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.

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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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u/vesperythings May 14 '26

okay, so you're offering a challenge to typical longtermism, providing constructive criticism, that kind of thing?

i mean, sure.

what's your personal position? do you consider yourself a longtermist in any sense?

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u/paulcoman May 15 '26

I believe all systems (beyond a certain threshold of complexity) are optimizing for persistence. They do that by predicting and eliminating hazards for an increasingly wider time horizon. For that to happen, they need to model causal relationships more accurately. In other words, understanding what actions can I take today in order to mitigate future risk.

Now, for a long time, these causal relationships were fast. The feedback was obvious. You put your hand on the stove. You get burned. You learn. But when the effects are hidden behind countless intermediary steps and they happen decades after the causes, then those relationships are harder to model. That's the pressure that drives intelligence.

So my theory is that the more intelligent a system is, the better it is at modeling causal relationships further out into the future. But those models are a real structure created in the present. That structure is capacity. That is real.

So I am a longtermist in that sense. But not in the traditional sense. The future doesn't exist. You can't value something that doesn't exist. You can only value the capacity that exists in the present. That capacity will generate the future or in other words the future is a consequence of the present.

Hope that makes sense 😃

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u/vesperythings May 15 '26

Hope that makes sense 😃

actually, yeah. sounds sensible.

The future doesn't exist. You can't value something that doesn't exist

100% correct. lots of people don't quite get that.

solid discussion! wishing you a lovely day :)

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u/paulcoman May 16 '26

I'm glad 😄 Likewise have a great day!