“Every point of intervention” by TsviBT

Crosspost from my blog.

Events are already set for catastrophe, they must be steered along some course they would not naturally go. [...]

Are you confident in the success of this plan? No, that is the wrong question, we are not limited to a single plan. Are you certain that this plan will be enough, that we need essay no others? Asked in such fashion, the question answers itself. The path leading to disaster must be averted along every possible point of intervention.

— Professor Quirrell (competent, despite other issues), HPMOR chapter 92

This post is a quickly-written service-post, an attempt to lay out a basic point of strategy regarding decreasing existential risk from AGI.

Keeping intervention points in mind

By default, AGI will kill everyone. The group of people trying to stop that from happening should seriously attend to all plausible points of intervention.

In this context, a point of intervention is some element of the world—such as an event, a research group, or an ideology—which could substantively contribute to leading humanity to extinction through AGI. A point of intervention isn't an action; it doesn't say what to do. It just [...]

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Outline:

(00:57) Keeping intervention points in mind

(01:37) The vague elephant

(02:19) Example: France

(03:03) Full-court press

(04:26) Multi-stage fal... opportunity!

(05:15) Brief tangent about a conjunction of disjunctions

(06:43) Varied interventions help

(07:17) Sources of correlation indicate deeper intervention points

(08:13) Some takeaways

(10:42) Some biases potentially affecting strategy porfolio balancing

(12:44) A terse opinionated partial list of maybe-underattended points of intervention

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First published:
December 8th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CseMTXtQHynGR8S5k/every-point-of-intervention

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.