Thanks for the reply. There are a bunch of interesting questions I’d like to discuss more in the future, but for the purposes of making a decision on the issue that triggered this thread, on reflection I think it would be valuable to have a discussion of the arguments you describe. The reason I believe this is that existential risk is such a core topic within EA that an article on the different arguments that have been proposed to mitigate these risks is of interest even from a purely sociological or historical perspective. So even if we may not agree on the definition of EA, the relevance of moral uncertainty or other issues, luckily that doesn’t turn out to be an obstacle for agreeing on this particular issue.
Perhaps the article should be simply called arguments for existential risk prioritization and cover all the relevant arguments, including longtermist arguments, and we could in addition have a longer discussion of the latter in a separate article, though I don’t have strong views on this. (As it happens, I have a document briefly describing about 10 such arguments that I wrote many years ago, which I could send if you are interested. I probably won’t be able to work on the article within the next few weeks, though I think I will have time to contribute later.)
Ok, I’ve gone ahead and made the tag, currently with the name Moral perspectives on existential risk reduction. I’m still unsure what the ideal scope and name would be, and have left a long comment on the Discussion page, so we can continue adjusting that later.
(Typing from my phone; apologies for any typos.)
Thanks for the reply. There are a bunch of interesting questions I’d like to discuss more in the future, but for the purposes of making a decision on the issue that triggered this thread, on reflection I think it would be valuable to have a discussion of the arguments you describe. The reason I believe this is that existential risk is such a core topic within EA that an article on the different arguments that have been proposed to mitigate these risks is of interest even from a purely sociological or historical perspective. So even if we may not agree on the definition of EA, the relevance of moral uncertainty or other issues, luckily that doesn’t turn out to be an obstacle for agreeing on this particular issue.
Perhaps the article should be simply called arguments for existential risk prioritization and cover all the relevant arguments, including longtermist arguments, and we could in addition have a longer discussion of the latter in a separate article, though I don’t have strong views on this. (As it happens, I have a document briefly describing about 10 such arguments that I wrote many years ago, which I could send if you are interested. I probably won’t be able to work on the article within the next few weeks, though I think I will have time to contribute later.)
Ok, I’ve gone ahead and made the tag, currently with the name Moral perspectives on existential risk reduction. I’m still unsure what the ideal scope and name would be, and have left a long comment on the Discussion page, so we can continue adjusting that later.
Great, I like the name.