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JonahSinick comments on Why I'm Skeptical About Unproven Causes (And You Should Be Too) - Less Wrong
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Why do you think that there's a bias against x-risk reduction in the broader world? I think that there's a pretty strong case for x-risk reduction being underprioritized from a utilitarian perspective. But I don't think that I've seen compelling evidence that it's unappealing relative to a randomly chosen cause.
By "randomly chosen cause," do you mean something like "Randomly chosen among the charitable causes which have at least $500k devoted to them each year" or do you mean "Randomly chosen in the space of potential causes"?
The former.
Consider the total amount sent toward the generalized cause of a randomly chosen charity with a budget of at least $500K/year. I.e., not the Local Village Center for the Blind but humanity's total efforts to help the blind. Compare MIRI and FHI.
Agreed.
Search for 'million donation' on news.google.com, first two pages:
Every time I hear a dollar amount on the news, I cringe at realizing how pathetic spending on existential risks is by comparison.
I agree that x-risk reduction is a lot less popular than, e.g., caring for the blind, but it doesn't follow that people are strongly biased against caring about x-risk reduction. Note that x-risk reduction is a relatively new cause (because the issues didn't become clear until relatively recently), whereas people have been caring for the blind for millennia. Under the circumstances, one would expect much more attention to go toward caring for the blind independently of whether people were biased against x-risk reduction specifically. I expect x-risk reduction to become more popular over time.