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.
:marx-hi:
It really sounds like the problem with their theory is that they are too stupid and corrupt to apply it properly
if you really believed that long term utility was a super important thing to consider you would be a communist environmental activist
They're techbros, so while they may be narrowly smart they have no understanding of society, and despise continental philosophy and sociology in lieu of trying to build the same things from first principles using naive materialism, dubious math and a half ass utilitarian calculus corrupted by fucking Peter Thiel before they ever saw it.
So they think climate change is unlikely to kill everyone or permanently degrade civilisation capability (because Thiel's pawns fudged the numbers from nothing) and therefore is not worth thinking about. The fact that civilization could collapse for 1000 years or more and wipe their "Long Term" research to nothing apparently doesn't occur to them.
If you can get them to really, honestly engage with Socialist theory, especially if you can throw some differential calculus their way, they'll convert under the sheer cognitive whiplash...or go fully fash like that Anissimov asshole.