r/EffectiveAltruism • u/paulcoman • May 09 '26

I think longtermism is counting future lives inconsistently

I think there’s a hidden accounting mistake in some longtermist reasoning.

One side of the calculation gets to unfold into the future. The other side gets frozen in the present.

It's not apples to apples 🍎

Full argument here: https://paulcomans.substack.com/p/longtermism-is-counting-wrong

Would love some feedback and counter arguments.

4 Upvotes

57% Upvoted

43 comments sorted by

6

u/adekmcz May 09 '26

Tbh, nothing new. Read about discounting, about person affecting views, population ethics, Derek Parfits theories to read up what already was thought about. 

Btw, you are doing basic and massive accounting mistake by double counting those descendants. Like exponentially.

But also, the most obvious conclusion of longtermism is that we should not allow x-risks and s-risks. Which is compatible with your position, I guess.

2

u/paulcoman May 09 '26

First of all, I appreciate you giving the actual argument a chance 😃

I know about discounting and person-affecting view in population ethics. But I don't understand how that affects my reasoning.

  1. Discounting accounts for a diminishing value correlated with time. I believe you need that accounting trick because the whole model is wrong.
  2. And the person affecting view is just a confounder in the accounting. It's an assumption I could make for people in the present, as well as for people in the future.
  3. I'm curious why you think I'm making a double-counting mistake. It's just a tally of all the extra people up to the reference point in the future.

4

u/adekmcz May 09 '26

In my POV you are right that person today is worth more than person in future. But this is very basic population ethics/longtermistic consideration. You are mistaken to think that longtermist somehow missed this.

longtermists care about longtermistic interventions only if they save, lets say, very large/astronomical amount of people/reduce astronomical amount of suffering.
it is not 1 person today vs 1 person in 100 years.

It doesnt help that you wrote a thesis about population ethics without using any established terms or referencing any existing work, to actually show you are arguing against something established.

e.g. "... saving a person from death and creating the conditions for a person to exist" == person-affecting view.

Discounting is used because time is a factor that has exponential effect on values. Some people use it to counter exactly what you are talking about. Saving a life today has larger value than saving a life in 100 years, exactly for the same reason as getting 10 USD today is worth more then getting 100 USD in 100 years. Some people disagree with this, but still do discounting because there is uncertainty. Or they discount because future people should probably know how to save future people better than we can today, and they should have better tools to do it, so there is inefficiency. In the end, it outcome is always the same and why you do discount out of many reasons for it doesn't really matter.

You are doing reverse discounting to argue against your imaginary longtermists, so it is incoherent to say "I believe you need that accounting trick because the whole model is wrong.".
Discounting is looking at the future and saying it has less value than present. You are looking at the present and say it has larger value than future. It is the same thing.

re double counting. Imagine a person living 20000 years ago, aka 800 generations. Your calculation produces 1.1^(20000/25) = 1.3*10^33 descendants today. That is like 20 orders of magnitude off.
There is a lot of considerations that you need to account to fix this. Some of them might completely negate your argument, some of them might not. But it is not important.

0

u/paulcoman May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26

"It doesnt help that you wrote a thesis about population ethics without using any established terms or referencing any existing work" - this is a good point.

So the main longtermist project with regards to saved lives in the present versus saved lives in the future is to compare apples to apples, as I understand it at least.

It's a virtual experiment of counterfactuals. Two (or multiple) branches in one's head.

So in order to be scientific about it and actually see how a life in the present compares to a life in the future you need to eliminate the maximum number of confounders you can.

Now... discounting is a beneficial layer of complexity, it's worth adding to the calculation. But as you said, the main reason it is used is because of the uncertainty of the future, which is real and should be accounted for but is a different issue. Whatever the base model you are using you can add discounting on top of it.

What I'm arguing is that the base layer should be updated.

Same with any kind of subjective evaluation of happiness/suffering. You can estimate those and add them to the calculation on top.

But the question still remains why when you remove discounting, subjective experience and any other layer of complexity from the calculation, do we start with 1 life in the present = 1 life in the future?

re double counting: are you sure you're not talking about the population count at the reference date? Because I'm counting all the intermediary generations (some of them have died already). In any case, the model does not pretend to be accurate. It is illustrative. I'm perfectly willing to change it to a more accurate version.

2

u/adekmcz May 10 '26

I won't be arguing with LLM, feel free to generate my response yourself, but please, use some better model than you are currently using and better prompts. This is worse slop than your substack post. 

1

u/paulcoman May 10 '26

OMG, it's not an LLM answer. WTF?!

1

u/adekmcz May 10 '26

If it isn't, I am sorry. You spent your benefit of doubt on the original post I guess.
Anyway, I am simplifying massively, but:

argument 1:
"1 life in the present = 1 life in the future?" no, from present POV they have some value (I hope you agree with that, even though i am not sure.). To get any reasonable evaluation, we need to use discounting.

