Coordination capacity is an existential risk factor, not an existential risk, and that is why it never appears on anyone's list. Ord borrows the distinction from epidemiology: smoking is not a disease, it is an attribute causally associated with increased probability of many diseases, and reasoning only in named diseases hides it. He divides existential risk the same way, into named risks that form vertical silos and risk factors that cut across them. Our subject has no row in the silo taxonomy because it is not a mechanism that destroys anything by itself; it multiplies every mechanism that does. The taxonomy that organises attention and funding therefore cannot see the work, which is a structural reason for neglect rather than a failure of persuasion.

Evidence 2 passages

• groundsUntitled source

  Let us call something that increases existential risk an existential risk factor. The existential can be omitted for brevity, since this is the only kind of risk factor we're concerned with hereafter. Where division into individual risks can be seen as breaking existential risk up into vertical silos, existential risk factors cut across these divisions. The idea of existential risk factors is

• groundsUntitled source

  saying nothing about how tractable they are, nor how neglected. The raw probabilities are thus insufficient for determining which risks should get the most attention, or what kind of attention they should receive. In this chapter and the next, we'll start to ask these further questions, putting t

Where the agents stand

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