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Comment by FrustratedMonky | Hacker News Reader

The problem is, it is not obvious what the 'correct' decision is today to maximize the future lives. It's all guesses, for longtermist and presentist. Its just that the longtermism people are using this long term argument for things they do want now, but are potentially 'atrocities', but in the view of infinity looks logical. So dress up some logic using the infinite future with trillions of lives, to make my current bad decision seem reasonable. Its tipping the scales when they also do not know which is best decision.

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Even if we accept their motivations at face value (which is naive), it's a totally incoherent morality. There are infinitely many future states with trillions of of lives. Which one is the one we attach moral value to? If it's all of them, then every single decision you make is equivalent to killing infinitely many future people. If it's one particular future state how do we decide which one? (I am not, of course, saying that you shouldn't value making the future better, just that applying this specific kind of utilitarian calculus to future humans is childish nonsense.)

Yes it is basically the classic expected value problem but we don't know the outcomes or their probabilities.

If there is any technological progress trend, then in the long term people will be vastly, incomprehensibly richer than us and so they will be much more able to deal with problems than we are.

Ask not what you can do for the future, ask why those b*stards aren't helping us.

>then in the long term people will be vastly, incomprehensibly richer than us

Like Rome after the fall was so much richer than before?

Or how Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so much better with the advent of nuclear fission technology? Since, technology basically just makes us richer and safer and everything!

Or like how the average working/middle class US (or European) family is so much more comfortable than in decades before?

>so they will be much more able to deal with problems than we are.

Like how we have the best government and Presidents ever?

And the best infrastructure and public policy, and the more capable?

A lot of this attitude is from people in the upper class (at least salary wise) who can't fathom anybody else suffering more now, because it's business as usual or better than ever for them...

This is a bit silly. Imagine life without even commonplace things such as easy access to food, or corrective glasses, or sun cream, or Paracetamol, or a Polio vaccine, or a car, or a bike? You don't need to be rich to access some of the biggest jumps in quality of life in history.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are way better off today than they were before World War 2 lmao

They have the same issues Japan does now (birth rate, long working hours, etc), but they’re not radioactive wastelands like people assume. In a lot of ways their infrastructure is better than the best cities in America

>Hiroshima and Nagasaki are way better off today than they were before World War 2 lmao

Which is neither here nor there lmao.

Were they better in 1947? 1950? Were even the same people alive when they were rehabitated? I'm pretty sure Rome, the other example I mentioned, is also better off today than the 5th century AD.

But the point was that "future == better" is not some guarantee. It might be much worse. Or better for some other people, after decades or generations of people have suffered in between a 'good present' and that 'good future', and then again worse, or any such combination.

What you described is mere technology and conveniences accumulated, which yes, it's often just increasing, though not even this is guaranteed (many places post war or economic collapse lost a lot of their prior conveniences and technology infrastructure). But societies can be optimistic for life, happy, and dynamic in times with less, and be depressed, stressed out, or squeezed in a rat race in times with more. This can even coincide with other things getting better for this or that segment: say, X improving (say network connectivity or gay rights), while cost of living, health costs, prospects of retiring, precarity of work getting worse for a big majority ever since the 70s.

Compate Hiroshima's fate to that of Pyongyang, and maybe a one-time atomic bombing doesn't sound so bad. It was necessary to give Stalin something to think about -- even if our own planners didn't see it that way at the time.

>It was necessary to give Stalin something to think about.

I really wish this meme would die. There's no evidence the US dropped the atomic bombs on Japan as a show of force to Stalin, yet people constantly state it as if it were proven fact. All of the existing documentary evidence from the time points to the purpose of the atomic bombs being to force a surrender from Japan and avoid the cost of an invasion of the main islands.

People need to accept that sometimes the straightforward explanation is actually correct. It isn't always a smokescreen of propaganda hiding a nefarious motive or conspiracy. Yes, the US was concerned about dealing with Russia after the war. No, not to the degree that they were willing to nuke two Japanese cities just to spook him.

Yes, the US was concerned about dealing with Russia after the war. No, not to the degree that they were willing to nuke two Japanese cities just to spook him.

Agreed, and I edited my comment to clarify. It's funny how it had that effect, though, isn't it? War might change, but Russians never do. They respect force and violence, nothing else.

My response was to coldtea's snark: Or how Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so much better with the advent of nuclear fission technology? Since technology basically just makes us richer and safer and everything! Yes, in fact, it absolutely did make Japan "richer and safer and everything," by ensuring that the country didn't become the scene of an epic, likely-endless battle with Communist forces for control of the Pacific.

