Back
Why Haven't We Seen a Promising Longtermist Intervention Yet? — EA Forum
blogAuthor
Yarrow Bouchard 🔸
Credibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: EA Forum
A critical EA Forum post questioning the practical novelty of longtermism as a movement; relevant for evaluating whether longtermist framing adds value beyond pre-existing existential risk and EA work.
Forum Post Details
Karma
14
Comments
24
Forum
eaforum
Forum Tags
Building effective altruismExistential riskPhilosophyCriticism of effective altruismCriticism of effective altruist causesCriticism of longtermism and existential risk studiesLongtermismOpinion
Metadata
Importance: 38/100blog postcommentary
Summary
The author critically examines why longtermism, despite eight years of discussion since the term was coined in 2017, has not produced genuinely novel, promising, and actionable interventions. The post argues that core longtermist ideas predate the movement by decades or centuries, and that most proposed interventions either lack novelty, are already pursued for near-term reasons, or lack clear actionability.
Key Points
- •Proposes four criteria for a genuine longtermist intervention: promising, novel (post-2017), actionable, and not motivated by near-term concerns alone.
- •Existential risk work predates longtermism by 15+ years (Bostrom 2002, Parfit 1984), so it doesn't count as a novel longtermist contribution.
- •Proposed interventions like economic growth, moral progress, and long-term thinking are ancient pursuits already extensively funded, lacking longtermist novelty.
- •The post suggests longtermism may have produced significant intellectual output without generating substantively new actionable ideas.
- •Raises the meta-question of whether longtermism as a movement adds value beyond pre-existing EA cause areas like existential risk reduction.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Longtermism's Philosophical Credibility After FTX | -- | 50.0 |
Cached Content Preview
HTTP 200Fetched Mar 15, 202643 KB
Why haven’t we seen a promising longtermist intervention yet? — EA Forum
This website requires javascript to properly function. Consider activating javascript to get access to all site functionality. Why haven’t we seen a promising longtermist intervention yet?
by Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 Dec 18 2025 5 min read 24 14
Building effective altruism Existential risk Philosophy Criticism of effective altruism Criticism of effective altruist causes Criticism of longtermism and existential risk studies Longtermism Opinion Frontpage
The word "longtermism" was coined in 2017 and discussed here on the Effective Altruism Forum at least as early as 2018. [1] In the intervening eight years, a few books on longtermism have been written, many papers have been published, and countless forum posts, blog posts, tweets, and podcasts have discussed the topic.
Why haven’t we seen a promising longtermist intervention yet? For clarity, longtermist interventions should meet the following criteria:
Promising: the intervention seems like a good idea and has strong evidence and reasoning to support it
Novel: it’s a new idea proposed since the term "longtermism" was coined in 2017 and it was first proposed by someone associated with longtermism in explicit connection to the term "longtermism"
Actionable: it’s something people could realistically do now or soon
Genuinely longtermist: it’s something that we wouldn’t want to do anyway based on neartermist concerns
In my view, the strongest arguments pertaining to the moral value of far future lives are arguments about existential risk. However, the philosopher Nick Bostrom’s first paper on existential risk, highlighting the moral value of the far future, was published in 2002, which is 15 years before the term "longtermism" was coined. The philosopher Derek Parfit discussed the moral value of far future lives in the context of human extinction in his 1984 book Reasons and Persons . [2] So, the origin of these ideas goes back much further than 2017. Moreover, existential risk and global catastrophic risk has developed into a small field of study of its own, and a topic that was well-known in effective altruism before 2017. For this reason, I don’t see interventions related to existential risk (or global catastrophic risk) as novel longtermist interventions.
Many of the non-existential risk-related interventions I’ve heard about are things people have been doing in some form for a very long time. General appeals to long-term thinking, as wise as they might be, do not present a novel idea. The philosophers Will MacAskill and Toby Ord coined the term "longtermism" while working at Oxford University, which is believed to be at least 929 years old. I’ve always thought it was ironic, therefore, to present long-term thinking as novel. ("You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?")
I have seen that (at least some) longtermists acknowledge this. In What We Owe the Future , MacAskill discusses the Haudenosaunee (or
... (truncated, 43 KB total)Resource ID:
625c64731bae25d1 | Stable ID: MjcyMmQwYz