Cross-posted from my Substack.
Epistemic status: I’ve puzzled over this for a long time but I’m not sure I came to the right answers. I'm sharing this partly because it might help others work on resource allocation, but mostly because some smarter reader might tell me how to do it better.
TL;DR:
* I he...
With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There’s increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell’s best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to...
This post is part of the Cross-Cause Fund (CCF) series by Rethink Priorities — a sequence of articles dedicated to effective giving across philanthropic areas.
TL;DR:
There is a seemingly plausible argument that do...
Two neglected X-risks
I've been going through various listings of x-risks (and GCR's, to account for some uncertainty re: climate and nuclear) by prominent organisations, and after a brief scanning have found that the usual list includes:
No list that I came across (explicitly) includes either:
I would make the case that both of these are potential X-risks, and should be taken seriously as objects of research. There appears to be credible reasons to believe that APM is not currently an urgent risk (see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gjEbymta6w8yqNQnE/risks-from-atomically-precise-manufacturing by Michael Aird), but the same cannot be said of SETI/METI. After reading through some longtermist/EA and non-EA community research into SETI/METI risks, it seems to be an open question as to just how probable the risk of finding/being found by hostile ETI might be.
In the face of deep uncertainty around a number of key questions (one of which is the small matter of how likely it is that ETI's exist and their likely proximity to us, another of which is a question of ETI behaviour which we must investigate and estimate based on a sample size of 0), I suggest that this risk be considered alongside the 'big four', both due to its potentially devastating scope and its potentially high likelihood.
We need to spend time fully researching this risk and identifying the most prudent course of action, even if the end result is that we find it can be safely discounted.