Thanks so much for this useful reply :) There’s something I want to write about which I believe carries a risk of ‘some undefined amount of suffering that is worth consideration’. I think I have been wasting time trying to decide if it is an s-risk by the usual definitions rather than just writing about what’s happening and then speculating from there. You make a good point that something not quite bad enough to be an s-risk is still pretty bad!
I do think ‘catastrophic suffering risk’ is an odd one, because it’s really not intuitive that a ‘catastrophic suffering risk’ is less bad than a ‘suffering risk’. I guess I just find it weird that something as bad as a genuine s-risk has such a pedestrian name, compared to ‘existential risk’, which I think is an intuitive and evocative name that gets across the level of bad-ness pretty well.
One quick question—when you say an s-risk creates a future with negative value, does that make it worse than an x-risk? As in, the imagined future is SO awful that the extinction of humanity would be preferable?
Thanks so much for this useful reply :) There’s something I want to write about which I believe carries a risk of ‘some undefined amount of suffering that is worth consideration’. I think I have been wasting time trying to decide if it is an s-risk by the usual definitions rather than just writing about what’s happening and then speculating from there. You make a good point that something not quite bad enough to be an s-risk is still pretty bad!
I do think ‘catastrophic suffering risk’ is an odd one, because it’s really not intuitive that a ‘catastrophic suffering risk’ is less bad than a ‘suffering risk’. I guess I just find it weird that something as bad as a genuine s-risk has such a pedestrian name, compared to ‘existential risk’, which I think is an intuitive and evocative name that gets across the level of bad-ness pretty well.
One quick question—when you say an s-risk creates a future with negative value, does that make it worse than an x-risk? As in, the imagined future is SO awful that the extinction of humanity would be preferable?