New x-risk organizations - Less Wrong

New x-risk organizations

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 03:52:05 +1100

Submitted by lukeprog • 16 votes • 3 comments

Of course: FHI, FutureTech, the Singularity Institute, and Leverage Research.

New: the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (Seth Baum & Tony Barrett).

I've also heard that the following people are working to set up x-risk departments/organizations:

Huw Price at Cambridge

Newton Howard at MIT

Jeffrey Epstein

3 comments

Giles on New x-risk organizations

2012-01-22T16:14:38.617310+11:00

Awesome.

A couple of points:

Any idea how these groups will coordinate with each other?
Out of the orgs that accept donations, who should I give money to?

I could believe that the answer to the second question is "it doesn't really matter at this point", but I'd like to hear a convincing argument. This SIAI vs. FHI post points very weakly in the direction of FHI.

An interesting twist is that the people best placed to answer "which orgs/interventions give best expected utility per marginal dollar" are probably the very same people that are working in these organizations.

I also still need to fully extinguish the hypothesis "these orgs are crazy and it's the rest of society that's sane (in terms of priorities)", before I give too much of my money away.

lukeprog on New x-risk organizations

2012-01-22T16:19:15.214701+11:00

My guess is that you can purchase the most x-risk reduction by donating to either SI or FHI; the other orgs either don't exist yet or don't have much of a track record yet.

SI and FHI already coordinate with each other quite a bit. Leverage Research is composed of people who have significant contact with SI or were past visiting fellows/employees of SI.

For now, I won't say more than that.

Giles on New x-risk organizations

2012-01-22T16:49:00.556316+11:00

Thanks - that fits with the general impression I've got.

I somehow missed the post on Leverage Research. I'd heard of them before but was put off by Connection Theory and all those flowcharts.