious-worth-no-internet-points-JWS-2023-Forum-Awards: 🏆✨🎄^[1]
 

Best Forum Post I read this year:

10 years of Earning to Give by @AGB: A clear, grounded, and moving look at what it actually means to 'Earn to Give'. In particular, the 'Why engage?' section really resonated with me.

Honourable Mentions:

• Why I'm still going out to bat for the EA movement post FTX by @Gemma Paterson: This post was a reflection on EAs tough year which was similar to my own journey, but was also able to make a case for why EA is worth fighting for.
• Third Wave Effective Altruism by @Ben_West: A short post, but one that came at exactly the right time. I think this is a really important topic for EA to be thinking about right now and look forward to more posts inspired by it next year.
• The Seeker’s Game – Vignettes from the Bay by @Yulia: I really enjoyed both the human perspective of this post, and the style with which it was written.

Best Sequence I read this year:

• The CURVE Sequence: Causes and Uncertainty: Rethinking Value in Expectation from Rethink Priorities: This sequence was utterly brilliant. All its posts are well-written and led to good discussion from the community. I particularly want to shout out Arvo's piece that stress-tested what EV from x-risk looks like under specific assumptions.

EA Forum Posters of the Year:

• @titotal  - I really value titotal's contributions to the Forum. Even though I sometimes disagree I always learn a lot by thinking about where and why I do so, and I hope they stick around so I can continue to learn from them.
• @Holly_Elmore  - Similarly to Titotal, while I don't always agree with Holly she just makes really solid points that always positively add to the discussion. Often she's able to clearly find the crux of a debate and ask the key questions.
• @Ivy Mazzola  - Whenever I've seen Ivy post on the Forum, even on heated topics, she always approaches them with integrity and grace that I really wanted to give recognition to.
• @David Mathers  - When David discusses ideas in the Forum he consistently does so in a good faith and truth-seeking way that really shows engagement on the Forum at its best.

Non-Forum EA Poasters of the Year:

• David Thorstad (on his blog) - I've really appreciated David's blog this year. I don't always agree, and you can find me in the comments pushing back sometimes, I've found his content high quality overall, especially on Existential Risk and the Time of Perils.
• Agustín (on Twitter) - Agus has been really fighting the good fighting in the Twitter trenches recently, on all sorts of topics (though sadly on the terrible state of AI discourse). Somehow he manages to translate complicated EA ideas clearly, convincingly, and remain calm in the face of less-than-charitable interlocutors.
• Nathan Young (on Twitter) - Nathan's commitment to honest exploration of his beliefs, dialogue with those who disagree, and finding mechanisms of belief resolution has been constantly inspiring.

Congrats to the winners! Feel free to give them more plaudits in the comments or just shout out your own Forum favourites from this year! I wish everyone who’s reading this every success in the year to come and I look forward to reading more good content on the Forum in 2024!

1. ^{^}

   Note that all of the award categories and choices are arbitrary, this is an intensely vibes-based post

The HLI discussion on the Forum recently felt off to me, bad vibes all around. It seems very heated, not a lot of scout mindset, and reading the various back-and-forth chains I felt like I was  'getting Eulered' as Scott once described. 

I'm not an expert on evaluating charities, but I followed a lot of links to previous discussions and found this discussion involving one of the people running an RCT on Strongminds (which a lot of people are waiting for the final results of) who was highly sceptical of SM efficacy. But the person offering counterarguments in the thread seems to be just as valid to me? My current position, for what it's worth,^[1] is:

• the initial Strongminds results of 10x cash transfer should raise a sceptical response. most things aren't that effective
• it's worth there being exploration of what the SWB approach would recommend as the top charities (think of this as trying other bandits in a multi-armed bandit charity evaluation problem)
• it's very difficult to do good social science, and the RCT won't give us dispositive evidence about the effectiveness of Strongminds (especially at scale), but it may help us update. In general we should be mindful of how far we can make rigorous empirical claims in the social sciences
• HLI has used language too loosely in the past and overclaimed/been overconfident, which Michael has apologised for, though perhaps some critics would like a stronger signal of neutrality (this links to the 'epistemic probation' comments)
• GiveWell's own 'best guess' analysis seems to be that Strongminds is 2.3x that of GiveDirectly.^[2] I'm generally a big fan of the GiveDirectly approach for reasons of autonomy - even if Strongminds got reduced in efficacy to around ~1x GD, it'd still be a good intervention? I'm much more concerned with what this number is than the tone of HLIs or Michael's claims tbh (though not at the expense of epistemic rigour).
• The world is rife with actively wasted or even negative action, spending, and charity. The integrity of EA research, and holding charity evaluators to account is important to both the EA mission and EAs identity. But HLI seems to have been singled out for very harsh criticism,^[3] but so much of the world is worse.

