It’s mostly like, ‘well the future of life institute has studied this problem, they don’t seem to think we can disregard it as a contributor to existential risk, and they seem like the most reasonable authority to trust here’.
Woah, yeah, just let it be known that I don’t think you should trust FLI with this kind of stuff. They seem to pretty transparently have messed up prioritization in this way a few times, trying to be more appealing to a broader audience, by emphasizing hypotheses that seem intuitively compelling but not actually very likely to be true, with the explicit aim of broadening their reach, as far as I can tell.
Of course, you are free to make your own judgement, but since I think there is a good chance others look at FLI and might think that I (and others) endorse their judgement here since they are kind of affiliated with the community, I want to make it clear that I very concretely don’t endorse their judgement on topics like this.
Woah, yeah, just let it be known that I don’t think you should trust FLI with this kind of stuff. They seem to pretty transparently have messed up prioritization in this way a few times, trying to be more appealing to a broader audience, by emphasizing hypotheses that seem intuitively compelling but not actually very likely to be true, with the explicit aim of broadening their reach, as far as I can tell.
Of course, you are free to make your own judgement, but since I think there is a good chance others look at FLI and might think that I (and others) endorse their judgement here since they are kind of affiliated with the community, I want to make it clear that I very concretely don’t endorse their judgement on topics like this.