The Unilateralist Curse vs. Overconformity: When to take risks
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The unilateralist's curse is a formal concept from philosophy, roughly speaking:
"Assume N unbiased, altruistically minded agents with imperfect information who are independently deciding whether to take an action (that’s in fact bad). As N grows, the probability that at least one of them will take the (very bad) action approaches one."
So this will suggest that people should be very careful about taking altruistic risks, and basically try to almost always avoid unilateral action. Yet in practice we can all think of situations where good things were not done (or not done soon enough) because nobody's willing to take the risk/initiative.
So the question becomes one of how to do this balancing act.
How should altruists decide when taking risks are worth it? And how can they best coordinate to prevent the unilateralist's curse? Let's discuss this at South Bay EA!
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If you have time, you might want to first read this paper by Bostrom:
https://nickbostrom.com/papers/unilateralist.pdf
And a short summary:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/131PeflCHIG_s8UtXA_jKtC8eERL_VCp-yi6jWJxTf7w/edit#slide=id.p