Thanks for the elaborate response Seán. It’s valuable for the EA community to understand the internal considerations of x-risk organization, and I don’t want to disincentivize organisations from publishing updates like these on the forum.
Just to be clear: I was not accusing CSER of ‘failure to understand basic prioritisation for impact’. I meant to say that it’s hard for outsiders to evaluate the reasons why an organisation chooses to pursue a certain project. When pure/direct x-risk related projects are reported together with these indirect projects, that can reinforce the ‘good-by-association fallacy’ in the outsiders.
I would expect that with most xrisk organisations, particularly those with an active engagement with other research communities, policy bodies etc, there will be a suite of outputs where some are very obviously and directly relevant to xrisk, and where others are less direct or obvious but have good reason within an overall suite of activities.
I think you’re right about that, although this does not necessarily mean that the current portfolio equals this ‘realistic ideal’ portfolio. I’m also wondering how much of the indirectness is necessary to make progress. A higher degree of indirect projects probably makes x-risk organization mainstream quicker, but at a larger risk that ‘existential risk’ becomes a diluted term and co-opted by other organizations.
Thanks for the elaborate response Seán. It’s valuable for the EA community to understand the internal considerations of x-risk organization, and I don’t want to disincentivize organisations from publishing updates like these on the forum.
Just to be clear: I was not accusing CSER of ‘failure to understand basic prioritisation for impact’. I meant to say that it’s hard for outsiders to evaluate the reasons why an organisation chooses to pursue a certain project. When pure/direct x-risk related projects are reported together with these indirect projects, that can reinforce the ‘good-by-association fallacy’ in the outsiders.
I think you’re right about that, although this does not necessarily mean that the current portfolio equals this ‘realistic ideal’ portfolio. I’m also wondering how much of the indirectness is necessary to make progress. A higher degree of indirect projects probably makes x-risk organization mainstream quicker, but at a larger risk that ‘existential risk’ becomes a diluted term and co-opted by other organizations.