For an additional gedanken exercise, contemplate the likely effect on the net well-being of North Korea's population over time if MacArthur had been given a free hand by Truman.

> It's funny how it had that effect, though, isn't it?

Did it, in the long term? We know Russia had spies inside the Manhattan Project. They knew what the US was doing, and it seems as if their plan was to get their own nuclear arsenal as soon as possible. In hindsight they don't seem to have been deterred at all.

Certainly they were inspired to build their own nuclear arsenal as soon as possible. But Japan was firmly under US hegemony by the time they succeeded, and no longer in play.

The standard assumption seems to be that the US had two options: shock-and-awe by dropping the bombs or engaged in a protracted invasion of the home islands.

Were there other options? By the last months of the war, they had largely lost control of the naval and air spaces. Japan was an import-dependent economy to begin with, and had consumed everything that wasn't nailed down for the war effort.

Couldn't they just be blockaded? Either they end up an isolated novelty that occasionally scrapes together enough scrap iron to launch a low-grade weapon, sort of like the DPRK is seen today, or it "starves out a surrender" by allowing domestic conditions to collapse, potentially nudging a coup towards a new regime who's more willing to negotiate.

That might take 5 or 10 years to reach endgame, but it seems like a less direct, but still viable way to complete the war.

Let’s not forget the Soviet’s. We didn’t want them to invade Japan first, we needed to end the war before they could have an excuse to do so as our ally (which was already coming undone by the end of WW2).

That might take 5 or 10 years to reach endgame, but it seems like a less direct, but still viable way to complete the war.

This plan would have killed more people, and caused far more net suffering, than simply nuking a couple of cities.

As a similar example, it's true that letting MacArthur use nukes would have been a monstrous act of evil that would have put the US up there with the Nazis in the annals of infamy... but it's also true that more North Koreans would be alive and well today if we had. We could hardly have done more damage with our bombs than the Kim family did with ideology.

Of course that's a simplistic assessment that ignores the consequences of normalizing nuclear warfare at a time when its destructive capacity was ramping up at an exponential rate. But it is entirely fair to apply it to Japan at the end of WWII, when the lesson was relatively cheap to learn.

Maybe we should start by nuking the city where you live. Imagine how it will look like in 70 years? It will be so much better than it is today.

That's the trouble with utilitarianism, isn't it? Even the very wise can't see all ends.

In any case we're discussing the historical intersection of postwar Japan and Soviet expansionism, not an anonymous American city nestled safely in the twenty-first century.

Nagasaki was some fairly unimportant Japanese city nestled safely in Kyūshū, as they probably thought sometime in the 1920's.

I personally find utilitarian views abhorrent. Even if the ends justified the means, I doubt the most adherent utilitarian would put his neck on the line if his head on the plate would be the best outcome for humanity as a whole. It's pure hypocrisy to justify exploitation.

I'm wondering what the other ethical positions would have done when choosing between dropping a nuke on a city or going ahead with a land invasion. Neither of which has anything to do with exploitation, and everything to do with ending a war.

Ehh, I think the usage of atomic bombs had nothing to do with ending the war, and everything to do with military dick-waving.

"We have nukes, and we're not afraid to use it".

Well, it's war. Discussing morality of actions in war is a fool's errand. Typically the actions of the winners are morally justifiable because they won, and for this reason they tend to write history.

The thinking was Japan, like Germany, had to unconditionally surrender. Whether that was from firebombing, nuking or a land invasion. Germany took a land invasion by both fronts. I'll agree that morality goes out the window in war. You try to win and then justify what you had to do to win.

Hint: Most countries in Japan's position would surrender after being nuked once. Actually most countries in Japan's position, with the Soviets charging in from one flank and the Americans on the other, would have surrendered long before that.

And, given that the leader finally did surrender after being told twice, most countries wouldn't have a junta conspiring to assassinate him so that they could keep fighting.

Japan wasn't -- and isn't -- "most countries." Monday morning quarterbacking is always fun but I'm personally glad I wasn't in that particular decision loop in the Oval Office. As goatlover so wisely suggests, war is basically a contest to see who can pull the most horrific atrocities on the other guy. We ultimately won the game but Japan gave it one hell of an effort.

They would certainly have done the same to us, given the technology, and without as much as 1% of the guilty feelings afterward.

> They would certainly have done the same to us

And it would later be justified as it being necessary for the US to surrender, and maybe now we would be discussing in Japanese how a couple of US cities are much nicer some 70 years after being nuked.

