Cause prioritisation Archives - Center for Reducing Suffering

S-risk impact distribution is double-tailed

Magnus Vinding — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 13:36:25 +0000

Summary Discussions about s-risks often rest on a single-tailed picture, focused on how much suffering human civilization could risk causing. But when we consider the bigger picture, including s-risks from alien civilizations, we see that human civilization’s expected impact on s-risks is in fact double-tailed. This likely has significant implications. For instance, it might mean […]

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On fat-tailed distributions and s-risks

Magnus Vinding — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 21:40:35 +0000

Summary It is sometimes suggested that since the severity of many kinds of moral catastrophes (e.g. wars and natural disasters) fall along a power-law distribution, efforts to reduce suffering should focus on “a few rare scenarios where things go very wrong”. While this argument appears quite plausible on its face, it is in fact a […]

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Longtermism and animal advocacy

Tobias Baumann — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 17:12:32 +0000

There is a common tendency among effective altruists to think of animal advocacy as having little value for improving the long-term future. Similarly, animal advocates often assume that longtermism has little relevance to their work. Yet this seems misguided: sufficient concern for nonhuman sentient beings is a key ingredient in how well the long-term future […]

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