I can’t tell whether you’re arguing “some small subset of EAs/rationalists are in a great position to fight COVID-19 and they should do so” vs. “if an arbitrary EA/rationalist wants to fight COVID-19, they shouldn’t worry that they are doing less because they aren’t reducing x-risk” vs. “COVID-19 is such an opportunity for x-risk reduction that nearly all longtermists should be focusing on it now”.
I agree with the first (in particular for people who work on forecasting / “meta” stuff), but not with the latter two. To the extent you’re arguing for the latter two, I don’t find the arguments very convincing, because they aren’t comparing against counterfactuals. Taking each point in turn:
Training Ourselves
I agree that COVID-19 is particularly good for training the general bucket of forecasting / applied epistemology / scenario-planning.
However, for coordination, persuasive argumentation, networking, and project management, I don’t see why COVID-19 is particularly better than other projects you could be working on. For example, I think I practiced all of those skills by organizing a local EA group; it also seems like ~any project that involves advocacy would likely require / train all of these skills.
Forging alliances
Presumably for most goals there are more direct ways to forge alliances than by working on COVID-19. E.g. you mentioned AI safety—if I wanted to forge alliances with people at OSTP, I’d focus on current AI issues like interpretability and fairness.
Establishing credibility
I agree that this is important for the more “meta” parts of x-risk, such as forecasting. But for those of us who are working closer to the object level (e.g. technical AI safety, nuclear war, climate change), I don’t really see how this is going to help establish credibility that’s used in the future.
Growing the global risk movement
You talk about field-building here, which in fact seems like an important thing to be doing, but seems basically unrelated to the COVID-19 response. I’d guess that field-building has ~zero effect on how many people die from COVID-19 this year.
Creating XRisk infrastructure
Agreed that this is good.
Overall take: It does seem like anyone working on “meta” approaches to x-risk reduction probably should be thinking very seriously about how they can contribute to the COVID-19 response, but I’d guess that for most other longtermists the argument “it is just a distraction” is basically right.
I’d probably change my mind if I thought that these other longtermists could actually make a large impact on the COVID-19 response, but that seems quite unlikely to me.
Copied from the EA Forum:
I can’t tell whether you’re arguing “some small subset of EAs/rationalists are in a great position to fight COVID-19 and they should do so” vs. “if an arbitrary EA/rationalist wants to fight COVID-19, they shouldn’t worry that they are doing less because they aren’t reducing x-risk” vs. “COVID-19 is such an opportunity for x-risk reduction that nearly all longtermists should be focusing on it now”.
I agree with the first (in particular for people who work on forecasting / “meta” stuff), but not with the latter two. To the extent you’re arguing for the latter two, I don’t find the arguments very convincing, because they aren’t comparing against counterfactuals. Taking each point in turn:
I agree that COVID-19 is particularly good for training the general bucket of forecasting / applied epistemology / scenario-planning.
However, for coordination, persuasive argumentation, networking, and project management, I don’t see why COVID-19 is particularly better than other projects you could be working on. For example, I think I practiced all of those skills by organizing a local EA group; it also seems like ~any project that involves advocacy would likely require / train all of these skills.
Presumably for most goals there are more direct ways to forge alliances than by working on COVID-19. E.g. you mentioned AI safety—if I wanted to forge alliances with people at OSTP, I’d focus on current AI issues like interpretability and fairness.
I agree that this is important for the more “meta” parts of x-risk, such as forecasting. But for those of us who are working closer to the object level (e.g. technical AI safety, nuclear war, climate change), I don’t really see how this is going to help establish credibility that’s used in the future.
You talk about field-building here, which in fact seems like an important thing to be doing, but seems basically unrelated to the COVID-19 response. I’d guess that field-building has ~zero effect on how many people die from COVID-19 this year.
Agreed that this is good.
Overall take: It does seem like anyone working on “meta” approaches to x-risk reduction probably should be thinking very seriously about how they can contribute to the COVID-19 response, but I’d guess that for most other longtermists the argument “it is just a distraction” is basically right.
I’d probably change my mind if I thought that these other longtermists could actually make a large impact on the COVID-19 response, but that seems quite unlikely to me.