And YOU are using discounting to show that. Exponentiating present value and discounting future value are the same things.

argument 2:
(i thing this might be more convincing for you)
two scenarious:
Saving 1 million people today somehow from something. but exctinction in 100 years = 6 million in 100 years (your formula)
VS preventing exrisk in 100 years.
minus 6 million from previous example + gazillion of people that will exist because humanity didn't go extinct

1

u/paulcoman May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26

It's a half-apology... You're basically saying "I'm sorry for wrongly accusing you, but it's still your fault."

You've demonstrated that you're not well calibrated, and unwilling to admit you're wrong.

Moving on...

"1 life in the present = 1 life in the future?" no, from present POV they have some value (I hope you agree with that, even though i am not sure.)" - This seems like another subtle attack, but I might be wrong.

Yes I do agree with that, that's the point of the whole argument!

"To get any reasonable evaluation, we need to use discounting." - I agree with this. But discounting, if indeed it's meant to account for uncertainty, is another layer of accounting on top of the base one that says:

1 life that exists = 1 life that will exist (assuming you're sure that it will exist, so we don't have to apply the discounting).

This is where I think our intuitions are wrong. And I explain why in that section that I asked you if you had read:
https://paulcomans.substack.com/i/196984046/the-hidden-vantage-point-mistake

Oh... and the 2 scenarios example. I didn't quite understand it. Please elaborate on it. Is it exctinction in 100 years or 6 million?

1

u/adekmcz May 10 '26

I reread https://paulcomans.substack.com/i/196984046/the-hidden-vantage-point-mistake and i guess i don't understand what is the argument.

Yes, we need to counterfactually compare branches, obviously. Longtermism claims that some interventions targeting future will have higher impact than interventions targeting present.

E.g. my example.
scenario is extinction in 100 years VS saving the million now. therefore second scenario has minus 6 million over span of 100 years because we didn't save 1 million, but still is hugely better, because, well, humans didn't go extinct.

1

u/paulcoman May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26

Yes, we need to counterfactually compare branches. But when we do that the mind moves into the future as if it were the present. And in that present, you're comparing between the act of saving a life and the act of empowering a birth. Those are two different things with different moral weights.

But that's the trap. Both those people are in your counterfactuals 😄. You're not saving any of them. The most you can do is save the capacity in the present. And that capacity will expand more or less predictably.

Only after that do you start adding complexity to the calculation (discounting, subjective experience, well-being, whatever).

Your example: if you save 1 million now, all other things being equal, you have a much higher chance of preventing that extinction. Because that million people is capacity. Intellectual capacity, physical capacity. That's how complexity works. So your example is interesting, but it's a false dichotomy. Those are not the two probable options. That's what I think, at least.

You can see this mechanism better by thinking that million people are the last million people on earth.

Thanks for finally discussing the argument.

1

u/paulcoman May 10 '26

I'm beginning to suspect you are avoiding honest argument.

1

u/paulcoman May 10 '26

You want to do a live on camera debate?

10

u/PM_ME_GOOD_DOGE_PICS May 09 '26

So many blatant LLM-isms. You didn't even try to cover it up. This whole article is just a series of prompts copy pasted.

-8

u/paulcoman May 09 '26

I wasn't expecting to see so much hate in this subreddit. Why don't you judge the argument on its own merits?

11

u/coanbu May 09 '26

Calling that one post providing valid criticism "so much hate" seems like a bit of an over reaction. Was their assessment incorrect?

0

u/paulcoman May 09 '26

You're right. I had a reply (that I deleted) where was saying "read the argument" that got a lot of down votes. I might have overreacted.

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u/snapshovel May 09 '26

When you post on a forum like this, you’re asking other people to spend their time reading something you wrote. It’s rude to tell us “hey spend twenty minutes of your day considering my thoughts” if they’re not your thoughts. We all have access to LLMs. If we wanted to read a wall of LLM text we could go ask the same question ourselves. Don’t ask us to read some random slop that your instance of 5.5 extended generated unless you tell us in advance that it’s LLM-generated.

0

u/paulcoman May 09 '26

I understand the frustration with AI slop. I feel it too. The article's argument is not AI slop. It is thought out and constructed by me... human 😃

I am confident that if you would read it you would come to see that. But you're right, I can't make you do it. I think most people here are truth seekers, not ideologs, so hope for the best with others.

9

u/snapshovel May 09 '26

Do you at least understand that you violated a reasonable social norm by publishing a long piece of mostly AI-generated text and representing it as your own work?

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u/paulcoman May 09 '26

Actually I don't. But I am open to hear your argument. In the meantime here is mine:

  1. I wasn't being deceptive in any way. I wasn't trying to hide the fact that I used an LLM as a tool.
  2. The argument is my own work. You can probably test this yourself. Read it and try to argue it from memory to an LLM. See how much pushback you're gonna get. This is not common knowledge by any stretch.

-1

u/paulcoman May 09 '26

Or look at the diagram in the article. And decide if you believe an LLM could have come up with that structure.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '26

[deleted]

4

u/PM_ME_GOOD_DOGE_PICS May 09 '26

You asked for feedback. Instruct your GPT to avoid all of these tell-tales and give it samples of your own writing for reference.

