Three mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk
David Thorstad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 7-2023, forthcoming in Ethics
Longtermists have recently argued that it is overwhelmingly important to do what we can to mitigate existential risks to humanity. I consider three mistakes that are often made in calculating the value of existential risk mitigation: focusing on cumulative risk rather than period risk; ignoring background risk; and neglecting population dynamics. I show how correcting these mistakes pushes the value of existential risk mitigation substantially below leading estimates, potentially low enough to threaten the normative case for existential risk mitigation. I use this discussion to draw four positive lessons for the study of existential risk: the importance of treating existential risk as an intergenerational coordination problem; a surprising dialectical flip in the relevance of background risk levels to the case for existential risk mitigation; renewed importance of population dynamics, including the dynamics of digital minds; and a novel form of the cluelessness challenge to longtermism.
Other working papers
Can an evidentialist be risk-averse? – Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Two key questions of normative decision theory are: 1) whether the probabilities relevant to decision theory are evidential or causal; and 2) whether agents should be risk-neutral, and so maximise the expected value of the outcome, or instead risk-averse (or otherwise sensitive to risk). These questions are typically thought to be independent – that our answer to one bears little on our answer to the other. …
Longtermist institutional reform – Tyler M. John (Rutgers University) and William MacAskill (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
There is a vast number of people who will live in the centuries and millennia to come. Even if homo sapiens survives merely as long as a typical species, we have hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us. And our future potential could be much greater than that again: it will be hundreds of millions of years until the Earth is sterilized by the expansion of the Sun, and many trillions of years before the last stars die out. …
Meaning, medicine and merit – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Given the inevitability of scarcity, should public institutions ration healthcare resources so as to prioritize those who contribute more to society? Intuitively, we may feel that this would be somehow inegalitarian. I argue that the egalitarian objection to prioritizing treatment on the basis of patients’ usefulness to others is best thought…