[hderms]

Maybe you can totally rank order goals or principles of morality within the confines of a single person, but how could you hope to do that for large groups of people without forcing everyone to assume the same things as you? Long-termism being a great example, because I personally, think the amount we should care about future people decays rapidly as we move into the future. It's not as if their lives don't have value equal to our own, but how can we hope to assess how many of them there may be or what aspects of the realities of human life will change over the next century even? This is like trying to predict the future by reading tea leaves, except you have to pledge 10% of your income to whichever leaf talks about the risk of general AI the loudest.

So should everyone be forced to value all future human lives as being as concretely valuable as our own? In order to put them into a total ordering of morality one is forced to make a judgement call on how many people we think are likely to exist in the future as well as how relevant our musings of today actually capture what life will be like in that future.

Effective altruists like to use exponential growth to beat people over the head with the idea that the future is more important than the present. Do they ever acknowledge the fact that the far future is also exponentially more unpredictable than seconds into the future?

It just reeks of hubris to me. To be a really effective altruist you must first create a time travel device.

[concordDance]

> Effective altruists like to use exponential growth to beat people over the head with the idea that the future is more important than the present. Do they ever acknowledge the fact that the far future is also exponentially more unpredictable than seconds into the future?

Not in my experience and all the time respectively.

[moistly]

> the amount we should care about future people decays rapidly as we move into the future

Better to save a life today, than a billion lives a century from now, because the unstoppable planet-killer asteroid is going to hit us in 99 years.