Carl, I like your suggestion to establish a prize for avoing mega-disasters and existential risks. (Meanwhile, I’m going to send Petrov a small donation.)
One of the bias issues this raises is the possibility of bias in how we allocate our attention. One could think of an attention allocation as if it involved an implicit belief that “this is worth attending to”. Then we can think of how this kind of implicit belief might be biased. For example, in the ancestral environment nobody was worth attending to because they had prevented millions of deaths by refraining from pressing a button; so maybe we are biased in the direction of allocating too little attention to such acts… Some future post might explore this in more detail.
Carl, I like your suggestion to establish a prize for avoing mega-disasters and existential risks. (Meanwhile, I’m going to send Petrov a small donation.)
One of the bias issues this raises is the possibility of bias in how we allocate our attention. One could think of an attention allocation as if it involved an implicit belief that “this is worth attending to”. Then we can think of how this kind of implicit belief might be biased. For example, in the ancestral environment nobody was worth attending to because they had prevented millions of deaths by refraining from pressing a button; so maybe we are biased in the direction of allocating too little attention to such acts… Some future post might explore this in more detail.
Eliezer, thanks for your post.