Interview
Why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all | Tom Moynihan (2021)
- Tom Moynihan expects his current flowchart project to deliver a condensed historical overview of existential risk insights for effective altruists and researchers.
- He plans to author a subsequent book titled The Genesis of the High-Stakes World view to explain the historical emergence of long-termism specifically in contrast to earlier periods such as the 1500s.
- Moynihan anticipates that future historians will document a shift toward intentional, informed decision-making regarding the far future, distinguishing the current generation from past figures like the Pharos or Jesus.
- He expects the scientific revolution's advancements in logic and mathematics to remain robust in the near term, suggesting a meaningful fraction of accurate learning methods has already been discovered.
- Predictions regarding the timeline for AI and technological advancement are characterized by a poor historical track record, warranting caution and broad credences rather than precise forecasting.
- Historical volatility in habitability estimates, ranging from Lord Kelvin's six million years to Eddington's trillion years, is cited to illustrate the unreliability of long-term scientific projections.
- Moynihan anticipates that historical failures to accept mass extinctions were driven by a scientific preference for parsimony and the steady-state theory, which delayed understanding of irreversible loss until the 1980.
- He expects the 1980 Alvarez case for an asteroid impact to be recognized as a revolution in earth sciences that overturned the uniformitarian dogma regarding mass extinctions.
- The worldview of "invariable value," which posits that total universal value is unchangeable, is predicted to make macro-scale human progress appear futile compared to modern frameworks that allow for a better world.
- Moynihan predicts that the re-evolution of intelligence following human civilization collapse could require an interval far exceeding the life cycle of a star due to the lack of data on convergence.
- He expects that the "pre-formation" theory of embryology, where future generations were believed to exist in miniature within the first man, was a common scientific view for over a century.
- The "Russell doll" homunculus theory is linked to historical concerns about the waste of sperm, as it implied every sperm contained a potential human life.
- Moynihan suggests that the principle of plenitude, or the idea that whatever can happen will happen, was an intuitive definition of possibility persisting until the late medieval period, when complex logical thinking distinguished possibility from realization.
- Christian theologians' disputes with the Aristotelian worldview regarding God's freedom in the late medieval era are identified as the origin of the logical framework required to separate what can happen from what is realized in time.
- Moynihan expects that the Christian inheritance of plenitude led to the view that the world is invariably perfect over time and that God could not have created a better world.
- He anticipates that the discovery of Earth's long pre-life history effectively ended previous eternities where all achievable states were assumed to have already occurred.
- Moynihan notes that while the Indian tradition shows aspects of plenitude, Mesoamerican and Aztec mythologies contained insights rejecting this principle by believing the universe could end and human existence could be meaningless.
- He expects the Victorian mindset to have been more concerned with humanity degenerating into a less dignified state than with total human extinction.
- The Last Man by Mary Shelley is expected to be recognized as the first novel-length treatment of human extinction in English, presenting a sense of inanimate matter continuing without cosmic significance.
- Moynihan predicts that modern narrative aesthetics have trended against stories where everyone dies without heroism or redemption, making The Last Man appear more modern than much contemporary art.
- He expects the shift toward an impartial view of future generations, as seen in the works of Sidgwick and Edgeworth, to have begun in the latter 1800s.
- Moynihan suggests that concepts from dynamical systems theory, such as path dependence and ergodic systems, could be usefully applied to broader domains like sociology and the study of civilizations.
- He expects to investigate the history of the upper bounds of habitability and the emergence of the concept of path dependence in his next project.
- Moynihan remains skeptical of claims that intelligence will re-evolve on Earth after civilizational collapse, citing the "Needham question" and the lack of convergence data.
- He notes that the social prestige of Newtonian science distracted the scientific community with an aesthetic predilection for time-reversible processes for ages.
- Moynihan expects that concepts regarding the vastness of the observable universe and the extent of inorganic void have not yet fully penetrated public consciousness.
- He expects historical failures in predicting future habitability and the delay in accepting mass extinctions to demonstrate that scientific consensus can be heavily influenced by aesthetic and philosophical preferences.
- Moynihan warns that the career path for an intellectual historian is highly competitive and risky, with failure being common in academia.
- Funding for intellectual history related to effective altruism is expected to continue coming primarily from grant-making organizations like the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative rather than standard academic salaries.
- Studying adjacent fields like economics is expected to be a safer career route than a narrow history PhD due to the availability of better transferable backup options.
- Moynihan expects that the history of ideas is underappreciated because demonstrating its utility requires more persuasion than quantitative fields.
- He acknowledges the risk that studying a community he advocates for (Effective Altruism) could blind him to aspects of it, though his delayed conversion may offer some protection.
- Moynihan states he is not fully confident in the distinction his book will draw between thinking about human extinction as a possibility and the novel way of looking at existential risk regarding expected value.
- He suggests that the modern aesthetic of narrative structures in fiction has trended against stories where everyone dies without heroism or redemption, making The Last Man more modern than much contemporary art.