I think intrinsically any prediction of the future not directly tied to things we have examples of from the past, such as climate cycles, will feel like this. And the future almost certainly will have things we don’t have lots of past evidence for. Maybe part of it might be that people just don’t actually try to think about or model the long term future very much, or the value in it, so the few people who do wind up being longtermists? Or maybe I’m just underexposed to other schools of thought. I wonder what other visions for the long term future exist, that depart radically from the longtermist point of view and are robust against scrutiny?
I generally think the long-term future is so chaotic that we shouldn’t have any confidence in pretty much any model. I also am not very familiar with other models for the long-term future, other than those proposed by people who are concerned about s-risks, i.e. the fear of an infinite dictatorship.
I think intrinsically any prediction of the future not directly tied to things we have examples of from the past, such as climate cycles, will feel like this. And the future almost certainly will have things we don’t have lots of past evidence for. Maybe part of it might be that people just don’t actually try to think about or model the long term future very much, or the value in it, so the few people who do wind up being longtermists? Or maybe I’m just underexposed to other schools of thought. I wonder what other visions for the long term future exist, that depart radically from the longtermist point of view and are robust against scrutiny?
I generally think the long-term future is so chaotic that we shouldn’t have any confidence in pretty much any model. I also am not very familiar with other models for the long-term future, other than those proposed by people who are concerned about s-risks, i.e. the fear of an infinite dictatorship.