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Values changes are significant because they have major impacts on the lives of people and other beings. But from a longtermist perspective, they are particularly significant compared to other sorts of changes we might make because their effects are unusually predictable.

If you promote a particular means of achieving your goals, like a particular policy, you run the risk that the policy might not be very good at achieving your goal in the future, especially if the world in the future is very different from today, with a very different political, cultural, and technological environment. You might also lose out on the knowledge that we will gain in the future, which might change whether we even think that this policy is a good idea. In contrast, if you can ensure that people in the future adopt a particular goal, then you can trust them to pursue whatever strategies make the most sense, in whatever environment they are in and with whatever additional information they have. You can therefore be fairly confident that you have made the achievement of that goal more likely, even if you have no idea at all what the world will be like when those future people act.