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Hoffnung's avatar

I feel like this overlaps a lot with the debate between normie nonthreatening emergency preparedness and doomsday prepper militia fanatic activities. (Full disclosure, I'm somewhat in favor of both of those.)

A few thoughts:

- It's almost impossible to predict how likely weird science fiction stuff is to happen. Error bars inevitably cover many orders of magnitude. This by itself kind of militates against what I've thought of as the EA virtues of doing things that can be measured.

- It's pretty clear that especially over centuries, normalcy bias is not a good idea.

- With things where the likelihood or impact is hard to predict, so there's lots of uncertainty and no measuring, it's very easy for self-serving bias or actual political corruption to lead to wildly overestimating them.

- Single-point probability optimization is probably not appropriate for things where the distribution itself is unknown.

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Max Chaplin's avatar

Revolutionary anarchism might be an example of a movement that fulfills both criteria while socially being as far from the longtermist scene as possible.

* They’re longtermist in the blunt literal sense - they're engaged in an arduous uphill struggle towards a revolution that will being turmoil and violence in the short run in the hope that it will eventually lead to an indefinitely long period of peace and justice.

* The theory they're working off is a form of social science fiction, since the society they’re aspire to build - a large, stable, highly-developed anarchist civilization - is radically different from any society we know of.

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