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u/seriously_perplexed 19d ago
The problem though is that the fear of changing something in the past is that the flow-on effects are unpredictable. If that thinking is correct, then it's not clear that this has any relevance for effective altruists, except perhaps as a reason against focusing on the far future.
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u/makeswell2 19d ago edited 19d ago
Yeah but the people who travel to the past are worried they'll change something that affects them personally. It'd be really difficult to change something that affects a large portion of the world.
Like you could travel to the past and kill Hitler, but the reason Hitler thrived was because Germany was struggling economically, in part because of the unfair conditions they had in the Treaty of Versailles from WWI, so there was a lot of anger in the German people at that time. Even if you get rid of Hitler you likely have some other guy who comes to power and does something similar... or you have a different kind of WWII that leaves horrific memories on the world which prevents another escalation of that kind.
It's like if Bill Gates never existed then some other guy would've invented something very similar to Microsoft. You can't just not have an operating system for a computer... Windows was bound to exist in one form or another, and the guy or girl inventing it was bound to get rich.
This idea I'm describing, where individuals have small impacts, and society at large is pretty predictable and unmovable, is written about in novel form pretty well in the Foundation series, which is coming out soon on Apple TV!
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u/redditjoda 19d ago
the Dalai Lama said something like:
https://mantesenne.medium.com/if-the-intention-is-pure-the-outcome-does-not-matter-d57647ab88b6
Valid rebuttal?
What about "the greater the change, the greater the unintended consequences"?