Another problem I want to mention: getting “established scientific experts” to take existential risk seriously is impeded by the fact that academia has no mechanism for assessing value of information. Academics are rewarded based upon how true the info they generate is, not on a combination of how true it is and how important it is. So we have more papers on dung beetle reproduction than on human extinction.
Furthermore, academia is utterly paranoid about not causing the utterly dumb public to mistrust it, so it has to adhere to the public’s standards about needing real physical proof for outlandish claims, rather than reasoning probabilistically about them using long, complex and somewhat subjective arguments.
Lastly, to complicate things even more, academia is chaos. Nobody is in charge. It is inherently conservative and slow to change, even when there is real physical proff that it is mistaken—most bad theories are buried along with their owners years after they have been shown to have a miniscule bayesian probability.
Now there are a few academics at Oxford University doing x-risk research. But to grow that community to 1000′s of researchers is going to be either very expensive and quite slow, or free and glacially slow.
Another problem I want to mention: getting “established scientific experts” to take existential risk seriously is impeded by the fact that academia has no mechanism for assessing value of information. Academics are rewarded based upon how true the info they generate is, not on a combination of how true it is and how important it is. So we have more papers on dung beetle reproduction than on human extinction.
Furthermore, academia is utterly paranoid about not causing the utterly dumb public to mistrust it, so it has to adhere to the public’s standards about needing real physical proof for outlandish claims, rather than reasoning probabilistically about them using long, complex and somewhat subjective arguments.
Lastly, to complicate things even more, academia is chaos. Nobody is in charge. It is inherently conservative and slow to change, even when there is real physical proff that it is mistaken—most bad theories are buried along with their owners years after they have been shown to have a miniscule bayesian probability.
Now there are a few academics at Oxford University doing x-risk research. But to grow that community to 1000′s of researchers is going to be either very expensive and quite slow, or free and glacially slow.