Either way, this is already far beyond the point of the thread.

They sit in comfortable homes with clean running hot and cold water, air conditioning, refrigeration, automated clothes and dish washers, waterproof under tile laminates, municipal sewer service which can be provided cheaper and faster then at any point in history, and electric lightning with tens of thousands of hours of lifetime at 30% quantum efficiency.

They use a computer which has more power then took us to the moon, connect instantly across half the planet, and post a lament: "has technology really made our lives better?"

> ask why those b*stards aren't helping us

This is an important question. Just like with AI, future generations don’t need us because history and the arrow of time has already caused them to emerge — there’s more risk for them in changing the past (our current time) than just let it be. How much do you care about going back in time and help your 10 generations ago ancestor have better access to clean water?

> there’s more risk for them in changing the past (our current time) than just let it be

Why would it be possible? And what would the risk be?

> And what would the risk be?

There are more ways to be dead than being alive. They're alive in their future time (they won the lotto!); any change they make in the past carries the risk that their future selves won't emerge.

But they have emerged already. What would it be at all possible to change that?

> If there is any technological progress trend, then in the long term people will be vastly, incomprehensibly richer than us

There are still people who enjoy "roughing it", some who enjoy it so much they spend large amounts of their lives effectively living as pre-agricultural people did.

As is seen in ennui and frustration among the rich, or grouchiness among the old, the human psyche adapts to what it is used to in terms of emotional responses.

> so they will be much more able to deal with problems than we are.

We are still dealing with the fallout (literal, and figurative) of tetraethyl lead. Stopping it at the beginning would have been far more cost effective, and "deal with it" effective, than all of the technology we have put into remediating it since. This is one example. An ounce of prevention is often far better than a pound of cure. Let's let future scientists, who will be far more capable than us, invent new things instead of spending their efforts rectifying our mistakes.

Imo, you can have all of the philosophical arguments you want but in the end, how do you make people go along with your goals? Not everyone is ever on board and the 'means' of the famous idiom have looked the same everywhere for most of human history.

Maybe we should first be more effective at policing our means than dream up better ends. The chosen means of centuries ago caused what people want to heal now. The ends (colonial industry, hegemony, religion, power) didn't matter at all for the people who were their victims.

Edit:

What if, by being too zealous, longtermists damage the image of their goal so much that it won't be seen as acceptable to pursue for centuries (ref. communism).

>how do you make people go along with your goals?

This is the challenge that "degrowth" or other scarcity-rooted environmentalists have. When you are pushing a promise of deprivation on the currently comfortable, your message is going to struggle to gain traction. For any movement, it is of primary tactical importance to have a message that is appealing to your audience.

It's not the currently comfortable who push back the most, it's those who don't have much and hear that they will have to lose even that (even if this is not true).

Constraints on the rich are popular even among some of the rich. Shared suffering is something the poor, rightfully, don't believe.

I feel like you are missing an opportunity here, the submission is about longtermism.

If you wanted to stay on topic you would say something like, if people have the option of certain deprivation and uncertain deprivation (effects of climate change) they will choose uncertain deprivation and that is exactly the problem with longtermism as well.

Of course, also, can't fight "Moloch". To best help the future, we should change ourselves in the present to not fall into the traps, local minima, "Moloch" has set out. This isn't going to happen through any philosophy or social program, we need to change ourselves as humans into something else. Some genetic change to change our brain to not 'keep up with the neighbors', and all of the other drives that make us form hierarchies and consume. But then, we wouldn't be human anymore, so does this violate longtermism?

In order to save humanity, we would need to stop being human. OR the opposite, humans are not going to make it.

Why? Humanity has had a pretty good run so far with all of its flaws, Dr. Frankensteining the entire species out of some general dislike of competition has barely any upside and a ton of downside

Guess responding more directly to the 'longtermism' argument.

If we , humans today, are so awful at making decisions (with our drive towards consuming, hierarchies, war), that we need to stop doing what we are doing, and focus on the future or we will die out.

Then, what I am saying is, there is no way to do that, other than to change ourselves to not be human. There is no way to form an organization, or re-work capitalism, or form a new government, to change the future, because all of the human based drives will remain and inevitably devolve to the current situation again. Over millions of years, we'll get what we have now, unless we change what we are. And the longtermism people are saying what we have now is no good, will lead to us dyeing out.

Because as the longtermist state, if we are heading towards dying out because of our current human decisions, then how can we do otherwise except to change our human reasoning.

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