Hey, glad you liked the post! I don’t really see a tradeoff between extinction risk reduction and moral circle expansion, except insofar as we have limited time and resources to make progress on each. Maybe I’m missing something?
When it comes to limited time and resources, I’m not too worried about that at this stage. My guess is that by reaching out to new (academic) audiences, we can actually increase the total resources and community capital dedicated to longtermist topics in general. Some individuals might have tough decisions to face about where they can have the most positive impact, but that’s just in the nature of there being lots of important problems we could plausibly work on.
On the more general category of s-risks vs extinction risks, it seems to be pretty unanimous that people focused on s-risks advocate cooperation between these groups. E.g. see Tobias Baumann’s “Common ground for longtermists” and CLR’s publications on “Cooperation & Decision Theory”. I’ve seen less about this from people focused on extinction risks, but I might just not have been paying enough attention.
(Though I do think there could also be some tensions between these two areas of work beyond just the fact that each area of work draws on similar scarce resources.)
Hey, glad you liked the post! I don’t really see a tradeoff between extinction risk reduction and moral circle expansion, except insofar as we have limited time and resources to make progress on each. Maybe I’m missing something?
When it comes to limited time and resources, I’m not too worried about that at this stage. My guess is that by reaching out to new (academic) audiences, we can actually increase the total resources and community capital dedicated to longtermist topics in general. Some individuals might have tough decisions to face about where they can have the most positive impact, but that’s just in the nature of there being lots of important problems we could plausibly work on.
On the more general category of s-risks vs extinction risks, it seems to be pretty unanimous that people focused on s-risks advocate cooperation between these groups. E.g. see Tobias Baumann’s “Common ground for longtermists” and CLR’s publications on “Cooperation & Decision Theory”. I’ve seen less about this from people focused on extinction risks, but I might just not have been paying enough attention.
Thanks for this post and this comment.
I agree that some work on extinction risk reduction may actually boost work on moral circle expansion, and vice versa. I also think there are some possible mechanisms for that beyond those you mentioned. I previously discussed similar points in my post Extinction risk reduction and moral circle expansion: Speculating suspicious convergence.
(Though I do think there could also be some tensions between these two areas of work beyond just the fact that each area of work draws on similar scarce resources.)