I'm also quite unsettled by a lot of what I call 'drive-by downvoting'. While writing a comment is a lot more effort than clicking to vote on a comment/post, I think the signal is a lot higher, and would help those involved in debates reach consensus better. Some people with high-karma accounts seem to be making some very strong votes on that thread, and very few are making their reasoning clear (though I salute those who are in either direction).

So I'm very unsure how to feel. It's an important issue, but I'm not sure the Forum has shown itself in a good light in this instance.

1. ^{^}

   And I stress this isn't much in this area, I generally defer to evaluators

2. ^{^}

   On the table at the top of the link, go to the column 'GiveWell best guess' and the row 'Cost-effectiveness, relative to cash'

3. ^{^}

   Again, I don't think I have the ability to adjudicate here, which is part of why I'm so confused.

I want to register that my perspective on medium-term^[1] AI existential risk (shortened to AIXR from now on) has changed quite a lot this year. Currently, I'd describe it as moving from 'Deep Uncertainty' to 'risk is low in absolute terms, but high enough to be concerned about'. I guess atm I'd think that my estimates are moving closer toward the Superforecasters in the recent XPT report (though I'd still say I'm still Deeply Uncertain on this issue, to the extent that I don't think the probability calculus is that meaningful to apply)

Some points around this change:

• I'm not sure it's meaningful to cleanly distinguish AIXR from other anthropogenic x-risks, especially since negative consequences of AI may plausibly increase other x-risks (e.g. from Nuclear War, biosecurity, Climate Change etc.)
• I think in practice, the most likely risks from AI would come from deployment of powerful systems that have catastrophic consequences that are then rolled back. I'm think of Bing 'Sydney' here as the canonical empirical case.^[2] I just don't believe we're going to get no warning shots.
• Similary, most negative projections of AI don't take into account negative social reaction and systematic human response to these events. You either assume we'll get no warning shots and then get exterminated ('sharp left turn') or think that humanity is doomed to not co-operate ('Moloch'). I think that the evidence suggests instead that societies and governments will react against increasing AI capability if they view it negatively, rather than simply stand by and watch it happen, which is what many AIXR seem to assume or at least imply to me.
• I think the AIXR community underestimated the importance of AI Governance and engaging with politics. Instead of politicians/the public 'not getting it', they infact seem to have 'got it'. The strategy of only letting people vetted to be smart enough think about AIXR seems to have been flawed, the same kind of thinking that led to thinking a 'pivotal act' strategy was viable.
• In fact, I've been pleasantly surprised by how welcoming both politicians and the public have been to the Overton Window being opened. Turns out the median voter in a liberal democracy doesn't like 'let large co-orporations create powerful models with little understanding of their consequences without significant oversight'. I think people's expectations of positive co-ordination on AI issues should have gone up this year, and conversely it should make your AIXR estimate go down unless you think relative alignment progress has declined even more.
• While there have been an awful lot of terrible arguments against AIXR raised this year, some have been new and valuable to me. Some examples:
  • As titotal has written, I expect 'early AGI' will be a 'buggy mess'. More specifically, I doubt it could one-shot solve 'take over the world' unless you assume god-like capability by assumption, instead of 'more capable than humans in some important ways, but not invincible'.
  • Progress via 'stack moar layers lol' will plausibly slow down, or at least run into some severe issues.^[3] The current hype-wave seems to be just following this as far as it will go with compute and data, rather than exploring alternative architectures that could be much more efficient.
  • I'm still unimpressed by how Frontier systems perform on tests such as The ARC Challenge which test hypothesis creativity and testing in a few-shot scenario (and on hidden data) without 'ground truth', as opposed to training on trillions-upon-trillions of training examples with masks and true labels.
  • Related to the above, I view creativity and explanation as critical to science and the progress of science, so I'm not sure what 'automation of science' would actually look like. It makes me very sceptical of claims like Davidson's with larger numbers like '1000x capability' (edit, it's actually 1000x in a year! Is that a one-time increase or perpetual explosive growth? It just seems way too strong a claim).^[4]
  • Progress in AI Safety has empirically been correlated, at least weakly, with increases in capability. I didn't agree with everything in Nora's recent post, but I think she's right about assessing a fully thoeretical approach to progress (such as MIRI's strategy, as far as I can tell).
• In summary, it doesn't seem like the field of AIXR comes out particularly strongly to me on the I-T-N Framework relative to other existential and catastrophic risks. It may be 'more important', but seems similarly intractable in the style that these global problems generally are, and definitely not as neglected any more (in terms of funding, where does it stand relative to nuclear or bio for example? would be interesting to know).
• However, I still think x-risk and catastrophic risk from AI this century is unjustifiably high. I just don't think it's plausible to have levels of pDoom ~>90% under current evidence unless you have private insight.
• I think the main existential/catastrophic issues around AI in the foreseeable future revolve around political institutions and great power conflict, rather than humans being wiped out agentically (either deceptively by a malicious power-seeker or unintentionally by an idiot-savant)

