Augh, I just read a huge list of critiques of longtermism, reading a couple of the more interesting-sounding ones in detail and skimming a couple more, and **not one** mentions the core of the issue with treating future people exactly the same as currently existing ones. (Vaden Masrani in https://vmasrani.github.io/blog/2020/against_longtermism/ comes the closest, although he also accidentally invalidates all epistemology with one of his arguments. Anyway, credit to him for coming the closest.) I don't think this is correct, for two kinds of reasons, anthropics and the fact that people are beings existing in time, so it shouldn't be surprizing that our values are not time-invariant. Why no one(?) is properly criticizing this part is beyond me, am I really the only one who sees these specific problems? Seems extremely unlikely.

Oh, and to be clear the criticisms of the _effects_ of longtermism are on point – the dangers of the ideology should be clear even to its proponents – the criticisms of the practicalities are pretty good (I would put more stress on the fact that a big part of the problem is that thinking about sufficiently small probabilities almost surely hits the problems with resource limited reasoning, in which case it's well known that Bayesianism ceases to be optimal, but in general the points are good) the criticisms of utilitarianism mostly suck (although mostly inasmuch as they conflate utilitarianism in general with the total utility variant, and it's hard to blame them for that since this is important as a basis for longtermism), it's just the complete absence of criticisms of the core idea described above that worries me and likely makes proponents of longtermism feel secure in these assumptions, which they really shouldn't.

For reference, the list I'm referring to: https://www.longtermism-hub.com/critiques .

@timorl I think there’s something very attractive to generalising systems, so time-invariance feels intuitively fair to some type of person, just as, for example, generalising of the “rational veil of ignorance” kind tries to make things position- or identity-invariant, or justice is supposed to apply independently of who does what. If you come to it with the timeless physics view that many long-termists have, this becomes even more pronounced.