EA - Beyond Simple Existential Risk: Survival in a Complex Interconnected World by Gideon Futerman

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Beyond Simple Existential Risk: Survival in a Complex Interconnected World, published by Gideon Futerman on November 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is the script of a talk I gave at EAGx Rotterdam, with some citations and references linked throughout. I lay out the argument challenging the relatively narrow focus EA has in existential risk studies, and in favour of more methodological pluralism. This isn't a finalised thesis, and nor should it be taken as anything except a conversation starter. I hope to follow this up with more rigorous work exploring the questions I pose over the next few years, and hope other do too, but I thought to post the script to give everyone an opportunity to see what was said. Note, however, the tone of this is obviously the tone of a speech, not as much of a forum post. I hope to link the video when its up. Mostly, however, this is really synthesising the work of others; very little of this is my own original thought. If people are interested in talking to me about this, please DM me on here.Existential Risk Studies; the interdisciplinary “science” of studying existential and global catastrophic risk. So, what is the object of our study? There are many definitions of Existential Risk, including an irrecoverable loss of humanity's potential or a major loss of the expected value of the future, both of these from essentially a transhumanist perspective. In this talk, however, I will be using Existential Risk in the broadest sense, taking my definition from Beard et al 2020, with Existential Risk being risk that may result in the very worst catastrophes “encompassing human extinction, civilizational collapse and any major catastrophe commonly associated with these things.”X-Risk is a risk, not an event. It is defined therefore by potentiality, and thus is inherently uncertain. We can thus clearly distinguish between different global and existential catastrophes (nuclear winters, pandemics) and drivers of existential risk, and there are no one to one mapping of these. The IPCC commonly, and helpfully, splits drivers of risk into hazards, vulnerabilities, exposures, and responses, and through this lens, it is clear that risk isn’t something exogenous, but is reliant on decision making and governance failures, even if that failure is merely a failure of response.The thesis I present here is not original, and draws on the work of a variety of thinkers, although I accept full blame for things that may be wrong. I will argue there are two different paradigms of studying X-Risk: a simple paradigm and a complex paradigm. I will argue that EA unfairly neglects the complex paradigm, and that this is dangerous if we want to have a complete understanding of X-Risk to be able to combat it. I am not suggesting the simple paradigm is “wrong”; but that alone it currently doesn’t and never truly can, capture the full picture of X-Risk. I think the differences in the two paradigms of existential risk are diverse, with some of the differences being “intellectual” due to fundamentally different assumptions about the nature of the world we live in, and some are “cultural” which is more contingent on which thinkers works gain prominence.I won’t really try and distinguish between these differences too hard, as I think this will make everything a bit too complicated. This presentation is merely a start, a challenge to the status quo, not asking for it to be torn down, but arguing for more epistemic and methodological pluralism. This call for pluralism is the core of my argument.The “simple” paradigm of existential risk is at present dominant in EA-circles. It tends to assume that the best way to combat X-Risk is identify the most important hazards, find out the most tractable and neglected solutions to those, and work on that. It often takes a ...