Pablo_Stafforini comments on A personal history of involvement with effective altruism - Less Wrong
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In the past, when I expressed worries about the difficulties associated to far-future meme-spreading, which you favor as an alternative to extinction-risk reduction, you said you thought there was a significant chance of a singleton-dominated future. Such a singleton, you argued, would provide the necessary causal stability for targeted meme-spreading to successfully influence our distant descendants. But now you seem to be implying that, other things equal, far-future meme-spreading is several orders of magnitude less likely to succeed than short-term interventions (including interventions aimed at reducing near-term risk of extinction, which plausibly represents a significant fraction of total extinction risk). I find these two views hard to reconcile.