Hi all,

Thanks to all for taking the time to discuss our paper. I don’t have time to read and comment on everything I’ve seen discussed in the forum, but I thought it would be worthwhile to comment on a few misunderstanding (some of which others have already pointed to):

 

1. Although our main focus is on strong longtermism, many things we say are relevant for weaker views as well.
2. Many of our arguments are related in the sense that if you bite the bullet on one, you end up in another problem.
3. I think there are good reason to think that the psychological constraints for distance in space and distance is time are different because distance is space can be overcome, and arguably the distance of “caring” is less today than it was in the past because distance can be reduced in so many ways, but the distance to far future individuals is for obvious reasons very different.
4. The difference-maker argument is not saying that we cannot do things that are good for the future, but that we don’t need to think about the far future to know that these things are good. I think this is important to keep in mind when one addresses the problem of predicting far future consequences and evaluating value weights for the far future.

Speaking for both me and Karolina, we’d be super happy if a longtermist would take the time to respond to our paper.