[Epistemic status: confused stuff that I haven’t thought about that much. That said I do think this consideration is quite real and I’ve talked to suffering focused people about this sort of thing (I’m not currently suffering focused)]
Beyond ECL-style cooperation with values which want to reach the stars and causally reaching aliens, I think the strongest remaining case is post singularity acausal trade.
I think this consideration is actually quite strong in expectation if you think that suffering focused ethics is common on reflection among humans (or human originating AIs which took over) and less common among other powerful civilizations. Though this depends heavily on the relative probabilities of S-risk from different sources. My guess would be that this consideration out weighs cooperation and encountering technologically immature aliens. I normally think causal trade with technologically mature aliens/AIs from aliens and acaual trade are basically the same.
I’d guess that this consideration is probably not sufficent to think that reaching the stars is good from a negative utiliarian perspective, but I’m only like 60⁄40 on this (and very confused overall).
By ‘on reflection’ I mean something like ‘after the great reflection’ or what you get from indirect normativity: https://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2012/04/21/indirect-normativity-write-up/
My guess would be that negative utilitarians should think that at least they would likely remain negative utilitarian on reflection (or that the residual is unpredictable). So probably negative utilitarians should also think negative utilitarianism is common on reflection?
I have a mild amount of insight into getting algo trading software engineering jobs: I had an internship at one of these companies this last summer and got a full time offer from from several. (However, I’m planning on working on alignment).
Maybe this is all totally obvious, but regardless, my short summary for one path into this industry is something like:
Go to university in the US, ideally somewhere with prestige. Top public universities (e.g. university of Michigan) can be decent, but MIT or similar is better.
Try to build up an internship ladder to one of these places. Maybe go small company → small hedge fund or other finance → algo trading.
Once you get an internship, you should be basically good to go (assuming the company thought you did a good job). I think most people get return offers and once you have an internship at one of these places, it’s easy to get past the resume screen at other algo trading companies.
This means that internships after freshman/sophomore year can be really important. Of course, ideally, you would just intern at an algo trading place from the start, but these internships can be hard to get without the right prior internships.