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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Convergence thesis between longtermism and neartermism, published by weeatquince on December 30, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Epistemic status: some vague musings. Introduction Here is a post I wrote very quickly a little while back on the topic of: would it be surprising that the best things to do if you are a longtermist and if you are not a longtermist might converge and be the same. It takes a many weak arguments approach to considering the question. I do not make the case that longtermism and neartermism will converge only that it would not in fact be “surprising and suspicious” if they did converge [1]. Making the stronger case that they do converge would require a bit more time and empirical data gathering work and this is mostly a thought exercise so far. Longtermism (roughly) defined here as: the moral belief that future wellbeing matters significantly and given the future might be extremely big it is extremely morally important to make sure it goes well. Neartermism is defined as not longtermism. Top 10 weak arguments SAME PROBLEMS 1. Neglectedness – the world is chronically short-term We should focus on issues that are high in scale, neglected and tractable. The world is chronically short term. Like extremely so. At least anecdotally I can say that politicians I have worked with have not put much thought into anything beyond their expected 2 year tenure in office. The UK national risk register looks 2 years ahead. Here is a whole bunch of literature pointing out how politicians are short term. For some reasons this even applies to politicians and society planning their own futures – as can be seen by the neglect of improving care for elderly people with mental illness (source). Even just considering people alive today most of society is not planning for 95% of our future. This is due to both presentism bias and the nature of our modern democracies. Given high negelctedness it should not be surprising that focusing on making sure the future goes well matters a lot even if you ignore the very long-term, so it should not be surprising if longtermist suggestions of how to do good are the same as suggestions from non-longtermist. 2. The same problems are relevant for both – e.g. X-risk estimates are high Consider Toby Ord’s estimates of existential risks. If these estimates are accurate and roughly constant over the next 100 years then your chance of dying any year from an existential catastrophe is roughly 1/600 or 0.16667% (there are some reasons to think it is higher or lower but let's call that a reasonable estimate). Let's compare to say your chance of dying from malaria at 0.00518% (source) or traffic accident if you live in the UK at 0.0026% (source and source). Your chance of dying in a global catastrophe would be over an order of magnitude higher than your chance of dying from any other big killer that can be listed. Many non-longtermists are also interested in topics such as preventing pandemics. We are already seeing convergent problems and should not be surprised to see more such convergence. SAME SOLUTIONS 3. The power-law rule of having impact could apply to approaches to doing good. Our ability to have impact is heavy tailed (source), maybe power law distributed, with some ways of having impact being much more powerful than other ways of having impact. This means some ways of doing good are vastly superior to other ways of doing good. If we think this applies to the tools that we use to impact the world then we should not be surprised if there are some super-powered approaches to doing good and if the same really high impact tool is great for both the long-term and the short-term. We might a priori expect that if examined some tool such as: becoming prime minister, promoting growth, fixing science, or something else, might be many times ...