Whether or not to get insurance should have nothing to do with what makes one sleep
This (and much of the rest of your article) seems needlessly disdainful of people’s emotions.
Wealth does not equal happiness!
If it did, then yes, 899 < 900 so don’t buy the insurance. But in the real world, I think you’re doing normal humans a big disservice by pretending that we are all robots.
Even Mr. Spock would take human emotions into consideration when giving advice to a human.
The probability should be given as 0.03 -- that might reduce your confusion!
Perhaps you should make this more clear in the calculator, to avoid people mistakenly making bad choices? (Or just change it to percent. Most people are more comfortable with percentages, and the % symbol will make it unambiguous.)
You’re saying that we might survive, but our environment/food might not, right?
How many things could reasonably have a p(doom) > 0.01? Not very many. Therefore your worry about me "neurotically obsessing over tons of things" is unfounded. I promise I won't :) If my post causes you to think that, then I apologize, I have misspoken my argument.
A lot of your responses make you sound like you're more interested in arguing and being contrarian than in seeking the truth with us. This one exemplifies it, but it's a general pattern of the tone of your responses. It'd be nice if you came across as more truth-seeking than argument-seeking.
Well of course there is something different: The p(doom), as based on the opinions of a lot of people who I consider to be smart. That strongly distinguishes it from just about every other concept.
This was the most compelling part of their post for me:
"You are correct about the arguments for doom being either incomplete or bad. But the arguments for survival are equally incomplete and bad."
And you really don't seem to have taken it to heart. You're demanding that doomers provide you with a good argument. Well, I demand that you provide me with a good argument!
More seriously: we need to weigh the doom-evidence and the non-doom-evidence against each other. But you believe that we need to look at the doom-evidence and if it's not very good, then p(doom) should be low. But that's wrong -- you don't acknowledge that the non-doom-evidence is also not very good. IOW there's a ton of uncertainty.
If you give me a list of "100 things make me nervous", I can just as easily give you "a list of 100 things that make me optimistic".
Then it would be a lot more logical for your p(doom) to be 0.5 rather than 0.02-0.2!
I (on average) expect to be treated about as well by our new AGI overlords as I am treated by the current batch of rulers.
...
By doom I mean the universe gets populated by AI with no moral worth (e.g. paperclippers).
Well, at least we've unearthed the reasons that your p(doom) differs!
Most people do not expect #1(unless we solve alignment), and have a broader definition of #2. I certainly do.
Agreed. Let's not lose sight of the fact that 2-20% means it's still the most important thing in the world, in my view.
I'm curious what kind of scenarios you're thinking about. Having actual control, yes, that could be important. But having 0.001% of control of Google does not seem like it would have any effect on either Google or me, under any scenario.