New preprint on the Hinge of History

My latest preprint, entitled The Hinge of History and the Choice between Patient and Urgent Longtermism, is out now. Some terminological explanation and further context:

• The Hinge of History means, roughly, the most important time in the entire human history (past, present and future), in which we either get our act together or do something really bad that destroys all or most of future value. This can be made more precise in various ways discussed in the preprint. An increasingly popular idea is that the Hinge of History is now. Will MacAskill pushes back against this idea in a recent paper called Are we Living at the Hinge of History?, and in my preprint I push back against his pushback.
• Longtermism, in the words of MacAskill in his recent book What We Owe the Future, is ''the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time''.
• Talk of urgent vs patient longtermism refers to whether this positive influence is best achieved via concrete object-level action now or via saving resources for such action at later times.
• The media attention around What We Owe the Future has been stupendous, not only in intellectually oriented and/or effective altruism-adjacent outlets such as Astral Codex Ten and podcasts by Tyler Cowen, Sean Carroll and Sam Harris, but also in mainstream media such as The New Yorker, Time Magazine, The Guardian and the BBC. I share the wide-spread enthusiasm for the book, and intend soon to help fix the relative shortage of reviews in Swedish.
• It has been pointed out that MacAskill sometimes defends far-reaching positions in academic papers and backs down to more moderate stances in his book, an example being how in a paper with Hilary Greaves he lays out the case for strong longtermism defined as the view that ''far-future effects are the most important determinant of the value of our options [today]'', but is content in the book with the somewhat more watered-down longtermism defined as above. Another example of this is his defense of patient longtermism in Are we Living at the Hinge of History, which is toned down in What We Owe the Future almost to the point of pressing the mute button. One may raise an eyebrow at this inconsistency, but in my opinion it is perfectly reasonable to explore principled positions in theoretical discussions taking place in seminar rooms and the academic literature, while choosing not to defend them in broader contexts.

Click here to find my new preprint!

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Edit December 19, 2022: New and (somewhat) revised version uploaded now.