Yes! In chapter 6 of The Precipice, Toby Ord talks about prioritizing risks that are more urgent, a.k.a. āsoon, sudden, and sharpā:
Risks that strike sooner rather than later should be prioritized: āOne reason is that risks that strike later can be dealt with later, while those striking soon cannot. Another is that there will probably be more resources devoted to risks that occur later on, as humanity becomes more powerful and more people wake up to humanityās predicament. This makes later risks less neglected. And finally, we can see more clearly what to do about risks that are coming to a head now, whereas our work on later risks has more chance of being misdirected.ā¦ This makes later risks less tractable right now than earlier ones.ā (p. 180)
We should also prioritize potential catastrophes that we expect to cause damage more suddenly, or rapidly. More slow-burning risks like climate change give the public and policymakers a greater chance to react, whereas catastrophes with sudden effects like a rapidly spreading pandemic are more likely to catch these actors off guard.
Finally, for similar reasons, we should prioritize potential catastrophes that are more sharp, or less likely to be preceded by āwarning shotsā.
Outside of x-risks, Iāve operationalized the āurgencyā of problems as something I called stickiness, or the rate at which they are expected to grow or shrink over time:
When it comes to comparing non-longtermist problems from a longtermist perspective, I find it useful to evaluate them based on their āstickinessā: the rate at which they will grow or shrink over time.
A problemās stickiness is its annual growth rate. So a problem has positive stickiness if it is growing, and negative stickiness if it is shrinking. For long-term planning, we care about a problemās expected stickiness: the annual rate at which we think it will grow or shrink. Over the long termāi.e. time frames of 50 years or moreāwe want to focus on problems that we expect to grow over time without our intervention, instead of problems that will go away on their own.
For example, global poverty has negative stickiness because the poverty rate has declined over the last 200 years. I believe its stickiness will continue to be negative, barring a global catastrophe like climate change or World War III.
On the other hand, farm animal suffering has not gone away over time; in fact, it has gotten worse, as a growing number of people around the world are eating meat and dairy. This trend will continue at least until alternative proteins become competitive with animal products. Therefore, farm animal suffering has positive stickiness. (I would expect wild animal suffering to also have positive stickiness due to increased habitat destruction, but I donāt know.)
Yes! In chapter 6 of The Precipice, Toby Ord talks about prioritizing risks that are more urgent, a.k.a. āsoon, sudden, and sharpā:
Risks that strike sooner rather than later should be prioritized: āOne reason is that risks that strike later can be dealt with later, while those striking soon cannot. Another is that there will probably be more resources devoted to risks that occur later on, as humanity becomes more powerful and more people wake up to humanityās predicament. This makes later risks less neglected. And finally, we can see more clearly what to do about risks that are coming to a head now, whereas our work on later risks has more chance of being misdirected.ā¦ This makes later risks less tractable right now than earlier ones.ā (p. 180)
We should also prioritize potential catastrophes that we expect to cause damage more suddenly, or rapidly. More slow-burning risks like climate change give the public and policymakers a greater chance to react, whereas catastrophes with sudden effects like a rapidly spreading pandemic are more likely to catch these actors off guard.
Finally, for similar reasons, we should prioritize potential catastrophes that are more sharp, or less likely to be preceded by āwarning shotsā.
Outside of x-risks, Iāve operationalized the āurgencyā of problems as something I called stickiness, or the rate at which they are expected to grow or shrink over time:
What do you mean by
specifically what mathematical quantity is ātheyā