Much time after the fact, I now realize that there is another argument you may have been talking about regarding the value of the species: If the reason we care about humanity is that we care about each of its individuals (regardless of temporal distance) then we could consider that there exist N individuals in humanity, and then the longtermist thought experiment asserts that it is better to reach N-100 by processing the waste than to reach N-1000 by burying it. In that case, I would answer that whether burying or processing the waste, N remains almost unchanged in expectation because population rebounds for any non-X risk.
So I guess the lesson there is to disregard any longtermist reasoning that doesn’t have such extreme gravity that the extreme volatility and predeterminedness of the future doesn’t blur all choices together.
I am assuming that any individual action basically doesn’t matter because balancing forces achieve almost the same consequences in the world where you counterfactually choose opposite, which I’m admittedly not that confident about...
Much time after the fact, I now realize that there is another argument you may have been talking about regarding the value of the species:
If the reason we care about humanity is that we care about each of its individuals (regardless of temporal distance) then we could consider that there exist N individuals in humanity, and then the longtermist thought experiment asserts that it is better to reach N-100 by processing the waste than to reach N-1000 by burying it.
In that case, I would answer that whether burying or processing the waste, N remains almost unchanged in expectation because population rebounds for any non-X risk.
So I guess the lesson there is to disregard any longtermist reasoning that doesn’t have such extreme gravity that the extreme volatility and predeterminedness of the future doesn’t blur all choices together.
I am assuming that any individual action basically doesn’t matter because balancing forces achieve almost the same consequences in the world where you counterfactually choose opposite, which I’m admittedly not that confident about...