Reading your suggested required readings, S-risks: An introduction and S-risk FAQ, I don't get a clear sense of why s-risks are plausible or why the suggested interventions are useful. I like S-risks: Why they are the worst existential risks, and how to prevent them (EAG Boston 2017) a bit more for illustrating why they are plausible, and I've added it as an optional reading in the uni chapter intro program I'm running. Unfortunately, it doesn't give more than a cursory overview of how s-risks could be reduced. I'd be hesitant about making an s-risk reading a required reading though since I don't know about high-quality intro-level material about s-risks for participants to learn more. I also expect that s-risks might provoke a lot of discussion, so we would want to make sure discussion facilitators have the resources to be well-informed about the issues. Right now, I wouldn't feel confident discussing s-risks with intro program participants.

By the way, if you want to make your suggestions as easy as possible to add it to the curriculum, you should also suggest discussion questions that facilitators can ask about the topic.

(Note: I'm not in charge of the EA Virtual Programs syllabus.)

Thanks for this! I'm not sure what I think about this--a few things might make it challenging/costly to introduce s-risks into the Introductory EA syllabi:

1. The Introductory EA Program is partly meant to build participants' sustained interest in EA, and the very speculative / weird nature of s-risks could detract from that (by being off-puttingly out-there to people who--like most program participants--have only spent a handful of hours learning about / reflecting on relevant topics).
   1. One might wonder: if this is an issue, why introduce x-risks? I'd guess x-risks are more accessible/intuitive to people, given common discourse about climate change and our recent experiences with pandemics. And the Introductory EA Program doesn't dive into, say, the details of AI risk arguments, for a mix of this reason and the following reason.
2. The Introductory EA Program aims to have an amount of material that's short enough (a) for many people who are busy and not totally dedicated to EA to want to apply / not drop out, and (b) for many participants to actually do the core readings (in the absence of serious external incentives). Adding core/required readings in general is costly, because it detracts from these things.
3. Careful thinking about s-risks seems to lead people to seek cooperative ways to mitigate s-risks, which seems great. The Introductory EA Program is too rushed and shallow to promote much thorough thinking, raising risks that participants could take naive/reckless approaches to reducing s-risks (which seems terrible, including for the reputation of the s-risk community).

Still, your basic point about the importance of diversifying the ideas EAs are introduced to seems right. (This is different from the importance of diversifying the views of people in longtermism--the value of that depends on the correctness of the views that are currently most prominent.) So I'd be tentatively optimistic about some approaches like these:

• Adding more topics to the further readings sections.
• Adding a week where people choose readings out of a wide range of topics.
• Having sections on s-risks in the In-Depth EA Program (if I remember correctly, this is already the case, which seems appropriate because points 1-3 above are all much less applicable to the in-depth program.)

(Also, if anyone is interested in suggesting changes to the Introductory EA Program, you might find it useful to make shovel-ready recommendations, e.g. proposing a specific reading or collection of readings for a week, because organizers are fairly time-constrained. Although broader suggestions/discussion also seems valuable.)

The EA Handbook follows a similar path to the introductory program syllabus. If you have specific suggestions for readings on S-risk (or anything else!), I'm always happy to hear them. I see the Handbook as a work in progress, and make small adjustments quite often.