Everything you have matches my understanding. For me, the key commonality between long-termist EA and Progress Studies is valuing the far future. In economist terms, a zero discount rate. The difference is time frame: Progress Studies is implicitly assuming shorter civilization. If civilization is going to last for millions of years, what does it matter if we accelerate progress by a few hundred or even a few thousand years? Much better to minimize existential risk. Tyler Cowen outlines this well in a talk he gave at Stanford. In his view, "probably we’ll have advanced civilization for something like another 6, 700 years... [It] means if we got 600 years of a higher growth rate, that’s much, much better for the world, but it’s not so much value out there that we should just play it safe across all margins [to avoid existential risk.]" He is fundamentally pessimistic about our ability to mitigate existential risks. Now I don't think most people in Progress Studies think this way, but its the only way I see to square a zero discount rate with any priority other than minimizing existential risk.
Giving what we can now has over 6,000 people (the accomplishments page says 5,000)
Thanks for sharing. It looks like this article is less of a good faith effort than I had thought
Everything you have matches my understanding. For me, the key commonality between long-termist EA and Progress Studies is valuing the far future. In economist terms, a zero discount rate. The difference is time frame: Progress Studies is implicitly assuming shorter civilization. If civilization is going to last for millions of years, what does it matter if we accelerate progress by a few hundred or even a few thousand years? Much better to minimize existential risk. Tyler Cowen outlines this well in a talk he gave at Stanford. In his view, "probably we’ll have advanced civilization for something like another 6, 700 years... [It] means if we got 600 years of a higher growth rate, that’s much, much better for the world, but it’s not so much value out there that we should just play it safe across all margins [to avoid existential risk.]" He is fundamentally pessimistic about our ability to mitigate existential risks. Now I don't think most people in Progress Studies think this way, but its the only way I see to square a zero discount rate with any priority other than minimizing existential risk.