“What probability do you put on future AI advances causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species?” – median: 5% – mean: 16.2%

“What probability do you put on human inability to control future advanced AI systems causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species?” – median: 10% – mean: 19.4%

Am I missing something, or are these answers nonsensical? On my reading, the 2nd outcome is a strict subset of the 1st outcome, so the probability can't be higher. But the median given probability is twice as high.

this shouldn't affect your update from Halstead

Would be true if I had read Halstead's 437-page report, but I didn't, I only read the intro + your summary. So if I don't put high credence in your summary then I don't know what Halstead's findings were.

I don't want to limit my interactions to people who agree with me on certain details because I might be wrong about those details and if I'm wrong then I want to be convinced.

I'm surprised the vote was so close to unanimous!

If some crops are much better for insect welfare than others, then I want to know about that.

I agree that it's too onerous to avoid harm in everything you do. But I think the correct way to handle it isn't to ignore the harm; it's to figure out which actions you can take that have the best ratio of harm reduction to personal hardship, and then do those.

It may be that the answer turns out to be something weird like "don't worry about dairy, but do avoid pumpkins and melons".

Hello, Michael!2024, I believe you are wrong to be concerned about #1 and #2. In the process of writing this post, where I looked at all the high-quality studies I could find, I've become more confident that peaceful protests are effective. And PauseAI's protest tactics are consistent with the tactics seen in the high-quality studies.

I obtained a probability of human extinction given insufficient calorie production of 10^-6 (= 1/10^6), considering 1 M years is the typical lifespan of a mammal species

This is a central input to your low estimate but it seems like a non-sequitur to me? 1 million years is the unconditional lifespan. The number you want is the lifespan conditional on insufficient calorie production, which is potentially a very different number.

Put another way, you could also reason that there is zero risk from nuclear war:

1. Humans are a mammal species, therefore the baseline probability of extinction is 1e-6.
2. Based on the reasoning in OP, the probability of extinction conditional on nuclear war is 1e-6.
3. These numbers are exactly the same.
4. Therefore, there is zero chance of extinction from nuclear war.

I thought the first review was fine—it didn't say much, but there wasn't much to say, and you were asked to write the review so you did what you could.

I think this updated review goes too far in criticizing SPI. To me it reads like you are mad at SPI for asking you not to mention confidentiality and then later mentioning confidentiality itself in a comment, and you wrote this negative review as retribution for making you look bad, not as an objective assessment.

In reality, SPI has never filed a lawsuit, never litigated a case, and legally—never had a "pending case."

The "in reality" phrasing seems to imply that SPI is lying. I don't think SPI is lying. I don't know much about law but my guess is it takes a while to prepare a lawsuit, and that they're still working on it.

SPI says they "spent $0 in [their] entire first fiscal year (2024-2025)," but in January 2025 SPI's website already stated that they reform pesticide use, protect endangered insects, and challenge insect factory farming.

This reads like you are objecting to SPI's use of present tense for activities that are ongoing. The use of present tense seems totally fine to me? When the website says "protect endangered insects", I read that as "The purpose of our ongoing activities is to protect endangered insects", whereas you seem to be interpreting it as "We have already protected endangered insects" and you're indirectly accusing them of lying on that basis. Which I don't think is reasonable.

It is impossible to reform pesticide use with $0.

This is obviously false. You can do political advocacy on a volunteer basis.

Also, SPI doesn't have $0. It spent $0 in its first fiscal year, and now has a small but nonzero budget.

Overall this review falls into the same patterns that you've been criticized for in previous reviews, where you interpret ambiguous evidence in the least charitable possible light, accusing charities of bad behavior when the accusation isn't warranted.

Follow-up comment now that I've finished reading this post:

I found a few minor inaccuracies from spot-checking specific claims. My spot-checks found a pretty high error rate (about 50%), which unfortunately leads me to believe that that I shouldn't update my beliefs based on this summary.

I like the genre of "summary of a very long article, written by a third party" and I'm glad you wrote it. My guess is you just rushed this post a bit and weren't as careful as you should have been.

Forest cover has been increasing for decades.

From Figure 1 in the linked paper, it looks like the rate of deforestation has decreased since ~2000, but it's still positive.

Climate change will likely cause a few hundred thousand extra people to relocate annually, by raising the frequency of extreme heat.

The linked paper is about sea level rise. From skimming, I don't think it said anything about displacement due to extreme heat.

Halstead estimates that at the highest end, warming-related conflicts will cause roughly an extra 40,000 deaths by 2100.

Where are you getting this? The closest claim I see is page 389:

This suggests that battle deaths [in Africa] will increase to 40,000 by 2100, other things equal.

Which is a very different claim.

Thank you for writing this, I've been putting off reading Halstead's report for the last three years so this summary was helpful for me!