It's sorta like collaborating with a human that you don't trust, except you can conduct as many experiments as you want to improve your understanding of their biases, and of how they respond to different ways of interacting. AI tells me I'm wrong all the time, but it takes work to make sure that stays the case.

I reminds me a little of a class where the teacher asked us how to get truly random results from a coin that may or may not be biased, with unknown bias. The answer is that even if H and T are not equiprobable, HT/TH, or HHTT/TTHH, or HHHHTTTT/TTTTHHHH, etc. are. You don't get as many random bits as you would from a truly fair coin, and the less fair the coin the more you lose, but it doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't use what you can get. You just need to approach it differently and with eyes open. AI as it currently exists can give you useful information/feedback, but using it well requires skill and care and is a constantly moving target.

Ok, fair, 'prove' is a strong word and we can have different opinions on both the probability estimate of climate-induced-extinction and the threshold for that probability being low enough to count as 'not an x-risk.'

In order to actually wipe out all humanity, such that there were no residual populations able to hang on long enough to recover and rebuild, the climate would need to change faster than any human population, anywhere in the world, could adapt or invent solutions. Even if life sucked for a decade or a millennium, or if there were only 10k of us left in a few enclaves worldwide, that could still avert extinction. Considering the range of environments humans can survive in today, that's an extremely high bar. Considering the pace of technological advance we have been ability to achieve under duress, it's even higher. Climate change could cause catastrophic events that are extremely disruptive to huge numbers of people. It could, over the scale of decades, make it much harder for the world to support the current population of humans using current technology. It could force mass migrations over decades of large numbers of people. But IMO, none of those are enough to wipe out all of humanity faster than we could develop solutions for some subset of us to survive.

It could, however, trigger resource wars that increase other forms of x-risk, like nuclear and biological warfare. I wasn't counting that as climate change x-risk in my accounting, not sure if you were.

If we were, no one ever told us, and no one I knew ever did. If nothing else, to do so, we would have had to skip lunch entirely, because we weren't allowed to be in the halls without a pass signed by a teacher, and there would not have been anyone in the cafeteria to write one.

Admittedly, after 9th grade I stopped taking lunch so I could fit in an extra elective. Also in 9th grade, we had 4 instances of students calling in fake bomb threats in order to get out of class, and ended up with much stricter rules about who could be where, when, than had been the case prior. For example, outside of lunch periods, all but one bathroom in the whole high school was locked, so if you asked for a pass to go use it, then depending on where you were it might mean missing close to 10 minutes of class just to get there and back, or to find out which one was open that day. And they banned teachers from giving out more than one pass at a time, for any reason.

The school essay is designed to be writable within the time constraints of an in-class exam, and to let teachers grade a whole five class's worth of essays fast enough to get them back long enough before the next exam.

As a kid I was always confused about why schools had libraries. In elementary school you got sent to them once a week and were allowed to take out one book, and the librarian taught how to use a library. Otherwise, there was never a time you could actually go to them and do research on anything. (Ok, except for once in second grade, when I corrected the teacher on something and she sent me to the library to find a book that proved it). The buses didn't arrive early or leave late enough to go outside class time, and the library wasn't open to visit that way anyway. In high school if you had a study hall it was held in the cafeteria or auditorium, and they did not grant people passes to go to the library, either. As a teen I decided school libraries existed so that adults could fight about what books would be in it, not realizing no one ever saw any of them. As an adult I decided it was pure cargo cult mimicry of what an institution trying to educate people would be. I also found it strange that they had a full-time librarian on staff but in 2004 we still used history books where the maps were from before the reunification of Germany.

Jabberwocky is my favorite poem. People who know me well hear that and are completely unsurprised :-)

I am locating the meaning outside the statement, rather than applying validity or invalidity to the statement itself. 

This is critical, I think. In daily life I make up words all the time, and the people around me with whom I share the necessary context and are also native English speakers have no trouble intuiting what they mean.

It’s a welcome start. The actual call to action is disappointingly content-free, as these things usually are

Potentially is this how a politician signals, "Hey, please give me some useful information and good ideas for what to actually try to get done"?

That was, as far as I can tell, one strong downvote from me (-7, from a starting value of 2). As my comment above hopefully indicates, I did read the whole thing. I don't know if it was as fast as five minutes after posting, but this post happened to be second on the front page when I looked, so I read through it, downvoted, then commented. It's about 2200 words, which usually means anywhere from 5-10 minutes read time for me. I did reread it slower while commenting, as well, and the second readthrough did not cause me to change my downvote.

