Tag: Biorisk
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Exaggerating the risks (Part 10: Biorisk: More grounds for doubt)
Continuing my treatment of existential biorisk, I give four further reasons to suspect that existential biorisk may be lower than many claim it to be.
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Exaggerating the risks (Part 9: Biorisk – Grounds for doubt)
Effective altruists often argue that biological phenomena pose a significant near-term existential risk. In this post, I give some preliminary reasons to doubt that claim.
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Mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk (Part 2: Ignoring background risk)
I discuss a second mistake in the moral mathematics of existential risk: neglecting background risk. I show how a leading discussion of biorisk makes this mistake, and also makes the mistake discussed in Part 1 of this series.
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Epistemics: (Part 2: Examples)
In this post, I look at some ways in which examples are systematically misused in discussions by effective altruists. I focus on two cases: Aum Shinrikyo and the Biological Weapons Convention.
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Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils (Part 7: An application)
I apply lessons learned about the value of existential risk mitigation to assess the cost-effectiveness of biosecurity. Leading cost-effectiveness estimates turn out to be overstated by several orders of magnitude because they do not appropriately model background risk.