This is a special post for quick takes by Cleo Nardo. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Things are looking more optimistic over the past few weeks. I’m sure many people have increased p(survival). For me, this makes me doubly optimistic, because the updates have come from greater-than-expected societal competence. So we also get a boost to the expected value of the future conditional on survival. That is, if we navigate x-risk through societal competence (as opposed to getting lucky with the NN priors or a scaling bottleneck) then that’s a good sign that we’ll also manage cosmic resource allocation, AI welfare, long reflection, acausal, etc. Of course, the strategic landscape is still in turmoil, so it’s definitely too early to celebrate. My aim is just to point out that some routes to survival are better news for flourishing.
Largely disagree with this specific update, in large part because it's very easy to increase p(survival) without p(flourishing), and the assumptions that make them strongly linked rely on premises that are relatively dubious, to put it mildly.
One of the larger takeaways I got from the Better Futures series as well as the Beyond Existential Risk post is that increasing survival probabilities do not increase flourishing probabilities by default, or at the very least that the connection between the probabilities is a lot weaker than often assumed, and from a ... (read more)