A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes

336

Become a Patron!

A Long Term Birthday Problem



Incredible coincidence that these effective altruist/longtermism dorks are always rich white guys living comfortably on the backs of the poorest and most exploited by the system, and they've discovered what is best for the world, and indeed the entire future of the human race, is to continue as is but give like 12% of their paychecks to charity or something.

Longtermism is a rather silly branch of "effective altruism", where philosophers try to work out what we should do to maximize the happiness of humans in the very long term. While it's an interesting idea to talk about, for whatever reason it tend to attract a bunch of people who seemingly want to use it to justify their place in a hierarchy today. For example, they will make a lot of money off exploiting people, and justify it in that they are donating some small part back to "long term" problems. Dismantling the system itself which exploits people, of course, isn't part of it. Even weirder, it attracts kind of AI conspiracy theorists who watched too many Terminator movies and think we have to stop super intelligent AI from doing...something bad.

If you really want to help the long term future of humanity, you should probably just become a communist like a normal person.

Longtermism is a rather silly branch of "effective altruism", where philosophers try to work out what we should do to maximize the happiness of humans in the very long term. While it's an interesting idea to talk about, for whatever reason it tend to attract a bunch of people who seemingly want to use it to justify their place in a hierarchy today. For example, they will make a lot of money off exploiting people, and justify it in that they are donating some small part back to "long term" problems. Dismantling the system itself which exploits people, of course, isn't part of it. Even weirder, it attracts kind of AI conspiracy theorists who watched too many Terminator movies and think we have to stop super intelligent AI from doing...something bad.

If you really want to help the long term future of humanity, you should probably just become a communist like a normal person.

Philosophers in this comic: John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, William MacAskill
Support the comic on Patreon!
Follow on RSS Follow on twitter Follow on facebook share with reddit share on twitter share with your friends on facebook