Thanks for the advise/feedback. I haven't spend much time looking into donating to political candidates. From a quick search it seems no longer posible to donate to Alex Bores and donating to Scott Wiener is not possible unless you live in the US (which is probably the case for all candidates). 

I have mostly donated to PauseAI US, Palisade and Secure AI Project. If you think I can do better as an individual doner living in Denmark, please let me know. :) 

Haha true, but while there's many future scenarios where saving for retirement isn't beneficial, I still wanna be on the safe side, even if that might be selfish. :) 

Let me know if you need funding. May be interested in donating $100-$1.000 monthly. 

A marginal $ 5000 should go to: .

Really excited to see an org in the WAW space focusing exclusively on policy. Especially since the org sounds to be pragmatic, very knowledgeable on the topic, have great communication skills and in general have a great team - what more can you ask for! Looking forward to donating. 

Thanks a lot for the post! Just wanted to say that your posts (especially the one you made last year) have inspired a large part of my donations. 

Of the almost $30k I donated over the last year, 70% went to AI policy orgs (mainly Palisade Research). I'm not sure where I would have donated without your posts, but I can't say with certainty that they would have ended up the same place.   

First off, I must say - I really like that answer. 

I guess I'm concerned about how much of a value lock-in there will be with the creation of AGI. And I find it hard to imagine a majority caring about wild animal suffering or mass producing happiness (e.g. creating a large amount of happy artificial sentience). But I do agree - I shouldn't giv it a 90% likelihood. 

True. But I think that's more of an argument that the future is uncertain (which ofc is a relevant argument). But even with the technology I don't necessarily think we'll have a majority interested in eliminating all forms of suffering (especially in the wild) or mass producing happiness.    

Net positive/negative: "All good" minus "all bad" 
In expectation:  Weighted average outcome (prob × impact)

I have a question I would like some thoughts on:

As a utilitarianist I personally believe alignment to be the most important course area - though weirdly enough, even though I believe x-risk reduction to be positive in expectation, I believe the future is most likely to be net negative.

I personally believe, without a high level of certainty, that the current utilities on earth are net negative due to wild animal suffering. If we therefore give the current world a utility value of -1, I would describe my believe for future scenarios like this:

1. ~5% likelihood: ~10¹⁰⁰⁰  (Very good future e.g. hedonium shockwave)
2. ~90% likelihood: -1 (the future is likely good for humans, but this is still negligible compared to wild animal suffering, which will remain)
3. ~5% likelihood: ~-10¹⁰⁰ (s-risk like scenarios)

My reasoning for thinking “scenario 2” is more likely than “scenario 1” is based on what seems to be the values of the general public currently. Most people seem to care about nature conservation, but no one seems interested in mass producing (artificial) happiness. While the earth is only expected to remain habitable for about two billion years (and humans, assuming we avoid any x-risks, are likely to remain for much longer), I think, when it comes to it, we’ll find a way to keep the earth habitable, and thus wild animal suffering. 

Based on these 3 scenarios, you don’t have to be a great mathematician to realize that the future is most likely to be net negative, yet positive in expectation. While I still, based on this, find alignment to be the most important course area, I find it quite demotivating that I spend so much of my time (donations) to preserve a future that I find unlikely to be positive. But the thing is, most long-termist (and EAs in general) don't seem to have similar beliefs to me. Even someone like Brian Tomasik has said that if you’re a classical utilitarian, the future is likely to be good. 

 So now I’m asking, what am I getting wrong? Why is the future likely to be net positive?