I’ve arrived at this post very late, but a relevant point I’d add is that as someone with person-affecting, non totalist consequentialist views, I disagree with many of the ideas of longtermism, but working on pandemics and AI alignment still makes sense to me on ‘disaster mitigation’ grounds. I think of the big three cause areas as ‘global health and poverty, farmed animal welfare and disaster mitigation’. Also, working on pandemics fits pretty neatly as a subset of global health work.
I’ve arrived at this post very late, but a relevant point I’d add is that as someone with person-affecting, non totalist consequentialist views, I disagree with many of the ideas of longtermism, but working on pandemics and AI alignment still makes sense to me on ‘disaster mitigation’ grounds. I think of the big three cause areas as ‘global health and poverty, farmed animal welfare and disaster mitigation’. Also, working on pandemics fits pretty neatly as a subset of global health work.