Anyway, these thoughts aren't fully worked out, I'm still exploring what I think on this issue, but just wanted to register where my current thoughts are at in case it helps others in the community.

1. ^{^}

   Say on a ~50 year time scale, or to the end of the century

2. ^{^}

   Clarification: I'm not saying 'Sydney' had catastrophic consequences, but that a future system could be released in a similar way due to internal corporate pressures, and that system could then act negatively in the real world in a way its developers did not expect.

3. ^{^}

   Btw, xuan's twitter is one of the best I know of to get insights into the state of AI. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I don't, but her takes are always legit

4. ^{^}

   What does it even mean to say 1,000x capability, especially in terms of science? Is there a number here that Davidson is tracking? When would he view it as falsified?

This is an off-the-cuff quick take that captures my current mood. It may not have a long half-life, and I hope I am wrong

Right now I am scared

Reading the tea-leaves, Altman and Brockman may be back at OpenAI, the company charter changed, and the board - including Toner and MacAulay - removed from the company

The mood in the Valley, and in general intellectual circles, seems to have snapped against EA^[1]

This could be as bad for EA's reputation as FTX

At a time when important political decisions about the future of AI are being made, and potential coalitions are being formed

And this time it'd be second-impact syndrome

I am scared EA in its current form may not handle the backlash that may come

I am scared that we have not done enough reform in the last year from the first disaster to prepare ourselves

I am scared because I think EA is a force for making the world better. It has allowed me to do a small bit to improve the world. Through it, I've met amazing and inspiring people who work tirelessly and honestly to actually make the world a better place. Through them, I've heard of countless more actually doing what they think is right and giving what they can to make the world we find ourselves is more full of kindness, happiness, and flourishing

I am scared because this could be lost, I don't know what to do to prevent it

I am scared

1. ^{^}

   Not just AI Safety, but EA as a whole. I don't think those upset and concerned with EA really care about making that distinction

Some personal reflections on EAG London:^[1]

