CRS co-founder and researcher, Tobias Baumann, has appeared on the Sentientism Podcast for a discussion with host Jamie Woodhouse.
Avoiding the Worst Audiobook Available Now
CRS Co-Founder Tobias Baumann’s introduction to s-risks, Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe is now available as an audiobook.
Professionally voiced by Adrian Nelson, the full audio can be listened to on Audible or there is a free video version now available on the new CRS YouTube channel. [...]
Tobias Baumann Discusses S-Risks & Avoiding the Worst on FLI Podcast
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. [...]
New book on 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. [...]
S-risk impact distribution is double-tailed
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? [...]
On fat-tailed distributions and 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. [...]