A Rational Altruist Punch in The Stomach

Neotenic

Very distant future times are ridiculously easy to help via investment. A 2% annual return adds up to a googol (10^100) return over 12,000 years, even if there is only a 1/1000 chance they will exist or receive it.

So if you are not incredibly eager to invest this way to help them, how can you claim to care the tiniest bit about them? How can you think anyone on Earth so cares? And if no one cares the tiniest bit, how can you say it is "moral" to care about them, not just somewhat, but almost equally to people now? Surely if you are representing a group, instead of spending your own wealth, you shouldn’t assume they care much.

So why do many people seem to care about policy that effects far future folk? I suspect our paternalistic itch pushes us to control the future, rather than to enrich it. We care that the future celebrates our foresight, not that they are happy.

In the comments some people gave counterarguments. For those in a rush, the best ones are Toby Ord's. But I didn't bite any of the counterarguments to the extent that it would be necessary to counter the 10^100. I have some trouble conceiving of what would beat a consistent argument a googol fold.

Things that changed my behavior significantly over the last few years have not been many, but I think I'm facing one of them. Understanding biological immortality was one, it meant 150 000 non-deaths per day. Understanding the posthuman potential was another. Then came the 10^52 potential lives lost in case of X-risk, or if you are conservative and think only biological stuff can have moral lives on it, 10^31. You can argue about which movie you'll watch, which teacher would be best to have, who should you marry. But (if consequentialist) you can't argue your way out of 10^31 or 10^52. You won't find a counteracting force that exactly matches, or really reduces the value of future stuff by

3 000 000 634 803 867 000 000 000 000 000 000 777 000 000 000 999 fold

Which is way less than 10^52

You may find a fundamental and qualitative counterargument "actually I'd rather future people didn't exist", but you won't find a quantitative one. Thus I spend a lot of time on X-risk related things.

Back to Robin's argument: so unless someone gives me a good argument against investing some money in the far future (and discovering some vague techniques of how to do it that will make it at least one in a millionth possibility) I'll set aside a block of money X, a block of time Y, and will invest in future people 12 thousand years from now. If you don't think you can beat 10^100, join me.

And if you are not in a rush, read this also, for a bright reflection on similar issues.

Robin Hanson wrote, five years ago:

Very distant future times are ridiculously easy to help via investment. A 2% annual return adds up to a googol (10^100) return over 12,000 years, even if there is only a 1/1000 chance they will exist or receive it.

So if you are not incredibly eager to invest this way to help them, how can you claim to care the tiniest bit about them? How can you think anyone on Earth so cares? And if no one cares the tiniest bit, how can you say it is "moral" to care about them, not just somewhat, but almost equally to people now? Surely if you are representing a group, instead of spending your own wealth, you shouldn’t assume they care much.

So why do many people seem to care about policy that effects far future folk? I suspect our paternalistic itch pushes us to control the future, rather than to enrich it. We care that the future celebrates our foresight, not that they are happy.

3 000 000 634 803 867 000 000 000 000 000 000 777 000 000 000 999 fold

Which is way less than 10^52

And if you are not in a rush, read this also, for a bright reflection on similar issues.

Philip Trammel has criticized my comment here: https://philiptrammell.com/static/discounting_for_patient_philanthropists.pdf#page=33 He makes 3 points:

Perhaps the many failed philanthropies were not meant to be permanent?

First, they almost certainly were. Most philanthropies were clan or religious-based. Things like temples and monasteries are meant to be eternal as possible. What Buddhist monastery or Catholic cathedral was ever set up with the idea that it'd wind up everything in a century or two? What dedication of a golden tripod to the Oracle at Delphi was done with the idea that they'd be done with the whole silly paganism thing in half a millennium? What clan compound was created by a patriarch not hoping to be commemorated and his grave honored for generations without end? Donations were inalienable, and often made with stipulations like a mass being said for the donators' soul once a year forever or the Second Coming, whichever happened first. How many funny traditions or legal requirements at Oxford or Cambridge, which survive due to a very unusual degree of institutional & property right continuity in England, came with expiration dates or entailments which expired? (None come to mind.) The Islamic world went so far as to legally remove any option of being temporary! To the extent that philanthropies are not encumbered today, it's not for any lack of desire by philanthropists (as charities constantly complain & dream of 'unrestricted' funds), but legal systems refusing to enforce them via the dead hand doctrine, disruption of property rights, and creative destruction. My https://www.gwern.net/The-Narrowing-Circle is relevant, as is Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order, which makes clear what a completely absurd thing that is to suggest of places like Rome or China.

Second, even if they were not, most of them do not expire due to reaching scheduled expiration dates, showing that existing structures are inadequate even to the task of lasting just a little while. Trammel seems to believe there is some sort of silver bullet institutional structure that might allow a charity to accumulate wealth for centuries or millennia if only the founders purchased the 1000-year charity plan instead of cheaping out by buying the limited-warranty 100-year charity plan. But there isn't.
His second point is, I'm not sure how to summarize it:

Second, it is misleading to cite the large numbers of failed philanthropic institutions (such as Islamic waqfs) which were intended to be permanent, since their closures were not independent. For illustration, if a wave of expropriation (say, through a regional conquest) is a Poisson process withλ= 0.005, then the probability of a thousand-year waqf is 0.7%. Splitting a billion-dollar waqf into a billion one-dollar waqfs, and observing that none survive the millennium, will give the impression that “the long-term waqf survival rate is less than one in one billion”.

I can't see how this point is relevant. Aside from his hypothetical not being the case (the organizational death statistics are certainly not based on any kind of fission like that), if a billion waqfs all manage to fail, that is a valid observation about the durability of waqfs. If they were split apart, then they all had separate managers/staff, separate tasks, separate endowments etc. There will be some correlation, and this will affect, say, confidence intervals - but the percentage is what it is.
His third point argues that the risk needs to grow with size for perpetuities to be bad ideas.

This doesn't seem right either. I gave many reasons quite aside from that against perpetuities, and his arguments against the very plausible increasing of risk aren't great either (pogroms vs the expropriation of the Church? but how can that be comparable when by definition the net worth of the poor is near-zero?).

A handful of relatively recent attempts explicitly to found long-term trusts have met with with partial success (Benjamin Franklin) or comical failure (James Holdeen). Unfortunately, there have not been enough of these cases to draw any compelling conclusions.

I'd say there's more than enough when you don't handwave away millennia of examples.

Incidentally, I ran into another failure of long-term trusts recently: Wellington R. Burt's estate trustees managed to, over almost a century of investment in the USA during possibly the greatest sustained total economic growth in all of human history, with only minor disbursements and some minor legal defeats, no scandals or expropriation or anything, nevertheless realize a real total return of around −75% (turning the then-inflation-adjusted equivalent of ~$400m into ~$100m).