This is a linkpost for https://foundational-research.org/s-risks-talk-eag-boston-2017/
Wow!
Many thanks for posting that link. It's clearly the most important thing I've read on LW in a long time, I'd upvote it ten times if I could.
It seems like an s-risk outcome (even one that keeps some people happy) could be more than a million times worse than an x-risk outcome, while not being a million times more improbable, so focusing on s-risks is correct. The argument wasn't as clear to me before. Does anyone have good counterarguments? Why shouldn't we all focus on s-risk from now on?
(Unsong had a plot point where Peter Singer declared that the most important task for effective altruists was to destroy Hell. Big props to Scott for seeing it before the rest of us.)
I think the reason why cousin_it's comment is upvoted so much is that a lot of people (including me) weren't really aware of S-risks or how bad they could be. It's one thing to just make a throwaway line that S-risks could be worse, but it's another thing entirely to put together a convincing argument.
Similar ideas have been in other articles, but they've framed it in terms of energy-efficiency while defining weird words such as computronium or the two-envelopes problem, which make it much less clear. I don't think I saw the links for either of those artic...