We should say more than “x-risk is high”

I appreciate this post and think you make broadly reasonable arguments!

As the cited example of "screw longtermism", I feel I should say that my crux here is mostly that I think AI x risk is just actually really important, and that given this, that longtermism is bad marketing and unnecessarily exclusionary.

It's exclusionary because it's a niche and specific philosophical position that has some pretty unsavoury conclusions, and is IMO incredibly paralysing and impractical if you AREN'T trying to minimise x risk. I think that if framed right, "make sure AI does what we want especially as it gets far more capable" is just an obviously correct thing to want, and I think the movement already has a major PR problem among natural allies (see, eg Timnit Gebru's Twitter) that this kind of thing exacerbates

It's bad marketing because it's easily conflated with neglecting people alive today, Pascal's Mugging, naive utilitarianism, strong longtermism, etc. And I often see people mocking EA or AI Safety who point to the same obvious weakness of "if there's just a. 0001% chance of it being really bad we should drop everything else to fix it". I think this is actually a pretty valid argument to mock!

And even for people who avoid that trap, it seems pretty patronising to me to frame "caring about future people" as an important and cruxy moral insight - in practice the distinguishing thing about EA is our empirical beliefs about killer robots!

I am admittedly also biased because I find most moral philosophy debates irritating, and think that EAs as a whole spend far too much time on them rather than actually doing things!

Congrats on posting your draft!

Ultimately I agree with: "x-risk is high", "the long-term is overwhelmingly important", and "we should use reason and evidence to decide what is most important and then do it", so what I choose to emphasize to people in my messaging is a strategic consideration about what I think will have the best effects, including convincingness. (I think you agree.)

One reason why the EA community seems to spend so much energy on the EA-principle thing is that we've figured out that it's a good meme. It's well-exercised. Whereas the "x-risk is high" message is less-well validated. I would also share you concern that it would turn people off. But maybe it would be good? I think we should probably try more on the margin!

I do think "the long-term is overwhelmingly important" is probably over-emphasized in messaging. Maybe it's important for more academic discussions of cause prioritization, but I'd be surprised if it deserved to be as front-and-center as it is.

I'm curious if anyone has tried experimentally evaluating what messaging works. It seems like this new lab in NYC will be doing just this sort of work, so I'll be following along with them: https://www.eapsychology.org/

Broadly agree; nitpick follows.

I think that outlining the case for longtermism (and EA principles, more broadly) is better for building a community of people who will reliably choose the highest-priority actions and paths to do the most good and that this is better for the world and keeping x-risk low in the long-run.

I'm persuaded of all this, except for the “better for the world” part, which I'm not sure about and which I think you didn't argue for. That is, you've persuasively argued that emphasising the process over the conclusions has benefits for community epistemics and long-term community health; but this does trade off against other metrics one might have, like the growth/capacity of individual x-risk-related fields, and you don't comment about the current margin.

For example, if you adopt David Nash's lens of EA as an incubator and coordinator of other communities,  “it's possible that by focusing on EA as a whole rather than specific causes, we are holding back the growth of these fields.”

The low-fidelity message “holy shit, x-risk” may be an appropriate pitch for some situations, given that people have limited attention, and 'getting people into EA per se' is not what we directly care about. For example, among mid-career people with relevant skills, or other people who we expect to be more collaborators with EA than participants.

The high-fidelity message-sequence “EA → Longtermism → x-risk”, as a more complicated idea, is more suited to building the cause prioritisation community, the meta-community that co-ordinates other communities. For example, when fishing for future highly-engaged EAs in universities.

This still leaves open the question of which one of these should be the visible outer layer of EA that people encounter first in the media etc., and on that I think the current margin (which emphasises longtermism over x-risk) is OK. But my takeaway from David Nash's post is that we should make sure to maintain pathways within EA — even 'deep within', e.g. at conferences — that provide value and action-relevance for people who aren't going to consider themselves EA, but who will go on to be informed and affected by it for a long time (that's as opposed to having the implicit endpoint be "do direct work for an EA org"). If these people know they can find each other here in EA, that's also good for the community's breadth of knowledge.

I agree pretty strongly with this. I think it especially matters since, in my cause prio, the case for working on AI x-risk is much higher than other causes of x-risk even if level of x-risk they posed were the same because I'm not convinced that the expected value of the future conditional on avoiding bio and nuclear x-risk is positive. More generally I think the things that it's worth focusing on from a longtermist perspective compared to just a "dying is bad" perspective can look different within cause areas especially AI. For instance, I think it makes governance stuff and avoiding multi-agent failures look much more important.