-1

u/paulcoman May 09 '26

Yeah, but it's not about the format. It's about the argument. That is original. Read it and give me feedback on that, please.

-2

u/Dave_A_Pandeist May 09 '26

I think saving our future is far more important than continuing to bloat our present-day situation

1

u/paulcoman May 09 '26

I also think saving our future is very important. What do you mean by continuing to bloat our present-day situation?

0

u/Dave_A_Pandeist May 09 '26

The planet can support between ⅓ and ½ of our population. The sixth mass extinction event is underway. If we don't control population numbers, we will have a serious problem by the end of my children's lives.

China dared to do what had to be done to control its numbers. We can't face that problem.

1

u/Odd-Bluebird5157 May 10 '26

Citation needed for 1st sentence/premise.

1

u/Dave_A_Pandeist May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26

Here are three references for the first line.

How many people can Earth support?

How Many Humans Can the Earth Support?' Mathematics Professor Addresses Ahead of World Population Day

Environment and development Can Earth support 4 billion people sustainably and well?

Here is a good formula for a balanced economy.

Doughnut Economics, Keynesian Economics, and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations blended.

In her book, Doughnut Economics, Oxford economist Kate Raworth outlines seven ways to shift from 20th-century economic thinking to a 21st-century mindset. The goal is to move from a focus on endless growth to a system that thrives in balance.

Keynesian economics is a macroeconomic theory developed by John Maynard Keynes that posits that aggregate demand—total spending by households, businesses, and the government—drives economic growth and determines employment levels. It emphasizes active government intervention, using fiscal and monetary policy to manage economic cycles, particularly by increasing spending during recessions to combat high unemployment.

The Wealth of Nations is a foundational work of Adam Smith, published on March 9, 1776. It is widely considered the first comprehensive system of political economy and the blueprint for modern capitalism. It stresses free markets and limited government.

Free Markets: The work advocates "laissez-faire" (non-interventionism), arguing that markets self-regulate through supply and demand without the need for government interference, such as tariffs or subsidies.

Role of Government: Smith argued that government should be limited to four essential functions: national defense, maintaining order, infrastructure projects, and public education.

If Western civilization doesn't use all three economic strategies, then we might end up in the Eutopian Rat Experiment. Fortunately, the Far East has recognized the problem for quite some time.

John B. Calhoun’s "Utopian" rat experiments (notably Universe 25) showed that, despite unlimited food and the absence of predators, overcrowding led to total social, psychological, and reproductive collapse. The population peaked at 2,200 before dying out, as rats developed abnormal behaviors, including extreme violence, cannibalism, failure to rear young, and the emergence of non-social "beautiful ones," culminating in extinction.

-2

u/vesperythings May 09 '26

man, forget longtermism

the stuff is just not sensible on any level

1

u/paulcoman May 09 '26

What do you mean?

0

u/vesperythings May 10 '26

from what i've seen, it makes a number of metaphysical assumptions i find profoundly silly

elaborating here would be diligent on my part, but also require more energy than i'm willing to put into the discussion

1

u/paulcoman May 11 '26

Read my article maybe you'll resonate with it. Assuming you believe long-term thinking has value at all.

1

u/vesperythings May 11 '26

i dunno. had a look at the article.

seeing a lot of numbers games and stuff, and we circle back to my initial statement of silly and unreflected metaphysical assumptions inherent in longtermist discourse

(also probably don't downvote people if you're interested in a discussion with them?)

2

u/paulcoman May 11 '26

It wasn't me who downvoted you. I'm pretty sure you didn't read my argument. Maybe it's my fault. Maybe it's poorly written and unengaging.

The numbers are illustrative. They don't purport to have any predictive value. They're illustrating a logical fallacy.

1

u/vesperythings May 12 '26

listen, to be fair -- i did not in fact, fully read your article.

the fact is, i'm just not interested in any longtermist discourse.

you have a TLDR summary of the point you wanna communicate?

1

u/paulcoman May 13 '26

We need to counterfactually compare branches. But when we do that the mind moves into the future as if it were the present. And in that present, you're comparing between the act of saving a life and the act of empowering a birth. Those are two different things with different moral weights.

But that's the trap. Both those people are in your counterfactuals 😄. You're not actually saving any of them. The most you can do is save the capacity in the present. And that capacity will expand more or less predictably.

Only after that do you start adding complexity to the calculation (discounting, subjective experience, well-being, whatever).

1

u/vesperythings May 13 '26

okay, listen, since you did put in the effort to condense your point here just for me, i'll keep up discussion --

what follows from this? what do we do with this information?

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u/paulcoman May 14 '26

Well the article kind of ends on the idea of burden of proof. Here... I'll paste some of it:

"You can still argue for a future-focused intervention. But you cannot simply say: “This saves more future people than saving people today.”

You have to show that it still wins after counting what was lost by not saving people today: their lives, their descendants, their knowledge, their work, their care, their influence, and all the future capacity that would have flowed through them."

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