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I know the whole premise of longtermism is in thinking about the far future but it seems to me the degree of uncertainty involved with respect to what it will be like makes it impossible to take them seriously. Making decisions today about what you expect things to be like in 11 generations, in a sociological or technological sense, is not rational, it is irrational.
Take the Collins example (that you rightly call crazy). How long is 11 generations? Assuming each of their kids has kids between the ages of 20-30 (for simpler math) it means their 11 generations is going to take between 220 and 330 years to realize. What was our own world like 220 to 330 years ago? Well 220 years ago would have been circa 1803. This is before the founding of Mormonism, indeed a few years before Joseph Smith's birth. The United States was still in the grip of a fierce debate over slavery. This was before the development of the ideology of communism by Marx and Engels. If you take the longer end, 330 years, that puts you at around 1693. So now we're back before the founding of the United States. This is around the time the Amish are founded in Switzerland and just a few years after Locke publishes his Treatises.
There is nothing "just" about 11 generations! Making decisions today on the assumption that your kids, and their kids, and so on up to 8 billion people will keep your ideology over the course of centuries is making decisions on the basis of a false assumption.
Even leaving aside this one family, how have various religious or ethnic organizations managed to hold their beliefs across this length of time? My impression is not very well. Firstly, many such organizations that are prominent today have not even *existed * that long. Secondly, among those that have, how many of the versions of these organizations from 11 generations ago would even recognize their modern incarnations? How much is the Catholic church today like the Catholic church of 1803? Of 1693? How much has the LDS church changed, since it's founding by Smith, in a much shorter time?
I agree. The DR has a more sober-minded view that the solution is to orchestrate the reproductive habits of a larger subset of people towards a common end. This can only be done with religion, whether theistic or non-theistic, traditional or hipster. I'm not familiar with Israel's internal politics, but I'll defer to the comment of @2rafa describing the looming dominance of the ultra-orthodox in that country. If trends continue, it's not going to take 11 generations for this to happen, and for the ensuing political (and likely geo-political) implications.
@Stefferi also mentioned the Laestadians in Finland.
Would longtermism want to emulate the Ultra-Orthodox or Laestadians in every sense? No. But if such a cult inspired and ameliorated productive and civilizational-oriented behavior instead of strict adherence to superstition, and incentivized a eugenic mate selection that increased the fertility of the most beautiful, intelligent, and physically fit- you likewise would not need 11 generations to see an evolution in the population.
The Collinses are surely fiercely intelligent, but based on those pictures, I'm not sure if most would describe them as the most beautiful or physically fit. Like, I'm not trying to dis - they're not physically unfit or ugly either. Just fairly average-looking for their age and situation, which is of course more than one might say of some other rationalist leading lights, if one was completely honest.
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