I think you should put very little trust in the default parameters of the projects. It was our initial intention to create defaults that reflected the best evidence and expert opinion, but we had difficulty getting consensus on what these values should be and decided instead to explicitly stand back from the defaults. The parameter settings are adjustable to suit your views, and we encourage people to think about what those parameter settings should be and not take the defaults too seriously.
For readers’ context, AI safety technical research is 80,000 Hours’ top career path, whereas one could argue extinction risk from natural disasters is astronomically low.
The parameters allow you to control how far into the future you look and the outcomes include not just effects on the long-term future from the extinction / preservation of the species but also on the probabilities of near-term catastrophes that cause large numbers of death but don’t cause extinction. Depending on your settings, near-term catastrophes can dominate the expected value. For the default settings for natural disasters and bio-risk, much of the value of mitigation work (at least over the next 1000 years) comes from prevention of relatively small-scale disasters. I don’t see anything obviously wrong about this result and I expect that 80K’s outlook is based on a willingness to consider effects more than 1000 years in the future.
I think you should put very little trust in the default parameters of the projects. It was our initial intention to create defaults that reflected the best evidence and expert opinion, but we had difficulty getting consensus on what these values should be and decided instead to explicitly stand back from the defaults. The parameter settings are adjustable to suit your views, and we encourage people to think about what those parameter settings should be and not take the defaults too seriously.
The parameters allow you to control how far into the future you look and the outcomes include not just effects on the long-term future from the extinction / preservation of the species but also on the probabilities of near-term catastrophes that cause large numbers of death but don’t cause extinction. Depending on your settings, near-term catastrophes can dominate the expected value. For the default settings for natural disasters and bio-risk, much of the value of mitigation work (at least over the next 1000 years) comes from prevention of relatively small-scale disasters. I don’t see anything obviously wrong about this result and I expect that 80K’s outlook is based on a willingness to consider effects more than 1000 years in the future.