How do you value lives in the far future versus lives today?
Imagine you could push a button and magically save a life today. Or you could push another button and save 2 lives 500 years from now (and you can't push both). Which would you choose?
What if, instead of 2 lives it was 1,000 lives?
If you chose 1 life today over 1,000 lives in the far future, then you were, under our segmentation "Presentdayist".
We at SoGive recently conducted a study to understand people's attitudes to this, and we found that 18% of our sample was "presentdayist", under this definition, and that presentdayists were more likely to be older.
The full study is published here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5qr9fSNvaHaWpm8jy/older-people-may-place-less-moral-value-on-the-far-future
Why am I talking to you about magic buttons?
I have often felt like donating is like a magic button. You can just transfer money and generate wondrous outcomes on the other side of space and time.
So this thought experiment matters.
If you care about lives in the far future, then this should influence your choice of where you donate. Especially since there's potentially so many more people in the far future. Instead of just caring about the 7ish billion people alive today, there might be a hundred thousand billion billion billion people in the future (that's 10^32, for those who like that notation). Which is an enormously bigger number!
This means that even if you needed as many as a million people in the far future to be considered before you valued them above one person today, then you may still need to place more emphasis on the far future. And in our study, most people did value a million people in the far future over one person today.
For example, in light of this, you might be more inclined to support climate change work. This is a complex area -- too nuanced to cover here, but climate change may be unlikely to directly lead to human extinction, but may be more likely to exacerbate other risks, such as risks of conflict.
If you're interested in this area, you might like to review some relevant charities, such as the Centre for the Study of Existential risk, which currently attains Silver status under SoGive's rating methodology. You can see more on this by going here: https://app.sogive.org/#charity?charityId=centre-for-the-study-of-existential-risk