• Congrats to the CEA Events Team for their hard work and for organising such a good event! 👏
• The vibe was really positive! Anecdotally I had heard that the last EAG SF was gloom central, but this event felt much more cheery. I'm not entirely sure why, but it might have had something to do with the open venue, the good weather, or there being more places to touch grass in London compared to the Bay. 
• I left the conference intellectually energised (though physically exhausted). I'm ready to start drafting some more Forum Post ideas that I will vastly overestimate my ability to finish and publish 😌
• AI was (unsurprisingly) the talk of the town. But I found that quite a few people,^[2] myself included, were actually more optimistic on AI because of the speed of the social response to AI progress and how pro-safety it seems to be, along with low polarisation along partisan lines.
• Related to the above, I came away with the impression that AI Governance may be as if not more important than Technical Alignment in the next 6-12 months. The window for signficiant political opportunity is open now but may not stay open forever, so the AI Governance Space is probably where the most impactful opportunties might be at the moment.
• My main negative takeaway was that there seemed to be so little reflection on the difficult last ~6 months for the EA movement. There was 1 session on the FTX, but none at all on the other problems we've faced as a community such as Sexual Abuse and Harassment, Trust in EA Leadership, Community Epistemic Health, and whether EA Institutions ought to be reformed. In the opening talk, the only reference was that the ship of EA feels like it's been 'going through a storm', and the ideas presented weren't really accompanied by a route to embed them in the movement. To me it felt like another missed opportunity after Toby Ord's speech, and I don't feel like we as a community have fully grasped or reckoned with the consequences of the last 6 months. I think this was also a common sentiment among people I talked to^[3] regardless of whether they agreed with me on proposed solutions.
• Shrimp Welfare is now post-meme and part of the orthodoxy, and the Shrimp Welfare Project is unironically an S(hrimp)-Tier Charity. 🦐🥰
• EA Conference Food continues to be good to me. I don't know why it seems to get consistently low ratings in the feedback surveys 🤷 I'd happily tile the universe with those red velvet desserts.

1. ^{^}

   Feel free to add your own thoughts and responses, I'd love to hear them :)

2. ^{^}

   {warning! sampling bias alert!} 

3. ^{^}

   {warning! sampling bias alert!} 

[edit: a day after posting, I think this perhaps reads more combative that I intended? It was meant to be more 'crisis of faith, looking for reassurance if it exists' than 'dunk on those crazy longtermists'. I'll leave the quick take as-is, but maybe clarification of my intentions might be useful to others]

Warning! Hot Take! 🔥🔥🔥 (Also v rambly and not rigorous)

A creeping thought has entered my head recently that I haven't been able to get rid of... 

Is most/all longtermist spending unjustified?

The EA move toward AI Safety and Longtermism is often based on EV calculations that show the long term future is overwhelmingly valuable, and thus is the intervention that is most cost-effective.

However, more in-depth looks at the EV of x-risk prevention (1, 2) cast significant doubt on those EV calculations, which might make longtermist interventions much less cost-effective than the most effective "neartermist" ones.

But my doubts get worse...

GiveWell estimates around $5k to save a life. So I went looking for some longtermist calculations, and I really couldn't fund any robust ones!^[1] Can anyone point me in some robust calculations for longtermist funds/organisations where they go 'yep, under our assumptions and data, our interventions are at least competitive with top Global Health charities'?

Because it seems to me like that hasn't been done. But if we're being EA, people with high and intractable p(doom) from AI shouldn't work on AI, they should probably EtG for Global Health instead (if we're going to be full maximise EV about everything). Like, if we're taking EA seriously, shouldn't MIRI shut down all AI operations and become a Global Health org? Wouldn't that be a strong +EV move given their pessimistic assessments of reducing xRisk and their knowledge of +EV global health interventions?

But it gets worse...

Suppose that we go, 'ok, let's take EV estimates seriously but not literally'. In which case fine, but that undermines the whole 'longtermist interventions overwhelmingly dominate EV' move that many people feel has happened to EA causes over recent years. I don't think that move grounds longtermism, instead I think it grounds a more pluralistic approach to all of EA that values a large variety of approaches to doing good, but acknowledges the uncertainty and limits on each, and even actively prevents the movement from being focused on any one area. That still seems incompatible with the monetary and social rise of longtermism and AI Safety.

tl;dr: Have any longtermist orgs done robust and defensible EV caculations for their interventions? If not, isn't that... overwhelmingly sus?

1. ^{^}

   I found some posts arguing that under set of assumptions X then longtermist interventions would be more effective, often by reducing the overall xrisk rate by 1% or something like that. But very little if no work had been done to actually show that was a likely result of the interventions

I think (at least) somebody at Open Philanthropy needs to start thinking about reacting to an increasing move towards portraying it, either sincerely or strategically, as a shadowy cabal-like entity influencing the world in an 'evil/sinister' way, similar to how many right-wingers across the world believe that George Soros is contributing to the decline of Western Civilization through his political philanthropy.

