It's great to have responses more thought out than one's original idea!
The people who would misunderstand existential risk, are you thinking it's better to leave them in the dark as long as possible so as to not disturb the early existential risk movement, or that they will be likelier to accept existential risk once there is more academic study? Or both? The downside of course is that without publicity you will have fewer resources and brains on the problem.
I agree it is best not to mention far future stuff. People are already familiar with nuclear war, epidemics and AI-trouble(with Gates, Hawking and Musk stating their concern), so existential risk itself isn't really that unfamiliar.
For the part about people just seeing the title and move on: you can have a suitably vague title, but even if not, what conclusions can they possibly draw from just a title? I don't think people remember skimming over one.
I have no idea what those search terms mean, but it sounds like a good idea. Perhaps you should run such a campaign?
I'm arguing "both", but mainly that we don't need those people who would misunderstand or misrepresent X-risk. People react against things they disagree with much more strongly than they react in favor of things they agree with. Consider 3 social movements:
1) a movement with 1000 reasonable-sounding people and 1 crazy sounding person.
2) a movement with 1000 reasonable-sounding people, 500 crazy sounding people
I'm arguing that movement 2 will grow more slowly than 1, and will never become anywhere near as large. This is because new members will be...
Has anyone tried advertising existential risk?
Bostroms "End of Humanity" talk for instance.
It costs about 0.2 $ per view for a video ad on YouTube, so if 0.2% of viewers give an average of 100 $ it would break even. Hopefully people would give more than that.
You can target ads to groups likely to give much by the way, like the highly educated.
I posted this suggestion in the open thread as well, before I had the karma to make a thread. That okay?