By contrast, the core message of an “x-risk first” frame would be “if existential risks are plausible and soon, this is very bad and should be changed; you and your loved ones might literally die, and the things you value and worked on throughout your life might be destroyed, because of a small group of people doing some very reckless things with technology. It’s good and noble to try to make this not happen”.
I think a very important counterargument you don’t mention is that, as with the Nanda and Alexander posts you mention, this paragraph, and hence the post overall importantly equivocates between ‘x-risk’ and ‘global catastrophic risk’. You mention greater transparency of the label, but it’s not particularly transparent to say ‘get involved in the existential risk movement because we want to stop you and everyone you love from dying’, and then say ‘btw, that means only working on AI and occasionally 100% lethal airborne biopandemics, because we don’t really care about nuclear war, great power conflict, less lethal pandemics/AI disasters, runaway climate change or other events that only kill 90% of people’.
I think focusing more on concrete ideas than philosophies is reasonable (though, following your second counterargument, I think it’s desirable to try doing both in parallel for months or years rather than committing to either). But if we want to rebrand in this direction, I hope we’ll either start focusing more on such ‘minor’ global catastrophes, or be more explicit (as David Nash suggested) about which causes we’re actually prioritising, and to what extent. Either way, I don’t think ‘existential risk’ is the appropriate terminology to use (I wrote more about why here).
I think a very important counterargument you don’t mention is that, as with the Nanda and Alexander posts you mention, this paragraph, and hence the post overall importantly equivocates between ‘x-risk’ and ‘global catastrophic risk’. You mention greater transparency of the label, but it’s not particularly transparent to say ‘get involved in the existential risk movement because we want to stop you and everyone you love from dying’, and then say ‘btw, that means only working on AI and occasionally 100% lethal airborne biopandemics, because we don’t really care about nuclear war, great power conflict, less lethal pandemics/AI disasters, runaway climate change or other events that only kill 90% of people’.
I think focusing more on concrete ideas than philosophies is reasonable (though, following your second counterargument, I think it’s desirable to try doing both in parallel for months or years rather than committing to either). But if we want to rebrand in this direction, I hope we’ll either start focusing more on such ‘minor’ global catastrophes, or be more explicit (as David Nash suggested) about which causes we’re actually prioritising, and to what extent. Either way, I don’t think ‘existential risk’ is the appropriate terminology to use (I wrote more about why here).