Agreed. As someone who prioritises s-risk reduction, I find it odd that long-termism is sometimes considered equivalent to x-risk reduction. It is legitimate if people think that x-risk reduction is the best way to improve the long-term, but it should be made clear that this is based on additional beliefs about ethics (rejecting suffering-focused views and not being very concerned about value drift), about how likely x-risks in this century are, and about how tractable it is to reduce them, relative to other ways of improving the long-term. I for one think that none of these points is obvious.
So I feel that there is a representativeness problem between x-risk reduction and other ways of improving the long-term future (not necessarily only s-risk reduction), in addition to an underrepresentation of near-term causes.
Agreed. As someone who prioritises s-risk reduction, I find it odd that long-termism is sometimes considered equivalent to x-risk reduction. It is legitimate if people think that x-risk reduction is the best way to improve the long-term, but it should be made clear that this is based on additional beliefs about ethics (rejecting suffering-focused views and not being very concerned about value drift), about how likely x-risks in this century are, and about how tractable it is to reduce them, relative to other ways of improving the long-term. I for one think that none of these points is obvious.
So I feel that there is a representativeness problem between x-risk reduction and other ways of improving the long-term future (not necessarily only s-risk reduction), in addition to an underrepresentation of near-term causes.