Do you care how long your society lasts?

From Robin Hanson on Minds Almost Meeting:

How much do we value future generations? And how much should we value future generations? What form should that value take? I have a survey question I did many years ago that I thought was especially interesting.

The idea is, imagine a civilization that is a billion people, times ten generations. And now, imagine another civilization that’s a million people, times 10,000 generations. Two different civilizations, one is spread across space, and the other is spread across time. And the question is, which civilization do you respect the most? Which world would you rather live in?

And it seemed clear that people really preferred the long-lived civilization. That was a much more noble, impressive, grand scenario, the million people living across 10,000 generations. Which is interesting, because of course, in some sense, it’s preventing contact, right? When there’s more people, there’s more of them you could go meet. There’s more people you could go interact with.

And so, by spreading them across time, you’re preventing many of them from ever being able to find or meet each other. So you might think, that’s bad. It might be like spreading a billion people across a long line. They can only travel a small distance on the line, right? They couldn’t meet as many. But still — it shows that people really put this value on this across-time connection.

Maybe you want your city, or your neighborhood, to last for a very long time, but you don’t care that Earth, or humans in general, do.

And another point from this episode, by Agnes Callard:

If you look at a philosopher like Aristotle, who early on in his Ethics, he considers a variety of lives. And he’s like, is this life a good life? Which is the best life?

He considers a life devoted to bodily pleasure, he considers a life devoted to honor, he considers a life devoted to making money. The life devoted to virtue. He dismisses all of those.

He doesn’t even consider the life devoted to helping others. It doesn’t even show up for him.