I’ve recently heard a number of people arguing for “fanaticism“ when it comes to longtermism. Basically, if a cause area has even a minuscule probability of positively affecting the long-term future of humanity (and thus influencing an effectively unbounded number of lives), we should fund/support that cause even at the expense of near-term projects with high probability of success. If this is so, I have trouble seeing why Pascal’s Wager (or the even less probable Pascal’s Mugging) shouldn’t hold. I know most people (even religious people) don’t believe Pascal’s argument is valid, but most arguments against it I’ve read would seem to also exclude low-probability longtermist causes from being valid. What am I missing here?
This has the problem that you have no assurance that the distribution does drop off sufficiently fast. It would be convenient if it did, but the world is not structured for anyone's convenience.