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."
In the discipline of software development new lifecycle development methodologies were adopted and became best practices because of the inadequacy of the previous standards that relied on a paper-based analysis of future outcomes. The new methodologies were essentially an acknowledgement that human analysis was inadequate to accurately design solutions that would hit a future target... there are generally far too many criteria to effectively capture and understand, and the future is generally always unknown and subject to surprise change.
New methodologies rely on rapid incremental change and adjustment. You have an existing system and change will disrupt that system. Instead of developing a complete new system that changes everything all at once, smaller steps of change are design. The results are analyzed and a new change cycle repeats including any required adjustments from the lessons learned from the previous change.
These methodologies work and they are the standards for all software development today. Those principles are also adopted in a general sense in the best-run companies as constant improvement. For example, Six Sigma that strives for zero manufacturing defects.
The problem with our political system to adopt these modern approaches to change are two-fold. One is the political process for deciding and then funding change... it requires the whole change to be debated and voted on, and then the money flows all at once to make the change within a political cycle.
The other problem is that activism has become an industry. Because so many activists depend on the subject that they exploit for a living, they have a natural motivation to see that subject perpetuated. A good example is the "war on hunger". The US has spent trillion and continues to spend billions to feed those that cannot or do not adequately feed themselves and their families. Although there is much less real hunger in the nation than there has been previously, there are still significant problems not solved. And many of those problems are newly developed as things have changed. A good example are the food desserts that have multiplied in rural and urban areas as retail food corporations have consolidated and cost of running a restaurant has increased to the point that fewer can operate in high-cost, and low-population areas. And the hunger activists shifted their topic to "food insecurity" and the lack of access to health food.
This topic should be a problem with a final solution that would be a multi-pronged system approach. Models for that system design should be tried in small batches in areas of the country. Lessons learned should be adopted and the program expanded to other areas of the country. The entire system should be on a constant-improvement loop... with adjustments made as needed and custom exceptions for areas of the country based on those unique circumstances and local autonomy.
However, solving this problem puts activists out of work. And they will naturally work to undermine a final solution for their own self interest.
So, there are two fundamental problems that continue this failed approach that relies on longtermism. One is our political and governmental approach to change, and the other is the large activism industry. The former can be dealt with by legislation and required adoption by government agencies to use an incremental change approach tied to funding tranches. I think the latter can be better-managed by 501 C 3 corporations involved in political activism being taxed when their operations exceed a certain financial size.
Here is a scenario that may put longtermism into perspective. A woman is brought into a hospital emergency room. The emergency room team is faced with the dilemma of saving either the mother or the baby but not both. I suspect that most people would side with the here and now and save the mother. However, would longtermism argue for saving the baby because the baby has more “potential “? (As no one can predict the future, longtermism can only be about th”a potential future.)
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."
In the discipline of software development new lifecycle development methodologies were adopted and became best practices because of the inadequacy of the previous standards that relied on a paper-based analysis of future outcomes. The new methodologies were essentially an acknowledgement that human analysis was inadequate to accurately design solutions that would hit a future target... there are generally far too many criteria to effectively capture and understand, and the future is generally always unknown and subject to surprise change.
New methodologies rely on rapid incremental change and adjustment. You have an existing system and change will disrupt that system. Instead of developing a complete new system that changes everything all at once, smaller steps of change are design. The results are analyzed and a new change cycle repeats including any required adjustments from the lessons learned from the previous change.
These methodologies work and they are the standards for all software development today. Those principles are also adopted in a general sense in the best-run companies as constant improvement. For example, Six Sigma that strives for zero manufacturing defects.
The problem with our political system to adopt these modern approaches to change are two-fold. One is the political process for deciding and then funding change... it requires the whole change to be debated and voted on, and then the money flows all at once to make the change within a political cycle.
The other problem is that activism has become an industry. Because so many activists depend on the subject that they exploit for a living, they have a natural motivation to see that subject perpetuated. A good example is the "war on hunger". The US has spent trillion and continues to spend billions to feed those that cannot or do not adequately feed themselves and their families. Although there is much less real hunger in the nation than there has been previously, there are still significant problems not solved. And many of those problems are newly developed as things have changed. A good example are the food desserts that have multiplied in rural and urban areas as retail food corporations have consolidated and cost of running a restaurant has increased to the point that fewer can operate in high-cost, and low-population areas. And the hunger activists shifted their topic to "food insecurity" and the lack of access to health food.
This topic should be a problem with a final solution that would be a multi-pronged system approach. Models for that system design should be tried in small batches in areas of the country. Lessons learned should be adopted and the program expanded to other areas of the country. The entire system should be on a constant-improvement loop... with adjustments made as needed and custom exceptions for areas of the country based on those unique circumstances and local autonomy.
However, solving this problem puts activists out of work. And they will naturally work to undermine a final solution for their own self interest.
So, there are two fundamental problems that continue this failed approach that relies on longtermism. One is our political and governmental approach to change, and the other is the large activism industry. The former can be dealt with by legislation and required adoption by government agencies to use an incremental change approach tied to funding tranches. I think the latter can be better-managed by 501 C 3 corporations involved in political activism being taxed when their operations exceed a certain financial size.
Here is a scenario that may put longtermism into perspective. A woman is brought into a hospital emergency room. The emergency room team is faced with the dilemma of saving either the mother or the baby but not both. I suspect that most people would side with the here and now and save the mother. However, would longtermism argue for saving the baby because the baby has more “potential “? (As no one can predict the future, longtermism can only be about th”a potential future.)
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