The Most Important Thing in the World

Sometimes we may dismiss a problem as "not the most important thing in the world".  Which raises the (surprisingly neglected!) question: what is, literally, the most important thing in the world?

In 'The Case for Strong Long-Termism', Greaves & MacAskill argue that the correct answer is: improving the long-run future. I'll try to summarize some of the core considerations here (with any flaws in the exposition being my own), but interested readers should of course check out the full paper for all the details.

First note that the near term -- the next hundred years, say -- is a vanishingly tiny proportion of all time, and contains an even tinier proportion of all the valuable entities (e.g. sentient lives) that could potentially exist (if we don't wipe ourselves out first).  It would seem to follow, on almost any plausible population axiology (whether 'total', 'average', or anything in-between -- so long as it does not intrinsically discount the value of future lives relative to current ones), that the overall value of the world will be determined almost entirely by the (quantity and) quality of far-future lives.  All of us existing today are, by comparison, a single speck of dust in the desert.  We matter immensely, of course, but no more than any other speck, and there are an awful lot more of them, in aggregate, than there are of us.

So if there's anything we can feasibly do to improve the trajectory of the long-run future, in expectation, the value of doing so seems likely to swamp every other possible consideration.

It's worth emphasizing that this implication is robust across a wide range of moral views.  For example, you don't have to be a consequentialist to think that consequences are among what matters.  So any kind of stakes-sensitive, non-absolutist form of deontology (which is surely the only plausible kind) is going to be similarly committed to allowing these astronomically great stakes to override the non-consequentialist elements of the theory, whatever they may be.

G&M similarly argue that their case does not depend upon traditional expected value being the correct account of rational choice under uncertainty.  Risk-aversion, if understood in "prioritarian" fashion as directing us to take special care to avoid the worst outcomes, may if anything increase the importance of protecting the far future.

One could cease to care about the future by adopting a narrow person-affecting view which embraces the "non-identity problem" to conclude that contingent future people simply don't matter.  But I take that to be an unacceptable view.  (It implies, for example, that we should maximally exploit the environment in order to benefit present generations, no matter how great the harm to future generations.)

I think about the only way to avoid long-termist swamping is if we can rationally discount highly-speculative reasoning. (This may be related to the ambiguity aversion discussed in section 4.5 of the paper? I'm not sure.)  There's obviously immense uncertainty about the long-run effects of our actions, so if we ought to overweight robust credences, and radically discount extremely tentative or weakly-based ones (perhaps in the way that Holden Karnofsky argues for here), then we may effectively treat the far-future as beyond our reach -- and focus instead on short-term "sure things" like anti-malaria interventions and cash grants.

I'm highly uncertain about whether we should discount speculative reasoning in this way (would that make the view self-undermining, as it does not itself seem to be robustly supported?), but I think it's most likely that we shouldn't -- or, at least, not too much.  So I'm ultimately pretty convinced by Greaves & MacAskill's case for seeing the long-run future as our top priority.  At the very least, it should certainly get a lot more attention and resources than it currently does -- though not, I think, the full 100% of our moral resources that would be warranted if we were certain that their view was correct.

But is the far-future tractable?  The long-termist conditional isn't of much practical significance if it turns out that we can't feasibly improve the long-run trajectory (in expectation).  So: can we?

As an undergrad, I suggested that self-propagating actions could have the greatest long-term impact. Breaking cycles of abuse, and generating cycles of virtue, might then be immensely important.  But I now note that their long-term persistence, like that of a virus, depends on the relevant actions having a "reproductive rate" of at least 1, which seems dubious.

More plausibly, it might be that we can best improve the future by improving the general capacities of humanity -- e.g. through deworming, developmental aid, and other interventions that help to ensure that as many people as possible develop their problem-solving capacities to their full potential. (Education would seem ideal in principle, but I gather that's it's nearly impossible in practice to actually find effective educational interventions, or at least ones that scale well, other than indirect stuff like deworming.  But it seems a crucial area for further research, at any rate.)  I think this is a crucial reason to prefer funding Global Health & Development over Animal Welfare, for example, despite expectations that the latter is more cost-effective at directly reducing suffering.

But it would be somewhat surprising if targeted efforts to improve the far future couldn't do better than these other cases of "short-term"-focused interventions that may have some incidental long-term benefits.  And G&A argue pretty convincingly, I think, that we should regard at least some targeted efforts as sufficiently tractable. A key concept they invoke is that of an attractor state, or state which, once entered, the world will tend to remain in for a long time.

The most obvious attractor state is extinction, and indeed it seems pretty straightforward that we should, as a species, invest significant resources to protect against extinction risks (e.g. asteroids, unfriendly AI, extreme climate change, nuclear war, pandemics, etc.).  But there are also less extreme attractor states -- just consider all the path-dependence one finds in politics and institutions generally.  Decisions about the constitutional rules of a new institution can shape their subsequent behaviour for as long as the institution in question survives, and tend to be much more difficult to change after the fact. G&A thus suggest that it's extremely important to get it right if the world develops "strong international governance organisations, or even a world government."  Climate change and AI are other issues that could plausibly shape the long-run future (even without causing our extinction).

Finally, G&A mention the "meta-option" of funding research into longtermist intervention prospects, which -- given our immense uncertainty around the first-order issues -- seems likely to be immensely valuable.  Given that the most important thing in the world, in principle, is to improve the trajectory of the long-run future, it seems pretty commonsensical to conclude that, for the time being, the most important thing we can do in practice is to secure more knowledge about how to affect this trajectory.

If you agree with this conclusion, a good place to start could be to (i) develop and/or share these arguments, and (ii) consider donating to the Long-Term Future EA Fund (or perhaps, more indirectly, the EA Infrastructure Fund).

Or, if you disagree, please leave a comment explaining your reasoning.  What do you think is the most important thing in the world, and why?

[UPDATE: I forgot to mention: I think this is one area where it matters a lot that one be a robust realist. If one thought that ethics was mere emoting, or a conventional construction out of people's actual attitudes and dispositions, there would seem no motivation to take these radical -- and potentially alienating -- arguments seriously.]