(1) Ok, fair enough, that wasn't clear to me on first read. I do think it's worth noting that he does, in fact, consider many other viewpoints before rejecting them, and gives clear explanations of his reasons for doing so, whether you agree or not. He also in many places discusses why he thinks introducing those other viewpoints does not actually help. Others in the community have since engaged with similar ideas from many other viewpoints.

(2) That conclusion does not follow from the premises. In particular, you have not considered the set of possible worlds where a higher coordination or power is attempting to increase x-risk or cause human extinction, something which is not exactly rare among human belief systems. As such, it is not clear to me in which direction this pushes the probability of human extinction. For example, human extinction or near-extinction happens twice in the Bible, multiple times in Norse and Greek mythology, cyclically in Buddhism and Hinduism, and some hard-to-determine fraction of the time in simulation hypotheses.

(3) This is not about science. It is about basic logic. There are two mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive possibilities. One is that everything, everywhere, without exception, throughout the universe, behaves in accordance with some set of physical laws. This is physicalism. The other is the very expansive category of "everything else." If anything within all of "everything else" is true, then there is somewhere in the universe that physicalism's central claim does not hold. If you find even one such place, then scientists will investigate and ultimately concede the point. Otherwise, what exactly is it that you (or whoever else) are claiming to believe, and how did you select that belief out of the expansive set of all possibilities?

(4) This is also not correct. It sounds like what you are describing, essentially, are local hidden variables, which are mostly ruled out by Bell's Theorem. There are known theories that get around this restriction, but as far as I know all of them look like strengthening the deterministic constraints on the behavior of all systems everywhere. They do not have anything to do with non-physicalist metaphysics. If you want to claim that the predictions of QM are coming from some non-physicalist metaphysical source, then technically I cannot rule that out, but you should realize this means that that source must be of such nature that it causes the universe to behave in extremely precise and mathematically consistent ways, which does not sound at all like what you want from this discussion. If anything, it sounds like a new law of physics.

(5) Sorry, I didn't mean to treat it as such. It's clear you are aware that x-risk is a thing worth caring about. I just thought it was worth highlighting that someone you cited, and a world leader in a category you cited, seem as though they are not presently on board with thinking that their philosophies or metaphysics reduce the probability of x-risk, or at least not enough to worry less about it.

Strongly downvoted, seems to not realize how deeply EY has engaged with and written about metaphysics, or at least not to engage with any of his relevant writings or those of the rest of the rationalist community over the last almost 20 years. 

Besides that, though: It's not clear to me how a non-physicalist metaphysics actually helps reduce x-risk, except to the extent that there is some probability of an outside force intervening in our physical cosmos. For one example among many, consciousness is not required to run physical simulations and identify physical systems with particular properties, or to control equipment that can build such systems, so its absence does not protect us from the consequences of badly-formulated requests made to such systems. How, precisely, do non-physical origins of conscious protect humanity from someone asking a non-conscious AI to model, optimize, build, and deploy a system that (unbeknownst to them) will sterilize the biosphere? Conscious intent is not required. And if some AI systems are conscious according to whatever is the correct metaphysics, how does that prevent them from having and pursuing goals incompatible with human survival? 

More fundamentally: If you want to argue against physicalism, there's a very simple, inarguable method that would prove it. All you need to do is find one single reproducible example, anywhere, ever, of any part of the universe behaving differently than the laws of physics say they should (in a context where the laws have otherwise been validated) due to the non-physical consciousness of some (human or non-human) entity. 

For example, quantum experiments such as the discovery of non-locality (ability to share/transmit information instantly across any distance) were so influential in philosophy they're sometimes referred to as "experimental metaphysics." 

This is, of course, one of the best possible arguments you could make for assuming this part of the field of metaphysics has no idea what it is talking about. It's a very importantly false description of what is going on in quantum mechanics or of what transmitting information means or of how causality physically works.

On another note, you mention David Chalmers. Were you aware he signed the Center for AI Safety's open letter, "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."? You mention the Abrahamic religions' opposition to physicalism, but are you aware of how Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV have warned about the risks of AI, including human extinction?

Upvoted, well written explanation.

Might be worth explicitly including a link back to .