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Do you find any existential risk concerns compelling? I'm tend to be pretty nervous about "prevent very bad but very unlikely things from happening" arguments, but I also feel various 20th century close calls with nuclear weapons were... way too close for comfort.

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Nicholas Schiefer

@nschiefer

Gotcha. I'm pretty curious about the partial extinction risk: what makes it basically as bad as total extinction? Is it a "future humans matter much less than current humans" perspective (or a really high discount rate), or something else?

10:47 PM · Jul 24, 2021Twitter Web App

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and

I liked

's argument about "near-existential risk" (tl;dr almost-but-not-quite total extinction resets you back in time, which increases the chance of actually-total extinction), but that still relies on total extinction being super-extra bad. adamjermyn.com/posts/near_exi

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Nicholas Schiefer

@nschiefer

Jul 24, 2021

The trauma perspective (both institutional and personal) is really interesting, thanks!