Our final century?
“So if we drop the baton, succumbing to an existential catastrophe, we would fail our ancestors in a multitude of ways. We would fail to achieve the dreams they hoped for; we would betray the trust they placed in us, their heirs; and we would fail in any duty we had to pay forward the work they did for us. To neglect existential risk might thus be to wrong not only the people of the future, but the people of the past.”
- Toby Ord
Humanity appears to face existential risks: a chance that we’ll destroy our long-term potential. We’ll examine why existential risks might be a moral priority, and explore why they are so neglected by society. We’ll also look into one of the major risks that we might face: a human-made pandemic, worse than COVID-19.
Alongside this, we’ll introduce you to the concept of “expected value” and explore whether you could lose all of your impact by missing one crucial consideration.
Key concepts from this session include:
Expected value: We’re often uncertain about how much something will help. In such circumstances, it may make sense to weigh each of the outcomes by the likelihood that they occur and pick the action that looks best in expectation.
Crucial considerations: It can be extremely hard to figure out whether some action helps your goal or causes harm, particularly if you’re trying to influence complex social systems or the long term. This is part of why it can make sense to do a lot of analysis of the interventions you’re considering.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Hi! I found a typo. I’ll delete the comment once it gets fixed:
“and explore they are so neglected by society”.
Thanks!
Fixed, thanks!
Hmm, to my surprise, I just found out that I can’t delete the comment, but only “retract” it (which amounts to striking the text through). Two questions:
Did I miss a way of really deleting the comment?
If there is no way to delete it, is there a better way to report the typos than pointing them out in the comments section?
I’m not sure, but I’ll ask someone who knows to respond. (Though looks like you managed to delete a comment below, so maybe you figured it out?)
I think another thing you could do is message the author (go to their profile page and then click “message”), but I think that commenting is also fine. Pointing out typos is an act of community service, so I think that people will be OK with you leaving the comment up!
Hi! For number 1: To delete a comment, simply click the three dots on the upper right side of the comment box, and you’ll see an option to delete.
If you still can’t see that option, please send us a screenshot of the options you see, and we’ll have our tech team investigate further. Hope this helps!
I think you can’t delete a comment once it has been replied to (you can edit it and remove all its contents though)
But you can ask mods to delete it
I think Lorenzo is right: when there is a reply to a comment, I can’t delete the comment. Here’s a screenshot of what I see (it’s the same thing when I click on the three dots in this comment I made (which starts with the words “Hmm, to my surprise”)):
Anyway, that’s no big deal! I’ll leave the comment up. Thank you folks for your kindness!