I totally agree. I’ve had several in-person discussions about the expected sign of x-risk reduction, but hardly anybody writes about it publicly in a useful way. The people I’ve spoken to in person all had similar perspectives and I expect that we’re still missing a lot of important considerations.
I believe we don’t see much discussion of this sort because you have to accept a few uncommon (but true) beliefs before this question becomes interesting. If you don’t seriously care about non-human animals (which is a pretty intellectually crappy position but still popular even among EAs) then reducing x-risk is pretty clearly net positive, and if you think x-risk is silly or doesn’t matter (which is another obviously wrong but still popular position) then you don’t care about this question. Not that many people accept both that animals matter and that x-risk matters, and even among people who do accept those, some believe that work on x-risk is futile or that we should focus on other things. So you end up with a fairly small pool of people who care at all about the question of whether x-risk reduction is net positive.
It’s also possible that people don’t even want to consider the notion that preventing human extinction is bad, or they may conflate it with negative utilitarianism when it could also be a consequence of classical utilitarianism.
For the record, I’ve thought about writing something about it, but I basically came to the same conclusions that you did in your blog post (I also subscribe to total, hedonistic utilitarianism and its implications i.e. anti-speciesism, concern for wild-animals etc).
If everyone has similar perspectives, it could be a sign that we’re on the right track, but it could be that we’re missing some important considerations as you say, which is why I also think more discussion of this would be useful.
I totally agree. I’ve had several in-person discussions about the expected sign of x-risk reduction, but hardly anybody writes about it publicly in a useful way. The people I’ve spoken to in person all had similar perspectives and I expect that we’re still missing a lot of important considerations.
I believe we don’t see much discussion of this sort because you have to accept a few uncommon (but true) beliefs before this question becomes interesting. If you don’t seriously care about non-human animals (which is a pretty intellectually crappy position but still popular even among EAs) then reducing x-risk is pretty clearly net positive, and if you think x-risk is silly or doesn’t matter (which is another obviously wrong but still popular position) then you don’t care about this question. Not that many people accept both that animals matter and that x-risk matters, and even among people who do accept those, some believe that work on x-risk is futile or that we should focus on other things. So you end up with a fairly small pool of people who care at all about the question of whether x-risk reduction is net positive.
It’s also possible that people don’t even want to consider the notion that preventing human extinction is bad, or they may conflate it with negative utilitarianism when it could also be a consequence of classical utilitarianism.
For the record, I’ve thought about writing something about it, but I basically came to the same conclusions that you did in your blog post (I also subscribe to total, hedonistic utilitarianism and its implications i.e. anti-speciesism, concern for wild-animals etc).
If everyone has similar perspectives, it could be a sign that we’re on the right track, but it could be that we’re missing some important considerations as you say, which is why I also think more discussion of this would be useful.