I recently realized that it's hard for me to take longtermism seriously considering I was brought up in the policy debate community where we talked about every possible avenue of existential risk every single day for years
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Love this—can you say anything about how these interactions tempered your stance? Just lots of experience making counterarguments rooted in what can actually be done to help with much more salient risks/harms today?
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Yeah, I think there were a few things:
1) We spent a lot of time researching and arguing both sides of impacts — e.g. I attended multiple 90-minute lectures by policy analysts on why global nuclear war wouldn't actually cause extinction
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2) Making impact framing arguments about the relative importance of structural harms occurring in the present, and how those harms are easy to dismiss because there isn't a single flashpoint, but cause comparable damage over longer time-horizons
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