I was considering writing a post making the point that for the majority of people, their personal risk of dying in an existential catastrophe in the next few decades is higher than all their other mortality risks, combined!
However, whilst I think this is probably true (and is a whole lot of food for thought!), it doesn’t necessarily follow that working on x-risk is the best way of increasing your life expectancy. Given that your personal share of finding solutions to x-risk will probably be quite small (maybe 1 part in 10^3-10^7), perhaps reducing your mortality by other means (lifestyle interventions to reduce other risks) would be easier. But then again, if you’re maxed out on all the low-hanging lifestyle interventions, maybe working on x-risk reduction is the way to go! :)
I was considering writing a post making the point that for the majority of people, their personal risk of dying in an existential catastrophe in the next few decades is higher than all their other mortality risks, combined!
However, whilst I think this is probably true (and is a whole lot of food for thought!), it doesn’t necessarily follow that working on x-risk is the best way of increasing your life expectancy. Given that your personal share of finding solutions to x-risk will probably be quite small (maybe 1 part in 10^3-10^7), perhaps reducing your mortality by other means (lifestyle interventions to reduce other risks) would be easier. But then again, if you’re maxed out on all the low-hanging lifestyle interventions, maybe working on x-risk reduction is the way to go! :)