What does politics have to do with it?
The researcher Tobias Baumann shows that, to prevent s-risks, it's important to change politics.
Without a well-informed public debate, polarization grows, it gets harder to reduce s-risks, and the risk of people with bad intentions coming to power goes up.
Two questions mixed up
One problem with today's public debate is that it mixes up two kinds of questions:
- Normative questions: which goals should society pursue? (For example: should we consider all sentient beings?)
- Empirical questions: which policies work best to reach those goals? (For example: will this law really reduce suffering?)
The two-step ideal
The authors suggest an ideal in two steps:
- Normative step: discuss and clarify the goals, like philosophers.
- Empirical step: investigate which policies best reach those goals, like scientists.
For this, we need to notice the biases that keep us from thinking with an open mind, like confirmation bias and motivated reasoning (believing what we want to be true).
Less polarization
A debate like this would let us look at the good and bad points of each proposal, instead of "putting our own side on a pedestal" and "demonizing" the other.
In short
- Politics has a big influence on the risks of future suffering.
- We should separate questions about goals from questions about what works.
- A more careful debate reduces polarization.