It makes sense that the earliest adopters of the idea of existential risk are more pessimistic and risk-aware than average. It’s good to attract optimists because it’s good to attract anyone and also because optimistic rhetoric might help to drive political change.
I think it would be pretty hard to know with probability >0.999 that the world was doomed, so I’m not that interested in thinking about it.
The underlying assumption is that for many people working on probability shifts that are between 0 and 1 percent is not desirable. They would be willing to work for the same shift if it was betwen, say, 20 and 21, but not if it is too low. This is an empirical fact about people, I’m not issuing that it is a relevant moral fact.
It makes sense that the earliest adopters of the idea of existential risk are more pessimistic and risk-aware than average. It’s good to attract optimists because it’s good to attract anyone and also because optimistic rhetoric might help to drive political change.
I think it would be pretty hard to know with probability >0.999 that the world was doomed, so I’m not that interested in thinking about it.
The underlying assumption is that for many people working on probability shifts that are between 0 and 1 percent is not desirable. They would be willing to work for the same shift if it was betwen, say, 20 and 21, but not if it is too low. This is an empirical fact about people, I’m not issuing that it is a relevant moral fact.
Yeah so if it started to look like the world was doomed, then less people would work on x-risk, true.