I think it makes sense because if you have an assumption that the future will be positive, working on x-risks seems more promising. It’s very difficult to predict how actions we take now will affect life millions of years from now (unless a value lock-in happens soon). It seems much easier to predict what will decrease x-risks in the next 50 years, and work on x-risks seems to be higher leverage.
This is the standard justification for working on immediate extinction, but I think it’s weak. It seems reasonable as a case for looking at them as a cause area first, but ‘it’s hard to predict EV’ is a very poor proxy for ‘actually having low EV’ - IMO the movement has been very lazy about moving on from this early heuristic.
I don’t have anything concrete in mind about quality of life. I’ve been doing some work on refining existential risk concerns beyond short term extinction, which you can see the published stuff on here. I’m currently looking for people to have a look at the next post in that sequence, and the Python estimation script it describes. If you’d be interested in having a look at that, it’s here :)
I do wonder whether a similar approach could be useful for quality of life, but haven’t put any serious thought into it.
This is the standard justification for working on immediate extinction, but I think it’s weak. It seems reasonable as a case for looking at them as a cause area first, but ‘it’s hard to predict EV’ is a very poor proxy for ‘actually having low EV’ - IMO the movement has been very lazy about moving on from this early heuristic.
I don’t have anything concrete in mind about quality of life. I’ve been doing some work on refining existential risk concerns beyond short term extinction, which you can see the published stuff on here. I’m currently looking for people to have a look at the next post in that sequence, and the Python estimation script it describes. If you’d be interested in having a look at that, it’s here :)
I do wonder whether a similar approach could be useful for quality of life, but haven’t put any serious thought into it.