Haha, there was the time they decided the objective best use of money was spending 30 grand "Giving copies of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to the winners of EGMO 2019 and IMO 2020" >Empirically, a substantial number of top people in our community have (a) entered due to reading and feeling a deep connection to HPMOR and (b) attributed their approach to working on the long term future in substantial part to the insights they learned from reading HPMOR. This includes some individuals receiving grants on this list, and some individuals on the grant-making team > >.... > >I think that Math Olympiad winners are a very promising demographic within which to find individuals who can contribute to improving the long-term future. I believe Math Olympiads select strongly on IQ as well as (weakly) on conscientiousness and creativity, which are all strong positives. Participants are young and highly flexible; they have not yet made too many major life commitments (such as which university they will attend), and are in a position to use new information to systematically change their lives’ trajectories. I view handing them copies of an engaging book that helps teach scientific, practical and quantitative thinking as a highly asymmetric tool for helping them make good decisions about their lives and the long-term future of humanity. Actually most of the things they funded were really stupid, but honestly I'm just glad they're throwing away their money uselessly instead of doing something actually dangerous, like, (to name a totally random example) boosting lunatic ideologues like Blake Masters or JD Vance into general elections they might actually win Edit: oops forgot [link](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/long-term-future-fund-april-2019-grant-recommendations#Mikhail_Yagudin___28_000__)

Plus, solving real problems would step on a lot of people's toes - these people will gladly pay for you to make up various longtermist problems, fly to conferences, and so on. There's a similar thing they keep trying to make happen in ethics, along the lines of claiming that e.g. insect population decline is a good thing because insects are suffering in the wild. That one is both more obscure and more malevolent.

The cynic in me agrees with you. Solving climate change is really hard and requires buy-in from a lot of people. It also requires a pretty large amount of scientific knowledge, and there are a lot of people already working on it. So getting attention (and more importantly, money) is really hard. And any solution you propose will be examined by a lot of smart people who will call you a dumbass if your idea won't work. But if you invent a really scary but very-far-off problem, this solves all of those issues. It's really scary, so you can justify spending money on your problem instead of sooner but theoretically less dangerous problems. It's made up, so whatever solution you invent is a lot harder to criticize. (How do you criticize an attempt to prevent General AI when literally nobody knows what an actual General AI would look like? And you can just make up whatever risk probability you want, since nobody has even a rough ballpark of when General AI will be possible.) And you invented it, so nobody is trying to solve it yet, which means you don't have any competition. Plus since it's not a real problem, you don't have to actually try implementing your solution.

It's almost a twisted parody of *actual* wise long-term decision-making. Like, we've been begging them for *decades* to consider the welfare of future generations, and now they're doing it in some kind of fucking monkey's paw way where they're like "wish granted, we will now optimize for the googolplextillion humans who will someday be living in the nonstop-orgasm machine, at your expense."

I imagine the people at the WHO catching heat for not doing it - when they have been begging for funding and action on it for *years* - find it a bit galling that this is how that work gets attention

That, and that they assume that there is a moral responsibility to bring more humans into existence. Most people, I think, wouldn't really agree, while antinatalism isn't that popular most longtermists think that simply *not creating* uncountably many simulated humans is itself a moral tragedy.

Nah, arguing against it is actually quite easy. I just don’t believe that we are morally obligated to bring people who don’t currently exist into existence, because they don’t exist.

I think the obvious corollary here is uncertainty. The more time between now and the hypothetical future, the more time there is for something that your model didn't account for to completely change the world such that your plans and expectations are now irrelevant. There's also a greater chance that your assumptions re: the consequences of your actions today will be proven wrong even without anything unexpected happening, but I think we know better than to expect rationalists to avoid that kind of hubris. Especially when thinking in terms of optimizing a post-singularity world, we shouldn't forget that the entire reason it's called "the Singularity" in the first place is that we cannot meaningfully predict what will be on the other side from here; all assumptions and heuristics we can develop break down due to the sheer power available once we're there. This means that our ability to predict the consequences of our actions today on a post-singularity future are, definitionally, *zero*. So even operating in the same frame, we should discount the utility of our actions into the future as that uncertainty limits our ability to predict whether our actions make things better or worse, and prefer to make things better now and in the immediate future since we can more realistically and predictably do that.

Well, to be fair, of all the long-term causes you can lampoon, pandemic preparedness is probably the most sensible. (See COVID-19).