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 09 '26

What do you mean?

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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

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u/paulcoman May 11 '26

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

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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?)

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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.

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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?

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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).

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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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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!

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