Date: 15 Aug 2022 I don’t remember having ever been so emotionally reactive to a simple intellectual idea as I am now about this "longtermism" business. It has managed to make my blood boil, it’s embarrassing.. What emotional triggers is it pulling on to make me lose my temper?  Also, what am I missing? I cringe every time I listen to its main proponent talk about his book on my favourite podcasts or read his arguments in high-profile publications.. I contract in disbelief when I see people I admire and respect endorse or promote it. Is it money? Is he handsome? Is it an underground conspiracy to seduce my favourite thinkers? Or have I lost my intellectual capacities? WHAT IS HAPPENING?! Sean Carrol interview with Will MacAskill in this podcast (https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/08/15/207-william-macaskill-on-maximizing-good-in-the-present-and-future/) Sean Carrol tells WM that future generations are already taken into consideration by economy models. In these models, the future is deliberately given a smaller value than the present. And he then asks WM if it's fair to assume that the "longtermism" he proposes is positioned against these existing economy models by putting equal value to the future as the present. WL says that generally, yes, SC is correct to say this. And then he goes on to explain why, first by giving a rough definition of "time discounting" and then explaining why he finds the concept of time discounting ridiculous. Both his definition and his arguments I found to be both very, bery bad intellectually and very, very triggering emotionally. Source to understand discounting: [https://www.rff.org/publications/explainers/discounting-101/](https://www.rff.org/publications/explainers/discounting-101/)  More podcast notes (TO BE CLEANED UP): - SC: contrast longtermism vs conventional economic strategy of temporal discounting. In economics we know there will be ppl in the future and we do count their value a little bit but we count it less, explicitly. And it seems that longtermism is saying that’s a mistake - WM: broadly, yes, it’s a mistake. There are good reasons to discount the future: - Economy grows - we are richer than ppl who lived 50 years ago, we are poorer that ppl who will live 50 years from now - The rate of pure time preference → a given benefit or harm (not only financial) is intrinsically worth less year-on-year. The typical value they give is 2%. A happy day today is worth 2% more than a happy day in a year's time.  - There’s something really fishy, really off, really wrong with his line of argumentation, when he says that “time discounting” is absurd when thinking really long time and when he asks his qustion - would you save 1 person who lived 1000 years from now or 1 million who live 11000 years from now? - Josh Greene gave a good answer to using hypothetical completely unlikely theoretical scenarios to judge the usefulness of a moral theory  - Also Paul Bloom gave a very good answer to using “statistically relevant” results to make decisions or conclusions about real life (tre sa caut exact lectia și vide-ul, undeva la final red) - I think he’s just being silly and pompous an presumptuous and trying to sound clever at the same time - There has to be a fallacy here that he’s a victim of, that I don’t know of..  - spacial vs temporal distance → he’s an idiot…  - If you want to discount against time and not against space, you get into paradoxes (?), it gets technical (?) - seriously? It’s people alive today that are . are you differentiating between ppl who will live 1000 years from now in Somalia and ppl who will live 1000 years from now in USA? Will these even make sense in 1000 years from now? What are you talking about?!!! - If you were given the choice bw saving the little girl drowning in front of you and saving 1000 little girls and boys sying of starvation in Ethiopia by donation 1 million dollars, what would you do? Is it ok to pass by and let the little girl drown while saying. I’ll donate 1 million dollars when I get to the office. Are you insane? - - # References: - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference)  - We distinguish time discounting from time preference.  - We use the term time discounting broadly to encompass any reason for caring less about a future consequence, including factors that diminish the expected utility generated by a future consequence, such as uncertainty or changing tastes.  - It is a tendency to give greater value to rewards as they move away from their temporal horizons and towards the "now". For instance, a [nicotine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine) deprived smoker may highly value a cigarette available any time in the next 6 hours but assign little or no value to a cigarette available in 6 months - We use the term time preference to refer, more specifically, to the preference for immediate utility over delayed utility. - A practical example is if Jim and Bob go out for a drink and Jim has no money so Bob lends Jim $10. The next day Jim comes back to Bob, and Jim says, "Bob, you can have $10 now, or at the end of the month when I get paid I will give you $15." Bob's time preference would change depending on if he trusted Jim and how much he needs the money now, thinks he can wait, or would prefer to have $15 at the end of the month than $10 now. Present and expected needs, present and expected income affect the time preference.**