One of the more annoying and least explicable features of life in the 21st Century is our hubris in glibly assuming that because we have better technology, we are smarter, wiser, and more virtuous than our ancestors. This hubris finds an expression in Longtermism, which as the author points out, assumes against all evidence that we're su…
One of the more annoying and least explicable features of life in the 21st Century is our hubris in glibly assuming that because we have better technology, we are smarter, wiser, and more virtuous than our ancestors. This hubris finds an expression in Longtermism, which as the author points out, assumes against all evidence that we're suddenly much better at predicting the future.
Better predictive tools are nice, but a little humility would be more useful because, as J. R. R. Tolkien wrote almost a hundred years ago now in The Return of the King, "[I]t is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."
One of the more annoying and least explicable features of life in the 21st Century is our hubris in glibly assuming that because we have better technology, we are smarter, wiser, and more virtuous than our ancestors. This hubris finds an expression in Longtermism, which as the author points out, assumes against all evidence that we're suddenly much better at predicting the future.
Better predictive tools are nice, but a little humility would be more useful because, as J. R. R. Tolkien wrote almost a hundred years ago now in The Return of the King, "[I]t is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."