Hearing from “longtermists” and their detractors is exhausting in that “stuck in the middle with you” way. Both are wrong.
It’s really frustrating how the detractors undervalue future lives. What if people would’ve gone all Ligotti and Zapffe in the 19th century and annihilated 100% of human life? Not into it. Please don’t mistake this for some anti-Roe “every sperm is sacred” nonsense; can’t we just have a dream of a world where there are humans in say 5000 years from now? That’s literally what might be at stake with some of these short-term existential threats.
The second problem of the detractors is how they mishear “the death of millions is bad and complete extinction is even worse” as “the death of millions is a super vital part of our evil plan”. That’d be messed up, yeah. If that was an intentional goal. Which it’s not. The idea is to try to save people.
I’m sometimes scared that the longtermists do undervalue present life. Jenny in the space ship a million years from now is not worth more than Jenny in the meadow today. And, maybe I’m weird about time, but I don’t wanna undervalue past lives either. Future events are not more real or valuable than past events. Maybe the present is a li’l bit better than both, but it has a drawback of already having become a few seconds ago, probably better known as “the past”.
An even bigger problem with these self-proclaimed longtermists is how they suck. It’s like the world’s worst people. Exploiting workers while living in luxury, making climate-endangering mistakes like Musk’s foray into proof-of-work crypto, and chumming with racists like Coulter and Trump like Peter Thiel does. Trump, who ended up hiring climate denier Rex Tillerson for secretary of state, is who Thiel selected to lead us into the long term future. That sucks.
Instead of these jokers & clowns, we’ve got to fix climate change and clean up our dying oceans.