Whether society ends up spending, in the end, more money on asteroid defense or, possibly, more money on monitoring large volcanoes, is orders of magnitude more important than whether people in the EA community (or outside of it) understand the intellectual lineage of these ideas and how novel or non-novel they are. I donāt know if thatās exactly what you were saying, but Iām happy to concede that point anyway.
To be clear, NASAās NEO Surveyor mission is one of the things Iām most excited about in the world. It makes me feel so happy thinking about it. And exposure to Bostromās arguments from the early 2000s to the early 2010s is a major part of what convinced me that we, as a society, were underrating low-probability, high-impact risks. (The Canadian journalist Dan Gardnerās book Risk also helped convince me of that, as did other people Iām probably forgetting right now.)
Even so, I still think itās important to point out ideas are not novel or not that novel if they arenāt, for all the sorts of reasons you would normally give to sweat the small stuff, and not let something slide that, on its own, seems like an error or a bit of a problem, just because it might plausibly benefit the world in some way. Itās a slippery slope, for one...
I may not have made this clear enough in the post, but I completely agree that if, for example, asteroid defense is not a novel idea, but a novel idea, X, tells you that you should spend 2x more money on asteroid defense, then spending 2x more on asteroid defense counts as a novel X-ist intervention. Thatās an important point, Iām glad you made it, and I probably wasnāt clear enough about it.
However, I am making the case that all the compelling arguments to do anything differently, including spend more on asteroid defense, or re-prioritize different interventions, were already made long before ālongtermismā was coined.
If you want to argue that ālongtermismā was a successful re-branding of āexistential riskā, with some mistakes thrown in, Iām happy to concede that. (Or at least say that I donāt care strongly enough to argue against that.) But then I would ask: is everyone aware itās just a re-branding? Is there truth in advertising here?
Whether society ends up spending, in the end, more money on asteroid defense or, possibly, more money on monitoring large volcanoes, is orders of magnitude more important than whether people in the EA community (or outside of it) understand the intellectual lineage of these ideas and how novel or non-novel they are. I donāt know if thatās exactly what you were saying, but Iām happy to concede that point anyway.
To be clear, NASAās NEO Surveyor mission is one of the things Iām most excited about in the world. It makes me feel so happy thinking about it. And exposure to Bostromās arguments from the early 2000s to the early 2010s is a major part of what convinced me that we, as a society, were underrating low-probability, high-impact risks. (The Canadian journalist Dan Gardnerās book Risk also helped convince me of that, as did other people Iām probably forgetting right now.)
Even so, I still think itās important to point out ideas are not novel or not that novel if they arenāt, for all the sorts of reasons you would normally give to sweat the small stuff, and not let something slide that, on its own, seems like an error or a bit of a problem, just because it might plausibly benefit the world in some way. Itās a slippery slope, for one...
I may not have made this clear enough in the post, but I completely agree that if, for example, asteroid defense is not a novel idea, but a novel idea, X, tells you that you should spend 2x more money on asteroid defense, then spending 2x more on asteroid defense counts as a novel X-ist intervention. Thatās an important point, Iām glad you made it, and I probably wasnāt clear enough about it.
However, I am making the case that all the compelling arguments to do anything differently, including spend more on asteroid defense, or re-prioritize different interventions, were already made long before ālongtermismā was coined.
If you want to argue that ālongtermismā was a successful re-branding of āexistential riskā, with some mistakes thrown in, Iām happy to concede that. (Or at least say that I donāt care strongly enough to argue against that.) But then I would ask: is everyone aware itās just a re-branding? Is there truth in advertising here?