“Is There Actually a Standard or Convincing Response to David Thorstad’s Criticisms of the Value of X-Risk Reduction and of Longtermism?” by David Mathers🔸

A while back (as I've just been reminded by a discussion on another thread), David Thorstad wrote a bunch of posts critiquing the idea that small reductions in extinction risk have very high value, because the expected number of people who will exist in the future is very high: https://reflectivealtruism.com/category/my-papers/mistakes-in-moral-mathematics/. The arguments are quite complicated, but the basic points are that the expected number of people in the future is much lower than longtermists estimate because:

-Longtermists tend to neglect the fact that even if your intervention blocks one extinction risk, there are others it might fail to block; surviving for billions (or more) of years likely requires driving extinction risk very low for a long period of time, and if we are not likely to survive that long, even conditional on longtermist interventions against one extinction risk succeeding, the value of preventing extinction (conditional on more happy [...]

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First published:
May 21st, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AwLZx5rfAvcRjt3FS/is-there-actually-a-standard-or-convincing-response-to-david

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.