Last time there was an explicitly hostile media campaign against EA the reaction was not to do anything, and the result is that Émile P. Torres has a large media presence,^[1] launched the term TESCREAL to some success, and EA-critical thoughts became a lot more public and harsh in certain left-ish academic circles. In many think pieces responding to WWOTF or FTX or SBF, they get extensively cited as a primary EA-critic, for example.

I think the 'ignore it' strategy was a mistake and I'm afraid the same mistake might happen again, with potentially worse consequences.

1. ^{^}

   Do people realise that they've going to release a documentary sometime soon?

Suing people nearly always makes you look like the assholes I think. 

As for Torres, it is fine for people to push back against specific false things they say. But fundamentally, even once you get past the misrepresentations, there is a bunch of stuff that they highlight that various prominent EAs really do believe and say that genuinely does seem outrageous or scary to most people, and no amount of pushback is likely to persuade most of those people otherwise. 

In some cases, I think that outrage fairly clearly isn't really justified once you think things through very carefully: i.e. for example the quote from Nick Beckstead about saving lives being all-things-equal higher value in rich countries, because of flow-through effects which Torres always says makes Beckstead a white supremacist.  But in other cases well, it's hardly news that utilitarianism has a bunch of implications that strongly contradict moral commonsense, or that EAs are sympathetic to utilitarianism. And 'oh, but I don't endorse [outrageous sounding view], I merely think there is like a 60% chance it is true, and you should be careful about moral uncertainty' does not sound very reassuring to a normal outside person. 

For example, take Will on double-or-nothing gambles (https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/william-macaskill/) where you do something that has a 49% chance of destroying everyone, and a 51% chance of doubling the number of humans in existence (now and in the future). It's a little hard to make out exactly what Will's overall position on this, but he does say it is hard to justify not taking those gambles:

'Then, in this case, it’s not an example of very low probabilities, very large amounts of value. Then your view would have to argue that, “Well, the future, as it is, is like close to the upper bound of value,” in order to make sense of the idea that you shouldn’t flip 50/50. I think, actually, that position would be pretty hard to defend, is my guess. My thought is that, probably, within a situation where any view you say ends up having pretty bad, implausible consequences'

And he does seem to say there are some gambles of this kind he might take:

'Also, just briefly on the 51/49: Because of the pluralism that I talked about — although, again, it’s meta pluralism — of putting weight on many different model views, I would at least need the probabilities to be quite a bit wider in order to take the gamble...'

Or to give another example, the Bostrom and Shulman paper on digital minds talks about how if digital minds really have better lives than us, than classical (total) utilitarianism says they should take all our resources and let us starve. Bostrom and Shulman are against that in the paper. But I think it is fair to say they take utilitarianism seriously as a moral theory. And lots of people are going to think taking seriously the idea that this could be right is already corrupt, and vaguely Hitler-ish/reminiscent of white settler expansionism against Native Americans. 

In my view, EAs should be more clearly committed to rejecting (total*) utilitarianism in these sorts of cases than they actually are. Though I understand that moral philosophers correctly think the arguments for utilitarianism, or views which have similar implications to utilitarianism in these contexts, are disturbingly strong. 

*In both of the cases described, person-affecting versions of classical utilitarianism which deny creating happy people is good doesn't have the scary consequences. 


 

Does anyone work at, or know somebody who works at Cohere?

Last November their CEO Aidan Gomez published an anti-effective-altruism internal letter/memo (Bloomberg reporting here, apparently confirmed as true though no further comment)

I got the vibe from Twitter/X that Aidan didn't like EA, but making an internal statement about it to your company seems really odd to me? Like why do your engineers and project managers need to know about your anti-EA opinions to build their products? Maybe it came after the AI Safety Summit?

Does anyone in the AI Safety Space of EA have any knowledge or context to help out here?

Ideally I'd like to read the memo and see what it's definition of EA is and what its arguments are.

Given Cohere are a leading, though not frontier-level, AI company feels like it's bad to have a fairly prominent CEO who hates EA so much he releases internal memos about it to the company.

