NB I strongly disagree with this take but tjink its useful to share anyway
One other way you might be able to generate a time of perils (or more generally save the x-risk pessimist) is by denying that x-risks exist as a class of things. Rather you take X-Risk as an arbitrarily small number of hazards which once we solve them X-Risk reduces massively until the next hazard comes along. However, because there are few enough existential hazards ,solving one could be very significant in solving total x-risk, and so generating only a short ( or multiple very short) periods of heightened x-risk before we just solve it.
I think this is problematic for many reasons. It requires an immense amount of epistemic confidence that we won’t come across even larger x-risks in the future. Also, it seems really strange to be at a time where multiple x-risks are present with x-risk not being a class of things with common cause but rather separate hazards unrelated to each other. Finally, as discussed in many papers, a hazard viewpoint of xrisk may be significantly oversimplified the problem.
NB I strongly disagree with this take but tjink its useful to share anyway
One other way you might be able to generate a time of perils (or more generally save the x-risk pessimist) is by denying that x-risks exist as a class of things. Rather you take X-Risk as an arbitrarily small number of hazards which once we solve them X-Risk reduces massively until the next hazard comes along. However, because there are few enough existential hazards ,solving one could be very significant in solving total x-risk, and so generating only a short ( or multiple very short) periods of heightened x-risk before we just solve it.
I think this is problematic for many reasons. It requires an immense amount of epistemic confidence that we won’t come across even larger x-risks in the future. Also, it seems really strange to be at a time where multiple x-risks are present with x-risk not being a class of things with common cause but rather separate hazards unrelated to each other. Finally, as discussed in many papers, a hazard viewpoint of xrisk may be significantly oversimplified the problem.