I can’t tell whether you’re arguing “some small subset of EAs/rationalists are in a great position to fight COVID-19 and they should do so” vs. “if an arbitrary EA/rationalist wants to fight COVID-19, they shouldn’t worry that they are doing less because they aren’t reducing x-risk” vs. “COVID-19 is such an opportunity for x-risk reduction that nearly all longtermists should be focusing on it now”.
I agree with the first (in particular for people who work on forecasting / “meta” stuff), but not with the latter two. To the extent you’re arguing for the latter two, I don’t find the arguments very convincing, because they aren’t comparing against counterfactuals. Taking each point in turn:
Training Ourselves
I agree that COVID-19 is particularly good for training the general bucket of forecasting / applied epistemology / scenario-planning.
However, for coordination, persuasive argumentation, networking, and project management, I don’t see why COVID-19 is particularly better than other projects you could be working on. For example, I think I practiced all of those skills by organizing a local EA group; it also seems like ~any project that involves advocacy would likely require / train all of these skills.
Forging alliances
Presumably for most goals there are more direct ways to forge alliances than by working on COVID-19. E.g. you mentioned AI safety—if I wanted to forge alliances with people at OSTP, I’d focus on current AI issues like interpretability and fairness.
Establishing credibility
I agree that this is important for the more “meta” parts of x-risk, such as forecasting. But for those of us who are working closer to the object level (e.g. technical AI safety, nuclear war, climate change), I don’t really see how this is going to help establish credibility that’s used in the future.
Growing the global risk movement
You talk about field-building here, which in fact seems like an important thing to be doing, but seems basically unrelated to the COVID-19 response. I’d guess that field-building has ~zero effect on how many people die from COVID-19 this year.
Creating XRisk infrastructure
Agreed that this is good.
Overall take: It does seem like anyone working on “meta” approaches to x-risk reduction probably should be thinking very seriously about how they can contribute to the COVID-19 response, but I’d guess that for most other longtermists the argument “it is just a distraction” is basically right.
I’d probably change my mind if I thought that these other longtermists could actually make a large impact on the COVID-19 response, but that seems quite unlikely to me.
I generally agree with your response, but wanted to point out one example of establishing credibility: Scott Aaronson says:
It does cause me to update in the direction of AI-risk being a serious concern. For the Bay Area rationalists have now publicly sounded the alarm about a looming crisis for the human race, well before it was socially acceptable to take that crisis too seriously (and when taking it seriously would have made a big difference), and then been 100% vindicated by events. Where previously they were 0 for 0 in predictions of that kind, they’re now 1 for 1.
...
[After Adam Scholl invites him to a workshop]: Thanks for asking! Absolutely, I’d be interested to attend an AI-risk workshop sometime. Partly just to learn about the field, partly to find out whether there’s anything that someone with my skillset could contribute.
(Note: part of what impressed Scott here was being early to raise the alarm, and that boat has already sailed, so it could be that future COVID-19 work won’t do much to impress people like him.)
Note: part of what impressed Scott here was being early to raise the alarm, and that boat has already sailed, so it could be that future COVID-19 work won’t do much to impress people like him.
I think that’s crucial—I’m generally supportive of EAs / rationalists to be doing things like COVID-19 work when they have a comparative advantage at doing so, which is a factor in why I support forecasting / meta work even now, and I’d certainly want biosecurity people to at least be thinking about how they could help with COVID-19 (as they in fact are). But the OP isn’t arguing that, and whether or not it was intended I could see readers thinking that they should be actively trying to work on COVID even if they don’t have an obvious comparative advantage at it, and that seems wrong to me.
This point about comparative advantage is also why I wrote:
I’d probably change my mind if I thought that these other longtermists could actually make a large impact on the COVID-19 response, but that seems quite unlikely to me.
I can’t tell whether you’re arguing “some small subset of EAs/rationalists are in a great position to fight COVID-19 and they should do so” vs. “if an arbitrary EA/rationalist wants to fight COVID-19, they shouldn’t worry that they are doing less because they aren’t reducing x-risk” vs. “COVID-19 is such an opportunity for x-risk reduction that nearly all longtermists should be focusing on it now”.
I agree with the first (in particular for people who work on forecasting / “meta” stuff), but not with the latter two. To the extent you’re arguing for the latter two, I don’t find the arguments very convincing, because they aren’t comparing against counterfactuals. Taking each point in turn:
I agree that COVID-19 is particularly good for training the general bucket of forecasting / applied epistemology / scenario-planning.
However, for coordination, persuasive argumentation, networking, and project management, I don’t see why COVID-19 is particularly better than other projects you could be working on. For example, I think I practiced all of those skills by organizing a local EA group; it also seems like ~any project that involves advocacy would likely require / train all of these skills.
Presumably for most goals there are more direct ways to forge alliances than by working on COVID-19. E.g. you mentioned AI safety—if I wanted to forge alliances with people at OSTP, I’d focus on current AI issues like interpretability and fairness.
I agree that this is important for the more “meta” parts of x-risk, such as forecasting. But for those of us who are working closer to the object level (e.g. technical AI safety, nuclear war, climate change), I don’t really see how this is going to help establish credibility that’s used in the future.
You talk about field-building here, which in fact seems like an important thing to be doing, but seems basically unrelated to the COVID-19 response. I’d guess that field-building has ~zero effect on how many people die from COVID-19 this year.
Agreed that this is good.
Overall take: It does seem like anyone working on “meta” approaches to x-risk reduction probably should be thinking very seriously about how they can contribute to the COVID-19 response, but I’d guess that for most other longtermists the argument “it is just a distraction” is basically right.
I’d probably change my mind if I thought that these other longtermists could actually make a large impact on the COVID-19 response, but that seems quite unlikely to me.
I generally agree with your response, but wanted to point out one example of establishing credibility: Scott Aaronson says:
(Note: part of what impressed Scott here was being early to raise the alarm, and that boat has already sailed, so it could be that future COVID-19 work won’t do much to impress people like him.)
I think that’s crucial—I’m generally supportive of EAs / rationalists to be doing things like COVID-19 work when they have a comparative advantage at doing so, which is a factor in why I support forecasting / meta work even now, and I’d certainly want biosecurity people to at least be thinking about how they could help with COVID-19 (as they in fact are). But the OP isn’t arguing that, and whether or not it was intended I could see readers thinking that they should be actively trying to work on COVID even if they don’t have an obvious comparative advantage at it, and that seems wrong to me.
This point about comparative advantage is also why I wrote: