Facing Up to the Worst

11.12.2025
Posted in s-risks, Uncategorized.

Most efforts to reduce suffering focus on helping individuals alive today. This is understandable, given the tragedies that currently exist. Many millions of people endure immense suffering due to poverty, wars, disasters, chronic pain, depression, and so on. On an even greater scale, tens of billions of animals live and die miserably in factory farms built to facilitate their mass exploitation and abuse. Beyond human civilisation, there are billions upon billions of wild animals who suffer serious harms.

But what about the possibility of a future moral catastrophe? What if such tragedies could potentially take place on an even larger scale? And what can we do now to prevent that from happening? [...] 

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Tobias Baumann Discusses S-Risks & Avoiding the Worst on FLI Podcast

15.03.2023
Posted in s-risks, Suffering-Focused Ethics.

Center for Reducing Suffering Researcher and Co-Founder Tobias Baumann has appeared on the Future of Life Institute podcast to discuss S-Risks (risks of astronomical future suffering), suffering-focused ethics, and his book Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe.

In the first part of a wide-ranging conversation with the podcast’s host Gus Docker, Tobias explained what S-Risks are and discussed some of the challenges associated with reducing suffering now and in the far-future. [...] 

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New book on s-risks

04.11.2022
Posted in s-risks.

I have just published my new book on s-risks, titled Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe. You can find it on Amazon, read the PDF version, or listen to a provisional audio version.

The book is primarily aimed at longtermist effective altruists. I wrote it because I feel that s-risk prevention is a somewhat neglected priority area in the community, and because a single, comprehensive introduction to s-risks did not yet exist. My hope is that a coherent introduction will help to strengthen interest in the topic and spark further work. [...] 

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S-risk impact distribution is double-tailed

19.02.2021 &
Posted in Cause prioritisation, Cooperation, s-risks. Tagged .

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 that we should try to pursue interventions that are robust across both tails, and it tentatively suggests that, for a wide range of impartial value systems, it is safest to focus mostly on improving the quality of our future.

Introduction

What is the distribution of future expected suffering caused by human civilization? [...] 

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On fat-tailed distributions and s-risks

25.11.2020
Posted in Cause prioritisation, s-risks.

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 lot less obvious than it seems at first sight. Specifically, a fat-tailed distribution need not imply that a single or even a few sources of suffering account for most future suffering in expectation, let alone that we should mostly prioritize a single or a few sources of suffering.

Introduction

In his post Is most expected suffering due to worst-case outcomes?, Tobias Baumann explores how skewed the distribution of future sources of suffering might be. His conclusion, in short, is that worst-case outcomes may well dominate, but that it is unclear to what degree we should expect future suffering to be concentrated in worst-case outcomes. [...] 

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