MichaelA🔸 comments on A Funnel for Cause Candidates

[MichaelA🔸]

[Tangent]

Do you hold a totalist view of population ethics? If you don’t you may want to funnel out all x-risk reduction charities

“X-risk” is typically short for “existential risk”, which includes extinction risk, but also includes risks of unrecoverable collapse, unrecoverable dystopia, and some (but not all) s-risks/​suffering catastrophes. (See here.)

My understanding is that, if we condition on rejecting totalism:

• Risk of extinction becomes way less important

  • Though it’d still matter due to its effects on the present generation

• Risk of unrecoverable collapse probably becomes way less important (though this is a bit less clear)

• Risk of unrecoverable dystopia still retains much of its importance

• Suffering risk still retains much of its importance

(See here for some discussion relevant to those points.)

So maybe by “x-risk” you actually meant “extinction risk”, rather than “existential risk”? (Using “x-risk”/​”existential risk” as synonymous with just “extinction risk” is unfortunately common, but goes against Bostrom and Ord’s definitions.)

[JackM]

Yeah absolutely, this was my tired 11pm brain. I meant to refer to extinction risk whenever I said x-risk. I’ll edit.