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gjm comments on A critique of effective altruism - Less Wrong
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This is my main problem with the idea that we should have a far-future focus. I just have no idea at all how to get a grip on far-future predictions, and so it seems absurdly unlikely that my predictions will be correct, making it therefore also absurdly unlikely that I (or even most people) will be able to make a difference except in a very few cases by pure luck.
It seems easier to evaluate "is trying to be relevant" than "has XYZ important long-term consequence". For instance, investing in asteroid detection may not be the most important long-term thing, but it's at least plausibly related to x-risk (and would be confusing for it to be actively harmful), whereas third-world health has confusing long-term repercussions, but is definitely not directly related to x-risk.
Even if third world health is important to x-risk through secondary effects, it still seems that any effect on x-risk it has will necessarily be mediated through some object-level x-risk intervention. It doesn't matter what started the chain of events that leads to decreased asteroid risk, but it has to go through some relatively small family of interventions that deal with it on an object level.
Insofar as current society isn't involved in object-level x-risk interventions, it seems weird to think that bringing third-world living standards closer to our own will lead to more involvement in x-risk intervention without there being some sort of wider-spread availability of object-level x-risk intervention.
(Not that I care particularly much about asteroids, but it's a particularly easy example to think about.)
Yes, most x-risk reduction will have to come about through explicit work on x-risk reduction at some point.
It could still easily be the case that working on improving the living standards of the world's poorest people is an effective route to x-risk reduction. In practice, scarcely anyone is going to work on x-risk as long as their own life is precarious, and scarcely anyone is going to do useful work on x-risk reduction if they are living somewhere that doesn't have the resources to do serious scientific or engineering work. So interventions that aim, in the longish term, to bring the whole world up to something like current affluent-West living standards seem likely to produce a much larger population of people who might be interested in reducing x-risk and better conditions for them to do such work in.
See the point about why its weird to think that new affluent populations will work more on x-risk if current affluent populations don't do so at a particularly high rate.
Also, it's easier to move specific people to a country than it is to raise the standard of living of entire countries. If you're doing raising-living-standards as an x-risk strategy, are you sure you shouldn't be spending money on locating people interested in x-risk instead?
I quite agree that if all you care about is x-risk then trying to address that by raising everyone's living standards is using a nuclear warhead to crack a nut. I was addressing the following thing you said:
which I think is clearly wrong: bringing everyone's living standards up will increase the pool of people who have the motive and opportunity to work on x-risk, and since the number of people working on x-risk isn't zero that number will likely increase (say, by 2x) if the size of that pool increases (say, by 2x) as a result of making everyone better off.
I wasn't claiming (because it would be nuts) that the way to get the most x-risk bang per buck is to reduce poverty and disease in the poorest parts of the world. It surely isn't, by a large factor. But you seemed to be saying it would have zero x-risk impact (beyond effects like reducing pandemic risk by reducing overall disease levels). That's all I was disagreeing with.