Substrat: positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time
wellbeing of sentient creatures is all that matters morally
move from “How can I personally have the biggest impact?” to “Who in the community is relatively best placed to do what?”
personal decisions with high leverage for impact: donations, political activism, spreading good ideas, having children, choice of career
ITN framework:
importance of problem: significance-persistence-contingency framework
significance: average value added by new state of affairs
persistence: how long new state of affairs lasts
contingency: noninevitability; extent to which state of affairs depends on small number of specific actions (agriculture is not very, novel Jane Eyre is very contingent)
tractability of problem: how many resources would it take to solve a given fraction of the problem?
neglectedness of problem: how many resources are already going towards solving the problem (however: with less neglectedness, maybe increasing returns to effort!)
3 rules of thumb:
take actions we can be comparatively confident are good
increase the number of options open to us
learn more
significant problems:
lock-in of bad values (e.g. through AGI or dominance of single world ideology)
end of civilisation (e.g. through nuclear weapons/bioweapons, technological stagnation, depleting fossil fuel reserves, significant warming of the planet)
past & future in perspective:
homo sapiens ~300 k years ago, agriculture ~12 k years ago, first cities ~6 k years ago, industrial era ~250 years ago
~100 bio. people have ever lived, ~8 bio. alife still
mammalians last ~1 mio. years (80 tr. people to come); earth habitable for 100s of mio. years
today's rate of change is extraordinary & not maintainable
in recent decades, global economig growth averaged ~3% per year
~0% for first 290,000 years of humanity’s existence; ~0.1% in agricultural era
from 10,000 BC onwards, world economy doubled every few hundred years;
most recent doubling took 19 years
Humanity might last for millions or even billions of years to come. But the rate of change of the modern world can only continue for thousands of years.
humans & animals:
per year 70 bn. chickens, 300 mio. cattle, 1.5 bn. pigs, 100 bn. fish killed
25 bn. chickens, 1.5 bn cattle, 1 bn. pigs alive at any one time