| Its not from Toby Ord, it is from Nick Beckstead's Thesis.[1] The idea is introduced as an couple sentence thought experiment in a 200pg thesis (emphasis mine): >To take another example, saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. By ordinary standards, at least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standards, saving and improving lives in rich countries is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal. Context is important, specifically the abstract assumptions of fixed cost for each life, and fixed innovative capacity. You could easily turn the premise around with the opposite conclusion. Improving the innovative capacity in poor countries is more important than saving lives in rich countries, provided you foster more innovation innovation in the poor country than is lost in the rich one. It looks like an interesting read, covering many topics discussed in this thread. Chapters include: Should "Extra" People Count for Less? Does Future Flourishing Have Diminishing Marginal Value? A Paradox for Tiny Probabilities of Enormous Values Infinite Value, Long Shots, and the Far Future https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=ON+T... |
Sorry for the mis-attribution, at the same time both the quote, your explication of the quote and the chapters you cite seem consonant with the longtermism the article (rightly imo) criticizes. One point the article makes is that reasoning this way can justify anything.
Reasoning with based on "Infinite Value, Long Shots, and the Far Future" is inherently fallacious, is no more plausible than arguments like pascal's wager. The only limit on "long shots" is one's ability to cook them up (which alien landing should we be preparing for anyway, etc).