A Critique of Longtermism
I recently watched a video about longtermism uploaded by a YouTube channel called Sabine Hossenfelder, which I highly recommend for its objective perspective on scientific news and complex real world issues. Longtermism, as defined in the video, is “the philosophical idea that the long-term future of humanity is way more important than the present.” Longtermists maintain that because the approximately 8 billion living humans are a tiny fraction of the lives that will populate the future, long-term issues are many orders of magnitude more significant than seemingly pressing issues like starvation, which afflict a ‘mere’ few hundred million. Sabine’s video presents longtermist views espoused by technocrats Elon Musk and Peter Thiel in addition to common arguments regarding these ideologies. I want to posit an argument against longtermism as a nonpartisan teenager who is admittedly dissatisfied with the trajectory of human innovation. Most longtermists contend society should ...