An important aspect is that people disagree about which (if any) X-risks are real.
That makes it quite different from the usual scenario, where people agree that situation sucks but each of them has individual incentives to contribute to making it worse. Such situation allows solutions like collectively agreeing to impose a penalty on people who make things worse (thus changing their individual incentive gradient). But if people disagree, imposing the penalty is politically not possible.
The boundary between disagreement about whether something is real and different preferences about the costs of mitigation are, alas, somewhat porous. E.g., when there was debate about the dangers of smoking, you were much less likely to think there was a lot of danger if you were either a smoker or an employee of a tobacco company than if you were neither of those things.
I don’t know how strong this effect is in the domain of existential risk; it might depend on what things one counts as existential risks.
An important aspect is that people disagree about which (if any) X-risks are real.
That makes it quite different from the usual scenario, where people agree that situation sucks but each of them has individual incentives to contribute to making it worse. Such situation allows solutions like collectively agreeing to impose a penalty on people who make things worse (thus changing their individual incentive gradient). But if people disagree, imposing the penalty is politically not possible.
The boundary between disagreement about whether something is real and different preferences about the costs of mitigation are, alas, somewhat porous. E.g., when there was debate about the dangers of smoking, you were much less likely to think there was a lot of danger if you were either a smoker or an employee of a tobacco company than if you were neither of those things.
I don’t know how strong this effect is in the domain of existential risk; it might depend on what things one counts as existential risks.