FYI there is a German institute studying sociological aspects of existential risk

The distinction between scientists and philosophers of science doesn't massively seem apt. Their work is primarily critical, similar to the work of sociologists of science or STS scholars rather than philosophers of science

Awesome, thanks for giving useful context!

That's fair. It was unreasonable of me to imply that their work is epistemically sound without engaging with it more. I flagged that I had only stumbled upon it and hadn't engaged with it, but that should have restrained me from implying their criticism being epistemically sound.  

In general, my idea of this post was more, "How curious, this sociology-ish institute is studying something related to x-risk and has engaged with EA in some way. Let me just share this and see what other people think." and not "The criticism of this group is correct and very important, EA needs to engage with it to improve." 

yeah whatever you want to call the academic and cultural memeplexes that are obsessed with demographic identities, I do think "when literally everyone dies in our threatmodels, the nonwhitemales die too" is kinda all you need to say. Based on my simulation of those memeplexes (which I sorta bought into when I first started reading the sequences, so I have a minor inside view), we can probably expect the retort to be "are you introspective enough to be sure you're not doing motivated reasoning about those threatmodels, rather than these other threatmodels over here?" at best, but my more honest money is on something more condescending than that. And to be clear, there's a difference between constant vigilance about "maybe I rolled a nat 1 on introspection this morning" (good) and falsely implying that someone accusing you of not being introspective enough is your peer when they're not (bad). 

I think I'd like to highlight an outsider (i.e. someone who isn't working on extinction-level threatmodels) who seems to be doing actually useful labor of reframing for folks of extinction-level threatmodels: I just read the prologue to David Chapman's new book, and I'm optimistic about it being good. I made a claim sorta related to his prologue in a lightning talk at the MA4 unconference just the other day: I claimed that "AI ethics" and "AI alignment" can unite on pessimism, and furthermore that there's a massive umbrella sense of "everyone who redteams software" that I think could be a productive way of figuring out who to include and exclude. I.e. I do think that research communities should have some fairly basic low-bandwidth channels open between everyone who redteams software and high-bandwidth channels open between everyone who shares their particular threatmodels, and only really excluding optimists who think everything's fine. 

I have an off topic thing to continue on saying that I'll put in a reply to this comment. 

Appreciate the pushback, but also think the upvotes are likely not representative of EAs reflexively thinking every criticism is great no matter how useless/uncharitable/etc. I think just from skimming this post, it was reasonable for me to have the reaction "Nice, some more people interested in x-risks/dystopias, and studying it from a critical sociological perspective, whatever that means. [Looking into it for 2 minutes without spotting anything really interesting] Thanks for sharing.", and that that's more representative of the upvotes. 

E.g. one example for EAs responding in a calibrated way to criticism is imo this recent thread about a book that's very critical of EA and that seems to receive appropriate pushback for its flaws: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YFGkyDjKvsr9tHzkS/book-post-the-good-it-promises-the-harm-it-does-critical 

That said, I also am now and then surprised by the amount of upvotes some EA criticism content here gets despite what I perceive to be relatively low usefulness. I'm probably convinced though that this collective behavior is optimal given that criticism is hard and feels socially abrasive and adversarial, and to encourage it coming forward we should bias towards upvoting even just for approving the energy somebody put into the general process of improving EA. EAs as a community should just also realize that a critical post having 400+ upvotes doesn't necessarily reflect agreement or quality. (I'm also a fan of the idea to introduce agreement votes for posts themselves.)