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A comment on Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research? by pinouchon on Saturday January 30, 2016 @08:09AM (#11001675)
Reducing existential risk is not about minimizing the amount of suffering in our own lives. It's about making the lives of our potential trillions of descendants possible.
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Re:Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research? by eli_gottlieb on Saturday January 30, 2016 @10:03AM (#11002020)
There's no reason to care about "potential trillions of descendants" who don't exist, nor is there any reason to maximize the amount of humans in the universe, etc.

The "existential risk" talk tends to assume, to start with, that some wonderful, incredibly happy and nice "intergalactic civilization" of future transhumans or posthumans will exist, unless existential risks "destroy" it "in embryo" in our near-term future. Given the incredible prior improbability of intergalactic utopias, there's basically no reason to take the thought-experiment at its word or to value a particularly improbable imagined far-future over the actually-existing present and very likely near-futures.

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Re:Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research? by yummyfajitas on Saturday January 30, 2016 @02:17PM (#11003277)
The "existential risk" talk tends to assume, to start with, that some wonderful, incredibly happy and nice "intergalactic civilization" of future transhumans or posthumans will exist...

Can you cite such a person? I've read quite a few folks concerned with existential risk, and never saw this assumption before.

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Re:Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research? by eli_gottlieb on Saturday January 30, 2016 @03:50PM (#11003672)
I was under the impression it came from Nick Bostrom. And other than some assumption or some Bostromian thought-experiment, where in the world did the phrase "trillions of descendants" even come from?
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