Going to quickly share that I'm going to take a step back from commenting on the Forum for the foreseeable future. There are a lot of ideas in my head that I want to work into top-level posts to hopefully spur insightful and useful conversation amongst the community, and while I'll still be reading and engaging I do have a limited amount of time I want to spend on the Forum and I think it'd be better for me to move that focus to posts rather than comments for a bit.^[1]

If you do want to get in touch about anything, please reach out and I'll try my very best to respond. Also, if you're going to be in London for EA Global, then I'll be around and very happy to catch up :)

1. ^{^}

   Though if it's a highly engaged/important discussion and there's an important viewpoint that I think is missing I may weigh in

I've generally been quite optimistic that the increased awareness AI xRisk has got recently can lead to some actual progress in reducing the risks and harms from AI. However, I've become increasingly sad at the ongoing rivalry between the AI 'Safety' and 'Ethics' camps^[1] 😔 Since the CAIS Letter was released, there seems to have been an increasing level of hostility on Twitter between the two camps, though my impression is that the holistility is mainly one-directional.^[2]

I dearly hope that a coalition of some form can be built here, even if it is an uneasy one, but I fear that it might not be possible. It unfortunately seems like a textbook case of mistake vs conflict theory approaches at work? I'd love someone to change my mind, and say that Twitter amplifies the loudest voices,^[3] and that in the background people are making attempts to build bridges. But I fear that instead that the centre cannot hold, and that there will be not just simmering resentment but open hostility between the two camps. 

If that happens, then I don't think those involved in AI Safety work can afford to remain passive in response to sustained attack. I think that this has already damaged the prospects of the movement,^[4] and future consequences could be even worse. If the other player in your game is constantly defecting, it's probably time to start defecting back.

Can someone please persuade me that my pessimism is unfounded?

1. ^{^}

   FWIW I don't like these terms, but people seem to intuitively grok what is meant by them

2. ^{^}

   I'm open to be corrected here, but I feel like those sceptical of the AI xRisk/AI Safety communities have upped the ante in terms of the amount of criticism and its vitriol - though I am open to the explanation that I've been looking out for it more

3. ^{^}

   It also seems very bad that the two camps do most of their talking to each other (if they do at all) via Twitter, that seems clearly suboptimal!!

4. ^{^}

   The EA community's silence regarding Torres has led to the acronym 'TESCREAL' gaining increasing prominence amongst academic circles - and it is not a neutral one, and gives them more prominence and a larger platform.

Oh hi. Just rubber-ducking a failure mode some of my Forum takes^[1] seem to fall into, but please add your takes if you think that would help :)

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Some of my posts/comments can be quite long - I like responding with as much context as possible on the Forum, but as some of the original content itself is quite long, that means my responses can be quite long! I don't think that's necessarily a problem in itself, but the problem then comes with receiving disagree votes without comments elaborating them.

<I want to say, this isn't complaining about disagreement. I like disagreement^[2], it means I get to test my ideas and arguments>

However, it does pose an issue with updating my thoughts. A long post that has positive upvotes, negative disagree votes, and no (or few) comments means it's hard for me to know where my opinion differs from other EA Forum users, and how far and in what direction I ought to update in. The best examples from my own history:

• My takeaways from Cremer's Vox piece. Do the disagree votes apply to Cremer's piece, my (relatively) positive response to it, or the specific points I highlighted, or all of the above?
• My fears about karma-downweighting Community posts. This one went in a few different directions - it has about 2.5 distinct but related points going on, so I don't know where the disagreement is focused on.^[3]

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Potential Solutions?:

• Post shorter takes: This means the agree/disagree signal will be more clearly linked to my context, but it means I won't be able to add all the content that I do now, which I think adds value.
• Post fewer takes: Ceteris paribus this might not be expected work, but the argument would be that with more time between fewer contributions, the quality of them would go up so they'd usually make one clear point for readers to agree/disagree with
• Post more takes: Splitting a large comment into lots of sub-comments would do the same thing as 'post shorter takes', and keep context. The cost is a karma-farming effect, and splitting a thread into multiple parts, making it harder to follow.
• Explicitly ask for comments: I feel like this wouldn't work? It feels a bit whiny and has no enforcement mechanism?
• Pre-commit to up-voting responses: Relies on others to trust me, might not be credible for those who strongly disagree with me.

