EA - Longtermist terminology has biasing assumptions by Arepo

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Longtermist terminology has biasing assumptions, published by Arepo on October 30, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Sequence summaryThis sequence investigates the expected loss of value from non-extinction global catastrophes. This post is a criticism of the biases and ambiguities inherent in longtermist terminology (including ‘global catastrophes’). The next post, A proposed hierarchy of longtermist concepts, lays out the terms which I intend to use for the rest of this sequence, and which encourage less heuristic, more expected-value thinking. Finally, for now, Modelling civilisation after a catastrophe lays out the structure of a proposed model which will inform the direction of my research for the next few months. If feedback on the structure is good, later parts will populate the model with some best-guess values, and present it in an editable form.IntroductionLongtermist terminology has evolved haphazardly, so that much of it is misleading or noncomplementary. Michael Aird wrote a helpful post attempting to resolve inconsistencies in our usage, but that post’s necessity and its use of partially overlapping Venn diagrams - implying no formal relationships between the terms - itself highlights these problems. Moreover, during the evolution of longtermism, assumptions that originally started out as heuristics seem to have become locked in to the discussion via the terminology, biasing us towards those heuristics and away from expected value analyses.In this post I discuss these concerns, but since I expect it to be relatively controversial and it isn’t really a prerequisite for the rest of the sequence so much as an explanation of why I’m not using standard terms, I would emphasise that this is strictly optional reading for the rest of the sequence, so think of it as a 'part 0' of the sequence. You should feel free to skip ahead if you disagree strongly or just aren’t particularly interested in a terminology discussion.Concepts under the microscopeExistential catastropheRecreating Ord and Aird’s diagrams of the anatomy of an existential catastrophe here, we can see an ‘existential catastrophe’ has various possible modes:Figure from The PrecipiceVenn diagram figures all from Aird’s postIt’s the ‘failed continuation’ branch which I think needlessly muddies the waters.An ‘existential catastrophe’ doesn’t necessarily relate to existence.In theory an existential catastrophe can describe a scenario in which civilisation lasts until the end of the universe, but has much less net welfare than we imagine it could have had.This seems odd to consider an ‘existential’ risk - there are many ways in which we can imagine positive or negative changes to expected future quality of life (see for example Beckstead’s idea of trajectory change). Classing low-value-but-interstellar outcomes as existential catastrophes seems unhelpful both since it introduces definitional ambiguity over how much net welfare must be lost for them to qualify, and since questions of expected future quality of life are very distinct from questions of future quantity of life, and so seem like they should be asked separately.. nor involve a catastrophe that anyone alive recognisesThe concept also encompasses a civilisation that lives happily on Earth until the sun dies, perhaps even finding a way to survive that, but never spreading out across the universe. This means that, for example, universal adoption of a non-totalising population ethic would be an existential catastrophe. I’m strongly in favour of totalising population ethics, but this seems needlessly biasing.‘Unrecoverable’ or ‘permanent’ states are a superfluous conceptIn the diagram above, Ord categorises ‘unrecoverable dystopias’ as a type of existential risk. He actually seems to consider them necessarily impermanent, but (in...