Ooo, that's a niche find. Thanks for sharing!

I think that the statement "There is a one in six chance that humanity will permanently destroy its future potential value" is an extraordinary claim.

What makes something extraordinary is definitely vibes-based and meant as a framing. For me, it is essentially whether the claim involves a vast change in our typical understanding of the world or a vast change in how our behavior should be in context to our world. The claim "There is a second world where people live forever" is an extraordinary claim. The claim "Lifespans in this part of Afghanistan are decreasing" is not an extraordinary claim.

Yeah, your last paragraph is how I think I should have re-framed the article. We have very little precedence for x-risks, given that the ones people worry about all have essentially no historical precedence. Additionally, since humans are the most intelligent, resilient, and creative species, we should expect that the risks that humans face must be truly vast in scale and unable to be defended against.

I generally worry that, because our brains have a proclivity towards believing we're in the end times, we may waste resources by lowering our epistemic standards when the concept of existential risk is raised.

The claim "Teleportation will be invented next year" is extraordinary. If 20% of physicists believe the claim to be true, we should think there's a significant chance it will occur. The claim "AI will cause human extinction" is also extraordinary, but, if a significant portion of AI researchers believe it is true, then we should probably think there's a significant chance (with no additional knowledge) that this will occur. Something can be extraordinary and true. General relativity is extraordinary and true.

Thanks for explaining how you perceived the article. There's some better way I could have written this. I argued that x-risk is an extraordinary claim not that x-risk is low because I'm much more confident in the first claim than the second.

My impetus for writing is that I think that people tend to be overly confident about x-risks because they fail to appreciate how much must be argued in order to be really justified in worrying about them.

Also, for clarity, I would consider a 1% x-risk to be extremely high. I don't think that we should lower our epistemic standards merely because the stakes are high as this could lead us to constantly invest resources in action when we know very little and we should instead be investing in further research.

That's a really great point! I think that a lot of people are skeptical that we have any obligation to be altruistic in the EA way at all, and, then I think there's a lot of people who would donate money but are too risk averse. This is a way in which I'm skeptical of GWWC's messaging. They target people of all ages, but it seems like young people should have a reasonable amount of aversion to taking the pledge if they're risk averse.

Yeah, I also agree that it's problematic that longtermism directs a uniquely high proportion of resources towards individuals working on the cause rather than the cause itself. That said, it seems like EA is, in general, a lot more talent-constrained than funding-constrained so I imagine most cause areas also have the effect of always being able to draw more people in.

Thank you! Yeah, exactly, EAs think about trying to do good in a cost-effective way, but they don't do so at all costs. Before it was called EA, Toby Ord was envisioning something he called "positive ethics," where the idea was that we should try to make use of the positive things from utilitarianism (that it takes seriously the suffering of people far away and how we go about reducing it) but not having to include the negative things (like a narrow set of values and extreme demandingness.)

I also wonder about this. I'm excited to see where research in the field leads.

Yeah, to be fair, I do think that the broad trend argument is probably the strongest argument for longtermism. Like, it appears that humanity has continuously expanded and grown for the past 12,000 years. If this trend continues, then it makes sense to think that eventually we'll have the technology to start expanding into space.

Ah, thank you!