Thanks! I'm not trying to resolve concerns around cluelessness in general, and I agree there are situations (many or even most of the really tough ‘cluelessness’ cases) where the whole ‘is this constructive?’ test isn't useful, since that can be part of what you're clueless about, or other factors might dominate.

Why do you think we ought to privilege the particular reason that you point to?

Well, I'm saying the ‘is this constructive’ test is a way to latch on to a certain kind of confidence, viz the confidence that you are moving towards a better world. If others also take constructive actions towards similar outcomes, and/or in the fullness of time, you can be relatively confident you helped get to that better world.

This is not the same thing as saying your action was right, since there are locally harmful ways to move toward a better world. And so I don't have as much to say about when or how much to privilage this rule!

Who can we thank for the design? It's seriously impressive!

Just I want to register the worry that the way you've operationalised “EA priority” might not line up with a natural reading of the question. 

The footnote on “EA priority” says:

By “EA priority” I mean that 5% of (unrestricted, i.e. open to EA-style cause prioritisation) talent and 5% of (unrestricted, i.e. open to EA-style cause prioritisation) funding should be allocated to this cause.

This is a bit ambiguous (in particular, over what timescale), but if it means something like “over the next year” then that would mean finding ways to spend ≈$10 million on AI welfare by the end of 2025, which you might think is just practically very hard to do even if you thought that more work on current margins is highly valuable. Similar things could have been said for e.g. pandemic prevention or AI governance in the early days!

Thanks Vasco!

Nice post! Copying the comment I left on the draft (edited for clarity) —

I agree with both conclusions, but I don't think your argument is the strongest reason to buy those conclusions.

My picture of how large-scale space expansion goes involves probes (not humans) being sent out after AGI. Then a reasonable default might be that the plans and values embedded in humanity's first large-scale space settlement initiatives are set by the plans and values of some very large and technologically advanced political faction at the time (capable of launching such a significant initiative by force or unanimity), rather than a smaller number of humans who were early to settle some part of the Solar System.

I then picture most human-originating life to not resemble biological humans (more like digital people). In this case it's very hard to imagine how farming animals would make any sense.

Even with shorter-term and human-led space settlement, like bases on the Moon and Mars, I expect it to make very little logistical sense to farm animals (regardless of the psychological profile of whoever is doing the settlement). The first settlements will be water and space and especially labour constrained, and raising animals is going to look needlessly painful and inefficient without the big economies of scale of factory farms. 

That said, if animals are farmed in early settlements, then note that smaller animals tend to be the most efficient at converting feed into human-palatable calories (and also the most space-efficient). For that reason some people suggest insect farming (e.g. crickets, mealworms), which does seem much more likely than livestock or poultry! But another option is bioreactors of the kind being developed on Earth. In theory they could become more efficient than animals and would then make most practical sense (since the capital cost to build the reactor isn't going to matter; taking anything into space is already crazy expensive). Also a lot of food will probably be imported as payload early on; unsure if that's relevant.

So I think I'm saying the cultural attitudes of early space settlers is probably less important than the practical mechanisms by which most of space is eventually settled. Especially if most future people are not biological humans, which kind of moots the question.

I do think it's valuable and somewhat relieving to point out that animal farming could plausibly remain an Earth-only problem!

I endorse many (more) people focusing on x-risk and it is a motivation and focus of mine; I don't endorse “we should act confidently as if x-risk is the overwhelmingly most important thing”.

Honestly, I think the explicitness of my points misrepresents what it really feels like to form a view on this, which is to engage with lots of arguments and see what my gut says at the end. My gut is moved by the idea of existential risk reduction as a central priority, and it feels uncomfortable being fanatical about it and suggesting others do the same. But it struggles to credit particular reasons for that.

To actually answer the question: (6), (5), and (8) stand out, and feel connected.

Agree.

In this spirit, here are some x-risk sceptical thoughts:

