William_MacAskill’s comment on the Scott Alexander post explains his rational for leading with longermism over x-risk. Pasting it below so people don’t have to click.
It’s a tough question, but leading with x-risk seems like it could turn off a lot of people who have (mostly rightly, up until recently) gotten into the habit of ignoring doomsayers. Longtermism comes at it from a more positive angle, which seems more inspiring to me (x-risk seems to be more promoting acting out of fear to me). Longtermism is just more interesting as an idea to me as well.
Is existential risk a more compelling intro meme than longtermism?
My main take is: What meme is good for which people is highly dependent on the person and the context (e.g., the best framing to use in a back-and-forth conversation may be different from one in a viral tweet). This favours diversity; having a toolkit of memes that we can use depending on what’s best in context.
I think it’s very hard to reason about which memes to promote, and easy to get it wrong from the armchair, for a bunch of reasons:
It’s inherently unpredictable which memes do well.
It’s incredibly context-dependent. To figure this out, the main thing is just about gathering lots of (qualitative and quantitative) data from the demographic you’re interacting with. The memes that resonate most with Ezra Klein podcast listeners are very different from those that resonant most with Tyler Cowen podcast listeners, even though their listeners are very similar people compared to the wider world. And even with respect to one idea, subtly different framings can have radically different audience reactions. (cf. “We care about future generations” vs “We care about the unborn.”)
People vary a lot. Even within very similar demographics, some people can love one message while other people hate it.
“Curse of knowledge”—when you’re really deep down the rabbit hole in a set of ideas, it’s really hard to imagine what it’s like being first exposed to those ideas.
Then, at least when we’re comparing (weak) longtermism with existential risk, it’s not obvious which resonates better in general. (If anything, it seems to me that (weak) longtermism does better.) A few reasons:
First, message testing from Rethink suggests that longtermism and existential risk have similarly-good reactions from the educated general public, and AI risk doesn’t do great. The three best-performing messages they tested were:
“The current pandemic has shown that unforeseen events can have a devastating effect. It is imperative that we prepare both for pandemics and other risks which could threaten humanity’s long-term future.”
“In any year, the risk from any given threat might be small—but the odds that your children or grandchildren will face one of them is uncomfortably high.”
“It is important to ensure a good future not only for our children’s children, but also the children of their children.”
So people actually pretty like messages that are about unspecified, and not necessarily high-probability threats, to the (albeit nearer-term) future.
As terms to describe risk, “global catastrophic risk” and “long-term risk” did the best, coming out a fair amount better than “existential risk”.
They didn’t test a message about AI risk specifically. The related thing was how much the government should prepare for different risks (pandemics, nuclear, etc), and AI came out worst among about 10 (but I don’t think that tells us very much).
Second, most media reception of WWOTF has been pretty positive so far. This is based mainly on early reviews (esp trade reviews), podcast and journalistic interviews, and the recent profiles (although the New Yorker profile was mixed). Though there definitely has been some pushback (especially on Twitter), I think it’s overall been dwarfed by positive articles. And the pushback I have gotten is on the Elon endorsement, association between EA and billionaires, and on standard objections to utilitarianism — less so to the idea of longtemism itself.
Third, anecdotally at least, a lot of people just hate the idea of AI risk (cf Twitter), thinking of it as a tech bro issue, or doomsday cultism. This has been coming up in the twitter response to WWOTF, too, even though existential risk from AI takeover is only a small part of the book. And this is important, because I’d think that the median view among people working on x-risk (including me) is that the large majority of the risk comes from AI rather than bio or other sources. So “holy shit, x-risk” is mainly, “holy shit, AI risk”.
Do neartermists and longtermists agree on what’s best to do?Here I want to say: maybe. (I personally don’t think so, but YMMV.) But even if you do believe that, I think that’s a very fragile state of affairs, which could easily change as more money and attention flows into x-risk work, or if our evidence changes, and I don’t want to place a lot of weight on it. (I do strongly believe that global catastrophic risk is enormously important even in the near term, and a sane world would be doing far, far better on it, even if everyone only cared about the next 20 years.)
More generally, I get nervous about any plan that isn’t about promoting what we fundamentally believe or care about (or a weaker version of what we fundamentally believe or care about, which is “on track” to the things we do fundamentally believe or care about).
What I mean by “promoting what we fundamentally believe or care about”:
Promoting goals rather than means. This means that (i) if the environment changes (e.g. some new transformative tech comes along, or the political environment changes dramatically, like war breaks out) or (ii) if our knowledge changes (e.g. about the time until transformative AIs, or about what actions to take), then we’ll take different means to pursue our goals. I think this is particularly important for something like AI, but also true more generally.
Promoting the ideas that you believe most robustly—i.e. that you think you are least likely to change in the coming 10 years. Ideally these things aren’t highly conjunctive or relying on speculative premises. This makes it less likely that you will realise that you’ve been wasting your time or done active harm by promoting wrong ideas in ten years’ time. (Of course, this will vary from person to person. I think that (weak) longtermism is really robustly true and neglected, and I feel bullish about promoting it. For others, the thing that might feel really robustly true is “TAI is a BFD and we’re not thinking about it enough”—I suspect that many people feel they more robustly believe this than longtermism.)
Examples of people promoting means rather than goals, and this going wrong:
“Eat less meat because it’s good for your health” → people (potentially) eat less beef and more chicken.
“Stop nuclear power” (in the 70s) → environmentalists hate nuclear power, even though it’s one of the best bits of clean tech we have.
Examples of how this could go wrong by promoting “holy shit x-risk”:
We miss out on non-x-risk ways of promoting a good long-run future:
E.g. the risk that we solve the alignment problem but AI is used to lock in highly suboptimal values. (Personally, I think a large % of future expected value is lost in this way.)
We highlight the importance of AI to people who are not longtermist. They realise how transformatively good it could be for them and for the present generation (a digital immortality of bliss!) if AI is aligned, and they think the risk of misalignment is small compared to the benefits. They become AI-accelerationists (a common view among Silicon Valley types).
AI progress slows considerably in the next 10 years, and actually near-term x-risk doesn’t seem so high. Rather than doing whatever the next-best longtermist thing is, the people who came in via “holy shit x-risk” people just do whatever instead, and the people who promoted the “holy shit x-risk” meme get a bad reputation.
So, overall my take is:
“Existential risk” and “longtermism” are both important ideas that deserve greater recognition in the world.
My inclination is to prefer promoting “longtermism” because that’s closer to what I fundamentally believe (in the sense I explain above), and it’s nonobvious to me which plays better PR-wise, and it’s probably highly context-dependent.
Let’s try promoting them both, and see how they each catch on.
I am still finding myself on the fence about about this. It feels like a very exciting opportunity and worth the money, but there is a nagging part of me that says don’t trust that emotional reaction. What really matters is whether it’s better in expectation than saving a life or two. If anyone has done or is willing to do that calculation (or parts of it), I’d love to read it.
There are a lot of comments regarding his chances of winning, but less about what he could (or would be likely) to realistically accomplish if he were to gain office. This seems important.
I’d love to read an outside view take on what the range of accomplishments could be for a new representative without much political experience or party support.