General-purpose and agentic systems are inevitably going to outcompete other systems

There's some of this: see this Gwern post for the classic argument.

People are trying to do this, and I just haven't noticed

LLMs seem by default less agentic than the previous end-to-end RL paradigm. Maybe the rise of LLMs was an exercise in deliberate differential technological development. I'm not sure about this, it is personal speculation.

Left-progressive online people seem to be consolidating on an anti-AI position; but mostly derived from resistance to the presumed economic impacts from AI art, badness-by-association inherited from the big tech / tech billionaires / 'techbro' cluster, and on the academic side from concern about algorithmic bias and the like. However, they seem to be failing at extrapolation. "AI bad" gets misgeneralized into skepticism about current and future AI capabilities.

Left-marxist people seem to be thinking a bit more clearly about this (ie extrapolating, applying any economic model at all, looking a bit into the tech). See an example here, or a summary here. However, the labs are based in the US, a country where associating with marxists is a very bad idea if you want your policies to get implemented.

These two leftist stances are mostly orthogonal to concerns about AI x-risk and catastrophic misuse. However, a lot of activists believe that the public's attention is zero-sum. I suspect that is the main reason coalition-building with the preceding two groups has not happened much. However, I think it is still possible.

About the American right: some actors have largely succeeded in marrying China-hawkism with AI-boosterism. I expect this association to be very sticky, but it may be counteracted by reactionary impulses coming from spooked cultural conservatives.

Weird off-the-cuff question but maybe intentionally inducing something like experimenter demand effects would be a worthwhile intervention? After figuring out a way of not making recipients feel cheated or patronized, of course.

Probably not, or to a much lesser extent.

I would expect those to be the same person if AI turns out to not be a huge deal, which for me is about 25% of futures.

While I agree that strong founder effects are likely to apply if SpaceX and/or NASA succeed in establishing a Mars colony, I expect that colony to be Earth-dependent for decades, and to be quite vulnerable to being superseded by other actors.

To put my model in more concrete terms: I expect whoever controls cislunar space in 2050 to have more potential for causal influence over the state of Mars in 2100 than whoever has put more people on Mars by 2040.

I think it would be a major win for animal welfare if the plant-based foods industry could transition soy-based products to low-isoflavone and execute a successful marketing campaign to quell concerns about phytoestrogens (without denigrating higher-isoflavone soy products).

I think it would be really hard (maybe even practically impossible) to market isoflavone-reduced products without hurting demand for non-isoflavone-reduced products as a side effect. 

If the plant-based food industry started producing and marketing isoflavone-reduced soy products, I am quite confident that it would counterfactually lower total demand for soy products in the short term, and I am very uncertain about the sign of impact over the long term.

Hi Juliana! Thank you for your response, it indeed answers my question quite clearly.

I love how thorough this post is. However, I'm not sure why you chose to research the production of vitamin D in an ASRS over other nutrients Pham et al. 2022 found would be deficient given adequate ASRS responses, such as vitamins E and K. ¿Are the effects of vitamin D deficiency worse, or maybe it is more feasible to produce than vitamins E and K?

However, endorsing this view likely requires fairly speculative claims about how existing risks will nearly disappear after the time of perils has ended.

A note on this: the first people to study the notion of existential risk in an academic setting (Bostrom, Ord, Sandberg, etc.) explicitly state in their work many of those assumptions.

They chiefly revolve around the eventual creation of advanced AI which would enable the automation of both surveillance and manufacturing; the industrialization of outer space, and eventually the interstellar expansion of Earth-originated civilization.

In other words: they assume that both

1. The creation of safe AGI is feasible.
2. Extremely robust existential security will follow, conditional on (1.).

Proposed mechanisms for (2.) include interstellar expansion and automated surveillance. 

Thus, the main crux on the value of working on longtermist interventions is the validity of assumptions (1.) and (2.). In my opinion, finding out how likely they are to be true or not is very important and quite neglected. I think that scrutinizing (2.). is both more neglected and more tractable than examining (1.), and I would love to see more work on it.