Episode Details

This is a link post.

Disclaimer: I am not a subject matter expert in any of the fields being discussed here. I have done my best to check for errors but cannot guarantee that this article is error-free.

I would like to thank Ezra Karger, the author of the main report I’m analysing, for looking through an earlier version of this article and giving helpful suggestions.

Introduction:

In discussions about existential risk, it is common for people to try and estimate how dangerous various threats are to humanity, in order to best defend against them.

Particularly in the orbit of effective altruist or Rationalist communities, this often takes the form of a probabilistic estimate. A typical question will ask: “how likely is it that humanity will go extinct due to X cause by Y date”? Especially in the context of AI risk, someone's answer can be colloquially referred to as their “P(doom)”, and tends to be expressed as a single number percentage estimate, like “0.01%”.

I do not think it will be very controversial for me to point out that there can be a very large amount of uncertainty in these estimates. The extinction of humanity [...]

---

Outline:

(02:17) Part 1: Analysing in-group spread in  XPT survey responses

(12:53) Part 2: Differences between groups and methodologies

---

First published:
April 28th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nn9ryA55sonAueeJ7/analysing-the-extreme-spread-in-existential-risk-survey

Linkpost URL:
https://open.substack.com/pub/titotal/p/analysing-the-extreme-spread-in-existential?r=1e0is3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Listen Now