What is Technoprogressivism? - James Hughes
Posts
Peter Singer - Extinction Risk & Effective Altruism
Many Effective Altruists think a lot about the future, and there are questions of course in how much we should invest in trying to prevent small risks that we will become extinct. Another cognitive bias might be that we are not very good at accounting for small risks - we tend to dismiss them. We can't see the difference between a 1 in 1000 chance and a 1 in 100,000 or a 1 in 1,000,000 is all that important. But really when you think about it, if there is a lot at stake, there is a huge gain in reducing the chance of risk from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 1,000,000. Meaning it is only 1 thousandth as likely to occur... And if what we are concerned about is the future of our species, and if we do value the idea that there should be human beings in the future, if you like the human story will continue, and that we hope there will be progress and that we will solve the problems that we are immediately faced with, and that eventually we will have potentially very large numbers of people, perh