The Longtermism Fellowship Syllabus

What this fellowship involves

The following is a syllabus on longtermism, the idea that we ought to be particularly concerned with ensuring that the far future goes well. The syllabus is divided into seven weeks, with six core weeks dedicated to introducing fellows to longtermist philosophy, followed by one additional week for self-directed study and presentations in order to allow fellows to cement the core content and forge new paths for inquiry.

Each core week is further divided into three sections, a Key Questions section (unsurprisingly) introducing key questions to ponder while reading, a Core Materials section listing and linking to the required reading for the week, and a Supplemental Materials section with additional reading to aid in understanding the core reading. The core reading should take about 1 hour per week. Approximate reading times are given for each of the core materials. Generally, we prefer that you to take your time and think through the readings instead of rushing through them.

In addition to the core weeks, you will have one week to take a closer look at a topic of interest relevant to longtermism. During the final week of the fellowship, we will hold a mini-conference where you and all other advanced fellows will give a short (7 – 10 minute) presentation based on your topic of interest.

How we hope you will approach the fellowship

Take ideas seriously. Often, conversations about ideas are like recreational diversions: we enjoy batting around interesting thoughts and saying smart things, and then we go back to doing whatever we were already doing in our lives. This is a fine thing to do — but at least sometimes, we think we should be asking ourselves questions like:

• “How could I tell if this idea was true?”

• “If it is true, what does that imply I should be doing differently in my life? What else does it imply I’m wrong about?”

And, zooming out: 

• “Where are my blind spots?”

• “Which important questions should I be thinking about that I’m not?”

Taking ideas seriously means wanting to make our worldviews as full and accurate as possible, since we see that having accurate beliefs allows us to make better decisions about things that we care about.

Disagreements are interesting. When thoughtful people with access to the same information reach very different conclusions from each other, we should be curious about why. Often, we tend to be incurious about this simply because it’s so common that we’re used to it. But if, for example, a medical community is divided on whether Treatment A or B does a better job of curing some disease, they should want to get to the bottom of that disagreement, because the right answer matters — lives may be at stake.

Strong opinions, weakly held. Often people abstain from trying to have opinions about things because they think things like “I’m not an expert” or “It’s hard to know for sure.” Instead, during this fellowship, we invite you to be bold enough to venture guesses, expressed clearly enough such that it’s easy for someone else, or evidence about the world, to prove you wrong. In the long run, we hope that you'll become stronger and more engaged thinkers; this seems more important than minimizing your error in the short run.