I’ve recently heard a number of people arguing for “fanaticism“ when it comes to longtermism. Basically, if a cause area has even a minuscule probability of positively affecting the long-term future of humanity (and thus influencing an effectively unbounded number of lives), we should fund/support that cause even at the expense of near-term projects with high probability of success. If this is so, I have trouble seeing why Pascal’s Wager (or the even less probable Pascal’s Mugging) shouldn’t hold. I know most people (even religious people) don’t believe Pascal’s argument is valid, but most arguments against it I’ve read would seem to also exclude low-probability longtermist causes from being valid. What am I missing here?
How do they justify the confidence of being able to affect the far far future positively rather than negatively, or at all? That seems rather presumptuous (In Bostrom's "presumptuous philosopher" sense). Which is also the reason where Pascal's wager fails.