Most of the people who I know are not in favor of near-term overt focus on existential risk reduction. I don’t know whether this is because I have implicit knowledge that they don’t have, because they have implicit knowledge that I don’t have or because they’re motivated to be opposed to such near-term overt focus for reasons unrelated to global welfare. I lean toward thinking that the situation is some combination of the latter two of the three.
I think you would normally expect genuine concern about saving the world to be rare among evolved creatures. It is a problem that our ancestor’s rarely faced. It is also someone else’s problem.
Saving the world may make sense as a superstimulus to the human desire for a grand cause, though. Humans are attracted to such causes for reasons that appear to be primarily to do with social signalling. I think a signalling perspective makes reasonable sense of the variation in the extent to which people are interested in the area.
I think you would normally expect genuine concern about saving the world to be rare among evolved creatures. It is a problem that our ancestor’s rarely faced. It is also someone else’s problem.
Saving the world may make sense as a superstimulus to the human desire for a grand cause, though. Humans are attracted to such causes for reasons that appear to be primarily to do with social signalling. I think a signalling perspective makes reasonable sense of the variation in the extent to which people are interested in the area.