Suggestions/thoughts on any of the above welcome

1. ^{^}

   I'm using 'takes' to refer to both posts and comments, it's not meant to imply low-quality contributions to the forum

2. ^{^}

   Modulo good faith norms etc

3. ^{^}

   Also, the agree-vote karma on this piece went all over the place, and comments might have been a place to hash this disagreement out

status: very rambly. This is an idea I want to explore in an upcoming post about longtermism, would be grateful to anyone's thoughts. For more detailed context, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/ for debate on the nature of time in philosophy

Does rejecting longtermism require rejecting the B-Theory of Time (i.e. eternalism, the view that the past, present, and future have the same ontological status)? Saying that future people don't exist (and therefore can't be harmed, can't lose out by not existing, don't have the same moral rights as present 'existing' people) also implies that the future they live in (i.e. the city, country, planet, solar system, galaxy etc) doesn't exist. This seems to fly in the face of our best understandings of physics (i.e. Relativity and Quantum Physics don't have a place for a special 'present' afaik, in fact Relativity suggests that there is no such thing as a universal present)^[1] I'm not sure people grapple with that contradiction.

Furthermore, if you want to claim the special 'present' moment does exist, and that our moral obligations only hold in that frame of time, doesn't that mean that our obligations to the past don't matter? Many have criticised Bostrom's use of 'mere ripples' to describe historical atrocities,^[2] but doesn't believing in a unique present moment imply that the past doesn't exist, and hence those atrocities don't exist either and that we have no obligations that refer to past events or people? One could get around this by assuming a 'growing block' theory of time, where the past exists, as does the present, but the future doesn't. But if you believe in a special, unique present then asserting the past exists but the future doesn't seems no more valid than the other way around?

I actually think that has legs as more than a niche philosophical point, but would be very interested in hearing others' thoughts.

1. ^{^}

   Physicists please correct me if I've made egregious mistakes of interpretation here

2. ^{^}

   And I'm not defending that language here

Has anyone else listened to the latest episode of Clearer Thinking ? Spencer interviews Richard Lang about Douglas Harding's "Headless Way", and if you squint enough it's related to the classic philosophical problems of consciousness, but it did remind me a bit of Scott A's classic story "Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person" which made me laugh. (N.B. Spencer is a lot more gracious and inquisitive than the protagonist!)

But yeah if you find the conversation interesting and/or like practising mindfulness meditation, Richard has a series of guided meditations on the Waking Up App, so go and check those out.

In this comment I was going to quote the following from R. M. Hare:

"Think of one world into whose fabric values are objectively built; and think of another in which those values have been annihilated. And remember that in both worlds the people in them go on being concerned about the same things - there is no difference in the 'subjective' concern which people have for things, only in their 'objective' value. Now I ask, What is the difference between the states of affairs in these two worlds? Can any other answer be given except 'None whatever'?"

I remember this being quoted in Mackie's Ethics during my undergraduate degree, and it's always stuck with me as a powerful argument against moral non-naturalism and a close approximation of my thoughts on moral philosophy and meta-ethics.

But after some Google-Fu I couldn't actually track down the original quote. Most people think it comes from the Essay Nothing Matters in Hare's Applications of Moral Philosophy. While this definitely seems to be in the same spirit of the quote, the online scanned pdf version of Nothing Matters that I found doesn't contain this quote at all. I don't have access to any of the academic institutions to check other versions of the paper or book.

Maybe I just missed the quote by skimreading too quickly? Are there multiple versions of the article? Is it possible that this is a case of citogenesis? Perhaps Mackie misquoted what R.M. Hare said, or perhaps misattributed it and and it actually came from somewhere else? Maybe it was Mackie's quote all along? 

Help me EA Forum, you're my only hope! I'm placing a £50 bounty to a charity of your choice for anyone who can find the original source of this quote, in R. M. Hare's work or otherwise, as long as I can verify it (e.g. a screenshot of the quote if it's from a journal/book I don't have access to).