{"id":37235,"date":"2022-09-05T20:51:17","date_gmt":"2022-09-06T01:51:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=37235"},"modified":"2022-09-05T20:51:17","modified_gmt":"2022-09-06T01:51:17","slug":"word-of-the-day-827","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2022\/09\/05\/word-of-the-day-827\/","title":{"rendered":"Word Of The Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Longtermism<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Longtermism<\/b>\u00a0is an\u00a0ethical stance<\/a>\u00a0which gives priority to improving the long-term\u00a0future<\/a>. It is an important concept in\u00a0effective altruism<\/a>\u00a0and serves as a primary motivation for efforts to reduce\u00a0existential risks<\/a> to humanity.<\/p>\n

Sigal Samuel from\u00a0Vox<\/a><\/i>\u00a0summarizes the key argument for longtermism as follows: “future people<\/a>\u00a0matter morally just as much as people alive today;… there may well be more people alive in the future than there are in the present or have been in the past; and… we can positively affect future peoples’ lives.”\u00a0These three ideas taken together suggest, to those advocating longtermism, that it is the responsibility of those living now to ensure that future generations get to survive and flourish. [Wikipedia<\/strong><\/a>]<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Uh huh. A deliberate purging of the chronological aspect of existence, sounds like, with a dubious helping of the same intellectual errors made by anti-abortionists, to wit, equating the a prior existence to a later existence of different things.<\/p>\n

Noted in “Why \u2018longtermism\u2019 isn\u2019t ethically sound<\/em><\/a>,” Christine Emba, WaPo<\/em><\/strong>:<\/p>\n

Longtermism relies on the theory that humans have evolved fairly recently, and thus we can expect our species to grow long into the future. The world\u2019s current population is really a blip; if all goes well, a huge number of humans will come after us. Thus, if we\u2019re reasoning rationally and impartially (as EAs pride themselves on doing), we should tilt heavily toward paying attention to this larger future population\u2019s concerns \u2014 not the concerns of people living right now.<\/p>\n

Depending on how you crunch the numbers, making even the minutest progress on avoiding existential risk can be seen as more worthwhile than saving millions of people alive today. In the big picture, \u201cneartermist\u201d problems such as poverty and global health don\u2019t affect enough people to be worth worrying about \u2014 what we should really be obsessing over is the chance of a sci-fi apocalypse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It rather makes me wonder which group of humans get the assistance. I mean, if not today’s suffering folks, how about tomorrow’s? Day after? Thousand years from now?<\/p>\n

I wonder if they’ll be making a religion out of this, with your position in the sainthood determined by how many people you, ah, “helped.” Every once in a while they update the computer’s database of people with the data, just to give those so stored a bit of a thrill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Longtermism: Longtermism\u00a0is an\u00a0ethical stance\u00a0which gives priority to improving the long-term\u00a0future. It is an important concept in\u00a0effective altruism\u00a0and serves as a primary motivation for efforts to reduce\u00a0existential risks to humanity. Sigal Samuel from\u00a0Vox\u00a0summarizes the key argument for longtermism as follows: “future people\u00a0matter morally just as much as people alive today;… there \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37235"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37236,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37235\/revisions\/37236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}