Are we living at the most influential time in history?

Abstract

Here are two distinct views: Strong Longtermism: The primary determinant of the value of our actions is the effects of those actions on the very long-run future. The Hinge of History Hypothesis (HoH): We are living at the most influential time ever. It seems that, in the effective altruism community as it currently stands, those who believe longtermism generally also assign significant credence to HoH; I’ll precisify ‘significant’ as \textgreater10% when ‘time’ is used to refer to a period of a century, but my impression is that many longtermists I know would assign \textgreater30% credence to this view. It’s a pretty striking fact that these two views are so often held together — they are very different claims, and it’s not obvious why they should so often be jointly endorsed. This post is about separating out these two views and introducing a view I call outside-view longtermism, which endorses longtermism but finds HoH very unlikely.