This is very bad news for longtermism if correct, since it suggests that value in the far future gained by preventing extinction now is much lower than it would otherwise be. 

If you think there might well be forms of naturalism that are true but trivial, is your credence in anti-realism really well over >99%?

This forum probably isn't the place for really getting into the weeds of this, but I'm also a bit worried about accounts of triviality that conflate a priority or even analyticity and triviality: Maths is not trivial in any sense of "trivial" on which "trivial" means "not worth bothering with". Maybe you can get out of this by saying maths isn't analytic and it's only being analytic that trivializes things, but I don't think it is particulary obvious that there is a sense making concept of analyticity that doesn't apply to maths. Apparently Neo-Fregeans think that lots of maths is analytic, and as far as I know that is a respected option in the philosophy of math: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logicism/#NeoFre

I also wonder about exactly what is being claimed to be trivial: individual identifications of moral properties with naturalistic properties, if they are explicitly claimed to be analytic? Or the claim that moral naturalism is true and there are some analytic truths of this sort? Or both?

Also, do you think semantic claims in general are trivial? 

Finally, do you think the naturalists whose claims you consider "trivial" mostly agree with you that their views have the features that you think make for triviality but disagree that having those features means their views are of no interest. Or do most of them think their claims lack the features you think make for triviality? Or do you think most of them just haven't thought about it/don't have a good-faith substantive response?



 

So your claim is that  naturalists are just stipulating a particular meaning of their own for moral terms? Can you say why you think this? Don't some naturalists just defend the idea that moral properties could be identical with complex sociological properties without even saying *which* properties? How could those naturalists be engaging in stipulative definition, even accidentally? 

I'd also say that this only bears on the truth/falsity of naturalism fairly indirectly. There's no particular connection between whether naturalism is actually true and whether some group of naturalist thinkers happen to have stipulatively defined a moral term, although I guess if most defenses of naturalism did this, that would be evidence that naturalism couldn't be defended in other ways, which is evidence against it's truth.

Is being trivial and of low interest evidence that naturalist forms of realism are *false*? "Red things are red" is boring and trivial, but my credence in it is way above 0.99. 

Yeah, I think I recall David Thorstad complaining that Ord's estimate was far too high also.

Be careful not to conflate "existential risk" in the special Bostrom-dervied definition that I think Ord, and probably Will as well, are using with "extinction risk" though. X-risk from climate *can* be far higher than extinction risk, because regressing to a pre-industrial state and then not succeeding in reindustrialising (perhaps because easily accessible coal has been used up), counts as an existential risk, even though it doesn't involve literal extinction. (Though from memory, I think Ord is quite dismissive of the possibility that there won't be enough accessible coal to reindustrialise, but I think Will is a bit more concerned about this?) 

Is there actually an official IPCC position on how likely degrowth from climate impacts is? I had a vague sense that they were projecting a higher world gdp in 2100 than now, but when I tried to find evidence of this for 15 minutes or so, I couldn't actually find any. (I'm aware that even if that is the official IPCC best-guess position that does not necessarily mean that climate experts are less worried about X-risk from climate than AI experts are about X-risk from AI.)

What did the IPCC people say exactly?

The global warming thing is interesting to me because my sense is that Ord and MacAskill think of themselves as relying on expert consensus and published literature, rather than as having somehow outsmarted it. So why the difference between them and the author in what it shows?

Interesting, the paper is older than Thorstad's blogposts, but it could still be that people are thinking of this as "the answer". 

I do think one issue people may be underrating is that we might just not bother with space colonization, if the distances and costs mean that no one on Earth will ever see significant material gain from it.