Category: Academic Papers
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Papers I learned from (Part 3: Risk, non-identity, and extinction)
Richard Pettigrew has argued that some versions of risk-averse longtermism may recommend hastening human extinction. Nikhil Venkatesh and Kacper Kowalczyk reply to Pettigrew.
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Against the singularity hypothesis (Part 4: Chalmers on the singularity)
This post reviews a leading argument for the singularity hypothesis due to David Chalmers. I argue that the argument does not succeed.
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Against the singularity hypothesis (Part 3: Further doubts)
This post gives three further reasons for skepticism about the singularity hypothesis.
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Papers I learned from (Part 2: Effective altruism, risk, and human extinction)
What effect does risk aversion have on the case for existential risk mitigation? Surprisingly, Richard Pettigrew argues that risk aversion may recommend working to hasten rather than avoid human extinction.
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Against the singularity hypothesis (Part 2: Preliminary doubts)
This post gives two preliminary reasons for skepticism about the singularity hypothesis.
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Against the singularity hypothesis (Part 1: Introduction)
The singularity hypothesis holds that the intelligence of artificial agents will grow at a rapidly accelerating rate, producing an intelligence explosion. This post introduces a new paper criticizing the singularity hypothesis.
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Papers I learned from (Part 1: Time discounting, consistency and special obligations)
Is there anything that can be said in favor of pure temporal discounting? A recent paper by Harry Lloyd shows one way that the case might be made.
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Mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk (Part 5: Implications)
I draw five implications from my discussion of mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk.
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Mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk (Part 4: Optimistic population dynamics)
I expand on the moral importance of modeling population dynamics by studying an optimistic growth model due to Christian Tarsney. I show that even in optimistic models, incorporating population dynamics tends to substantially decrease the expected value of existential risk mitigation.