I think the grandfather idea is that if you kill 100 people now, and the average person who dies would have had 1 descendant, and the large loss would happen in 100 years (~4 more generations), then the difference in total lives lived between the two scenarios is ~500, not 900. If the number of descendants per person is above ~1.2, then burying the waste means population after the larger loss in 100 years is actually higher than if you processed it now.
Obviously I’m also ignoring a whole lot of things here that I do think matter, as well.
And of course, as you pointed out in your reply to my comment above, it’s probably better to ignore the scenario description and just look at it as a pure choice along the lines of something like “Is it better to reduce total population by 900 if the deaths happen in 100 years instead of now?”
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...
I think the grandfather idea is that if you kill 100 people now, and the average person who dies would have had 1 descendant, and the large loss would happen in 100 years (~4 more generations), then the difference in total lives lived between the two scenarios is ~500, not 900. If the number of descendants per person is above ~1.2, then burying the waste means population after the larger loss in 100 years is actually higher than if you processed it now.
Obviously I’m also ignoring a whole lot of things here that I do think matter, as well.
And of course, as you pointed out in your reply to my comment above, it’s probably better to ignore the scenario description and just look at it as a pure choice along the lines of something like “Is it better to reduce total population by 900 if the deaths happen in 100 years instead of now?”
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...