1. You could reasonably think human extinction this century is very unlikely. One way to reach this conclusion is simply to work through the most plausible causes of human extinction, and reach low odds for each. Vasco Grilo does this for (great power) conflict and nuclear winter, John Halstead suggests extinction risk from extreme climate change is very low here, and the background rate of extinction from natural sources can be bounded by (among other things) observing how long humans have already been around for. That leaves extinction risk from AI and (AI-enabled) engineered pandemics, where discussion is more scattered and inconclusive. Here and here are some reasons for scepticism about AI existential risk.
   • Even if the arguments for AI x-risk are sound, then it's not clear how they are arguments for expecting literal human extinction over outcomes like ‘takeover’ or ‘disempowerment’. It's hard to see why AI takeover would lead to smouldering ruins, versus continued activity and ‘life’, just a version not guided by humans or their values.
2. So “existential catastrophe” probably shouldn't just mean "human extinction". But then it surprisingly slippery as a concept. Existential risk is the risk of existential catastrophe, but it's difficult to give a neat and intuitive definition of “existential catastrophe” such that “minimise existential catastrophe” is a very strong guide for how to do good. Hilary Greaves dicusses candidate definitions here.
3. From (1), you might think that if x-risk reduction this century should be a near-top priority, then most its importance comes from mitigating non-extinction catastrophes, like irreversible dystopias. But few current efforts are explicitly framed as ways to avoid dystopian outcomes, and it's less clear how to do that. Other than preventing AI disempowerment or takeover, assuming those things are dystopian.
4. But then isn't x-risk work basically just about AI, and maybe also biorisk? Shouldn't specific arguments for those risks and ways to prevent them therefore matter more than more abstract arguments for the value of mitigating existential risks in general? 
5. Many strategies to mitigate x-risks trade off uncomfortably against other goods. Of course they require money and talent, but it's hard to argue the world is spending too much on e.g. preventing engineered pandemics. But (to give a random example), mitigating x-risk from AI might require strong AI control measures. If we also end up thinking things like AI autonomy matter, that could be an uncomfortable (if worthwhile) price to pay.
6. It's not obvious that efforts to improve prospects for the long-run future should focus on preventing unrecoverable disasters. There is a strong preemptive argument for this; roughly that humans are likely to recover from less severe disasters, and so retain most their prospects (minus the cost of recovering, which is assumed to be small in terms of humanity's entire future). The picture here is one on which the value of the future is roughly bimodal — either we mess up irrecoverable and achieve close to zero of our potential, or we reach roughly our full potential. But that bimodal picture isn't obviously true. It might be comparably important to find ways to turn a mediocre-by-default future into a really great future, for instance.
   • A related picture that “existential catastrophe” suggests is that the causes of losing all our potential are fast and discrete events (bangs) rather than gradual processes (whimpers). But why are bangs more likely than whimpers? (See e.g. “you get what you measure” here).
7. Arguments for prioritising x-risk mitigation often involve mistakes, like strong ‘time of perils’ assumptions and apples to oranges comparisons. A naive case for prioritising x-risk mitigation might go like this: “reducing x-risk this century by 1 percentage point is worth one percentage point of the expected value of the entire future conditional on no existential catastrophes. And the entire future is huge, it's like ${10}^x$ lives. So reducing x-risk by even a tiny fraction, say $y\%$, this century saves ${10}^x\cdot y\%$ (a huge number of) lives in expectation. The same resources going to any work directed at saving lives within this century cannot save such a huge number of lives in expectation even if it saved 10 billion people.” This is too naive for a couple reasons:
   • This assumes this century is the only time where an existential catastrophe could occur. Better would be “the expected value of the entire future conditional on no existential catastrophe this century”, which could be much lower.
   • This compares long-run effects with short-run effects without attempting to evaluate the long-run effects of interventions not deliberately targeted at reducing existential catastrophe this century.
8. Naive analysis of the value of reducing existential catastrophe also doesn't account for ‘which world gets saved’. This feels especially relevant when assessing the value of preventing human extinction, where you might expect the worlds where extinction-preventing interventions succeed in preventing extinction are far less valuable than the expected value of the world conditional on no extinction (since narrowly avoiding extinction is bad news about the value of the rest of the future). Vasco Grilo explores this line of thinking here, and I suggest some extra thoughts here.
9. The fact that some existential problems (e.g. AI alignment) seem, on our best guess, just about solvable with an extra push from x-risk motivated people doesn't itself say much about the chance that x-risk motivated people make the difference in solving those problems (if we're very uncertain about how difficult the problems are). Here are some thoughts about that.

These thoughts make me hesitant about confidently acting as if x-risk is overwhelmingly important, even compared to other potential ways to improve the long-run future, or other framings on the importance of helping navigate the transition to very powerful AI.

But I still existential risk matters greatly as an action-guiding idea. I like this snippet from the FAQ page for The Precipice —

But for most purposes there is no need to debate which of these noble tasks is the most important—the key point is just that safeguarding humanity’s longterm potential is up there among the very most important priorities of our time.

[Edited a bit for clarity after posting]

Thanks for the comment, Owen.

I agree with your first point and I should have mentioned it.

On your second point, I am assuming that ‘solving’ the problem means solving it by a date, or before some other event (since there's no time in my model). But I agree this is often going to be the right way to think, and a case where the value of working on a problem with increasing resources can be smooth, even under certainty.

Ah thanks, good spot. You're right.

Another way to express $\frac{\delta \left(\text{Total resources}\right)}{\text{Total resources}}$(to avoid a stacked fraction) is $\%\delta \left(\text{Total resources}\right)$; i.e. percentage change in resources. I'll update the post to reflect this.