More to explore on 'What could the future hold? And why care?'

By EA Handbook @ 2022-07-07T23:00 (+4)

Global historical trends

• How big a deal was the Industrial Revolution? (1 hour 20 mins.)
• Three wild speculations from amateur quantitative macrohistory (10 mins.)
• Modeling the Human Trajectory - Open Philanthropy Project (30 mins.)

Forecasting

• Efforts to Improve Accuracy in our Judgements and Forecasts - Open Philanthropy (10 mins.)
• How accurate are Open Phil’s predictions? (18 mins.)
• Efforts to Improve the Accuracy of Our Judgments and Forecasts - exploring the ways to work on and the importance of improving our calibration

The case for longtermism

• All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild (15 mins.)
• Orienting towards the long-term future (Video - 25 mins.)
• The Case for Strong Longtermism - Global Priorities Institute (1 hour 20 mins.) 
• The epistemic challenge to longtermism (2 min. Discussion of a somewhat longer paper)
• The Precipice, Appendix B - Population Ethics and Existential Risk (10 mins.)
• Representing future generations - Political institutions generally operate on 2-to-4-year timescales which aren’t long enough to address global issues (as the issue of climate change has shown). This talk analyzes sources of political short-termism and describes institutional reforms to align government incentives with the interests of all generations. (Video - 30 mins.)
• Blueprints (& lenses) for longtermist decision-making - How are we supposed to apply longtermism in practice?  The author outlines two concepts of a ‘blueprint’ and a ‘lens’ to clarify this issue. (7 mins.)
• Major UN report discusses existential risk and future generations (summary) (18 mins.)

Criticism of longtermism

• Against Longtermism (1 min. summary, 5. min read)
• This short comment, and the more academic pieces that it links to (2 mins. for the comment, lots to explore)
• How the simulation argument dampens future fanaticism
• How much current animal suffering does longtermism let us ignore? (9 mins.)
• This comment, with ten reasons to work on near-term causes (2 mins.)
• The Base Rate of Longtermism Is Bad — EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org) (8 mins.)
• Towards a Weaker Longtermism — EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org) (4 mins.)
• Against Strong Longtermism: A Response to Greaves and MacAskill | by Ben Chugg | Curious | Medium (12 mins.)

Suffering risks

• S-risks: Why they are the worst existential risks, and how to prevent them (20 mins.)