(1) There’s less point in saving the world if it’s just going to end anyway. Which is to say that pessimism about existential risk (i.e. higher risk) decreases the value of existential risk reduction because the saved future is riskier and therefore less valuable.
(2) Individual existential risks cannot be evaluated in isolation. The value of existential risk reduction in one area (e.g., engineered pathogens) is substantially impacted by all other estimated sources of risk (e.g. asteroids, nuclear war, etc.). It is also potentially affected by any unknown risks, which seems especially concerning.
Ok, but indeed all arguments for longtermism, as plenty of people have commented on the past, make a case for hingeyness, not just the presence of catastrophic risk.
There is currently no known technology that would cause a space-faring civilization that sends out Von Neumann probes to the edge of the observable universe to go extinct. If you can manage to bootstrap from that, you are good, unless you get wiped out by alien species coming from outside of our Lightcone. And even beyond that, outside of AI, there are very few risks to any multiplanetary species, it does really seem like the risks at that scale get very decorrelated.
Ok, but indeed all arguments for longtermism, as plenty of people have commented on the past, make a case for hingeyness, not just the presence of catastrophic risk.
There is currently no known technology that would cause a space-faring civilization that sends out Von Neumann probes to the edge of the observable universe to go extinct. If you can manage to bootstrap from that, you are good, unless you get wiped out by alien species coming from outside of our Lightcone. And even beyond that, outside of AI, there are very few risks to any multiplanetary species, it does really seem like the risks at that scale get very decorrelated.