Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I'm curious, why is the possibility of humanity surviving for a very long time, not something that is a strong part of your worldview–– given that you’re a long termist. I think the chance of there being a major war with nuclear weapons or whatever comes next. While very low in any given year, you just have the clock tick, and that chance adds up. We're not going to be here for another 100,000 years. It’s a simple argument, but I'm not a pessimist about any given year at all. Right, but if the odds are like sufficiently above zero, then do you just not buy the argument that anything above zero is just huge? And that we should be optimizing for that?…

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