Yeah, I also agree that it's problematic that longtermism directs a uniquely high proportion of resources towards individuals working on the cause rather than the cause itself. That said, it seems like EA is, in general, a lot more talent-constrained than funding-constrained so I imagine most cause areas also have the effect of always being able to draw more people in.

Thank you! Yeah, exactly, EAs think about trying to do good in a cost-effective way, but they don't do so at all costs. Before it was called EA, Toby Ord was envisioning something he called "positive ethics," where the idea was that we should try to make use of the positive things from utilitarianism (that it takes seriously the suffering of people far away and how we go about reducing it) but not having to include the negative things (like a narrow set of values and extreme demandingness.)

I also wonder about this. I'm excited to see where research in the field leads.

Yeah, to be fair, I do think that the broad trend argument is probably the strongest argument for longtermism. Like, it appears that humanity has continuously expanded and grown for the past 12,000 years. If this trend continues, then it makes sense to think that eventually we'll have the technology to start expanding into space.

Ah, thank you!

I'm glad you looked at it!

Thanks!

Yeah, I agree that it's important to get more information than merely "fear of pandemic."

If you haven't already, I'd recommend reading Abi Olvera's series on this. She argues that AI people think about virology completely differently than virology people do. From the perspective she offers, engineered pandemics seem a lot less concerning than the AI community makes them out to be.

The metabolic energy argument makes sense. It's unclear to me whether we should apply any kind of power law though since consciousness seems to be different in nature, as I view it as likely non-physical.

Three things:

1. I don't think we should take the enormous size of the future into account because I don't think we have sufficient knowledge about the future to have any good guesses on how large humanity will become or whether it will create a world that we would approve of. As such, I would measure the value of existential risk reduction much more conservatively, such as the number of humans over the next two hundred years who wouldn't be born.
2. I find the chance of an existential risk from biorisks to be extremely low (I.e. 10^-7). This is because I think that, for a biorisk to be an existential risk, I think that it would have to make the surface of the Earth unlivable for an extended period of time. Otherwise, a significant number of humans will survive and be able to continue civilization. I find this unlikely to occur because, even if this is technically possible, it would be extraordinarily difficult. (That said, I haven't looked into mirror bacteria.)
3. Even among people who are worried about engineered pandemics, virtually none of the are worried about existential risk. As such, if we're basing our view on other people's view, and (1) very few experts are concerned about engineered pandemics (2) very few of those experts are worried about existential risk (3) we have the prior that we should significantly discount fringe views because they're almost always wrong, then we can reasonably get to quite a low risk of engineered pandemics.

I definitely agree with the idea of doing a bit of a numbers game though. If the numbers suggest we should be really focused on biorisks over other concerns, I think it makes sense to allocate a lot of resources towards it.