Edited to add a definition:

VO2max is the maximum amount of oxygen your body is capable of consuming. VO2max is commonly used as a measure of aerobic fitness.

I think it's a good quote. I will refer to this post from The Sequences: Trying to Try

Ok, it sounds like we agree on pretty much everything except what it means for something to "be an existential risk". I think 0.01% still counts as a risk worth worrying about (or it would, if AI x-risk weren't multiple orders of magnitude higher).

Are you saying 99.9 to 99.99 per year, or total?

I directionally agree but I don't think that's the sort of reasoning in which you can be >99.9% confident.

I'm also concerned about runaway warming making earth uninhabitable. Climate models suggest that won't happen but Halstead (implicitly) expects a <0.001% chance of runaway warming which seems hard to justify to me.

Do you think you can learn something useful about existential risk from reading the IPCC report?

FWIW I only briefly looked at the latest report but from what I saw, it seemed hard to learn anything about existential risk from it, except for some obvious things like "humans will not go extinct in the median outcome". I didn't see any direct references to human extinction in the report, nor any references to runaway warming.

"Climate change is not an x-risk" is the kind of thing you can easily (and correctly) prove to yourself in a matter of hours

How do you do that? I've spent several hours researching the topic and I'm still not convinced, but I think there's a lot I'm still missing, too.

My current thinking is

1. Existential risk from climate change is not greater than 1%, because if it were, climate models would show a noticeable probability of extinction-level outcomes.
2. But I can't confidently say that existential risk is less than 0.1% because the assumptions of climate models may break down when you get into tail outcomes, and our understanding of climate science isn't robust enough to strongly rule out those tail outcomes.

Bees are more social than salmon. I haven't put serious thought into it, but I can see an argument that sociality is an important factor in determining intensity-of-consciousness. (Perhaps because sociality requires complex neuron interactions that give rise to certain conscious experiences?)

I've spoken to grantmakers about this in the past and I got the impression that they see it as a largely unavoidable problem:

• You can't hire good people without taking a lot of time to assess them, which takes time away from other important activities.
• Expanding the team requires hiring more managers, who are even harder to assess than grantmakers.

I thought price wars was false, although I haven't been paying that much attention to companies' pricings. GPT was $20/month in 2023 and it's still $20/month. IIRC Gemini/Claude were available in 2023 but they only had free tiers so I don't know how to judge them.