How to neglect the long term
Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 11-2023
Consider longtermism: the view that, at least in some of the most important decisions facing agents today, which options are morally best is determined by which are best for the long-term future. Various critics have argued that longtermism is false—indeed, that it is obviously false, and that we can reject it on normative grounds without close consideration of certain descriptive facts. In effect, it is argued, longtermism would be false even if real-world agents had promising means of benefiting vast numbers of future people. In this paper, I develop a series of troubling impossibility results for those who wish to reject longtermism so robustly. It turns out that, to do so, we must incur severe theoretical costs. I suspect that these costs are greater than simply accepting longtermism. If so, the more promising route to denying longtermism would be by appeal to descriptive facts.
Other working papers
Estimating long-term treatment effects without long-term outcome data – David Rhys Bernard (Rethink Priorities), Jojo Lee and Victor Yaneng Wang (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
The surrogate index method allows policymakers to estimate long-run treatment effects before long-run outcomes are observable. We meta-analyse this approach over nine long-run RCTs in development economics, comparing surrogate estimates to estimates from actual long-run RCT outcomes. We introduce the M-lasso algorithm for constructing the surrogate approach’s first-stage predictive model and compare its performance with other surrogate estimation methods. …
AI alignment vs AI ethical treatment: Ten challenges – Adam Bradley (Lingnan University) and Bradford Saad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
A morally acceptable course of AI development should avoid two dangers: creating unaligned AI systems that pose a threat to humanity and mistreating AI systems that merit moral consideration in their own right. This paper argues these two dangers interact and that if we create AI systems that merit moral consideration, simultaneously avoiding both of these dangers would be extremely challenging. While our argument is straightforward and supported by a wide range of pretheoretical moral judgments, it has far-reaching…
Cassandra’s Curse: A second tragedy of the commons – Philippe Colo (ETH Zurich)
This paper studies why scientific forecasts regarding exceptional or rare events generally fail to trigger adequate public response. I consider a game of contribution to a public bad. Prior to the game, I assume contributors receive non-verifiable expert advice regarding uncertain damages. In addition, I assume that the expert cares only about social welfare. Under mild assumptions, I show that no information transmission can happen at equilibrium when the number of contributors…