The Importance of Focusing on Existential Risks

We assess problems by three criteria: importance, tractability and neglectedness. If you're the first person to work on a problem, you can probably have a lot more impact than if you're the hundredth person to arrive working on a problem. So we very often look for issues that we think are big in scale and can be solved, but that not many people are working on them. And this is basically why they end up being particularly important - because there's fewer people focusing their whole career on solving those problems.