Well done for the hard work in putting together the course, and I am sure many people will benefit from it!
Nonetheless, I do have a number of critiques (sorry!) as many of the choices seem somewhat odd.
Firstly, relying on the Precipice so much, particularly for cause area work, seems a little odd. For example, on climate change, the precipice really is nowhere near the best work done on it, and for example Beard et al 2020 or Kemp et al 2022 may be considerably better. I certainly think a lot of the climate stuff you have could be improved. I don’t know how genralisable such a suggestion is to other cause areas.
Secondly in the forecasting and decision making, you have nothing on foresight or horizon scanning, important techniques used in decision making with the future, despite what you have on forecasting. This decision seems odd given the former is often seen as more appropriate in situations of deep uncertainty. I think it’s a major mistake not to include foresight work in here, as in oractice this is vital to xrisk work.
Thirdly, your week on alternative paradigms really hardly explores the systems/complexity approach to xrisk (although defense in depth and democratising risk is a start!). I would recommend some of what’s written in Beard & Torres 2020 for an introduction to this “3rd paradigm” of X-Risk studies, and maybe to look from there. A lot of work coming out of CSER maybe useful on this, as might some work Seth Baum and other have done. Other useful papers may be “7 questions for ERS Scholars” and some of the talks at CCCR 2022.
Your choices to lump climate, nuclear and anthropogenic and natural risks into one week seems a little strange, and I really don’t think you do any of these justice by such a small time spent on them.
The choice to have the Vulnerable World Hypothesis without critique seems potentially dangerous, despite its utility (it sort of Advocates for a global surveillance state!) I also think some critical views on AI risk (eg Ben Garfinkel) maybe useful in that week.
More generally, whilst it is only an intro course, I really do worry that some of the decisions made look in some common assumptions of how xrisk will manifest and be that seems quite common in the ea community buildingspaces that I don’t see as very common in the more research orientated xrisk spaces.
I don’t think all these criticisms bite. Some of it is legitimately the compromises you have to make with an intro course. And maybe you have different intentions to me and you want to convince the participants of a sort of 2nd wave xrisk approach (one that is common in ea, pretty mechanistic and modernist, close to what kemp and cramer describe as the TUA), but if you don’t and rather want to give people an intro into xrisk that introduces them to the state of the academic debate more generally, I think a number of the changes I suggested should be incorporated.
Well done for the hard work in putting together the course, and I am sure many people will benefit from it! Nonetheless, I do have a number of critiques (sorry!) as many of the choices seem somewhat odd. Firstly, relying on the Precipice so much, particularly for cause area work, seems a little odd. For example, on climate change, the precipice really is nowhere near the best work done on it, and for example Beard et al 2020 or Kemp et al 2022 may be considerably better. I certainly think a lot of the climate stuff you have could be improved. I don’t know how genralisable such a suggestion is to other cause areas.
Secondly in the forecasting and decision making, you have nothing on foresight or horizon scanning, important techniques used in decision making with the future, despite what you have on forecasting. This decision seems odd given the former is often seen as more appropriate in situations of deep uncertainty. I think it’s a major mistake not to include foresight work in here, as in oractice this is vital to xrisk work.
Thirdly, your week on alternative paradigms really hardly explores the systems/complexity approach to xrisk (although defense in depth and democratising risk is a start!). I would recommend some of what’s written in Beard & Torres 2020 for an introduction to this “3rd paradigm” of X-Risk studies, and maybe to look from there. A lot of work coming out of CSER maybe useful on this, as might some work Seth Baum and other have done. Other useful papers may be “7 questions for ERS Scholars” and some of the talks at CCCR 2022.
Your choices to lump climate, nuclear and anthropogenic and natural risks into one week seems a little strange, and I really don’t think you do any of these justice by such a small time spent on them.
The choice to have the Vulnerable World Hypothesis without critique seems potentially dangerous, despite its utility (it sort of Advocates for a global surveillance state!) I also think some critical views on AI risk (eg Ben Garfinkel) maybe useful in that week.
More generally, whilst it is only an intro course, I really do worry that some of the decisions made look in some common assumptions of how xrisk will manifest and be that seems quite common in the ea community buildingspaces that I don’t see as very common in the more research orientated xrisk spaces. I don’t think all these criticisms bite. Some of it is legitimately the compromises you have to make with an intro course. And maybe you have different intentions to me and you want to convince the participants of a sort of 2nd wave xrisk approach (one that is common in ea, pretty mechanistic and modernist, close to what kemp and cramer describe as the TUA), but if you don’t and rather want to give people an intro into xrisk that introduces them to the state of the academic debate more generally, I think a number of the changes I suggested should be incorporated.