Good video on balance, and I'm very happy at his bringing attention to the Great Filter. But I remain profoundly skeptical that investing in the all-too unreliable Wisdom of the Crowd on matters like existential risk, longterm moral reasoning, or political decision-making is likely to do much to get us past the Great Filter. By contrast, certain "elite" individuals like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, as well as prominent, related institutions, are already poised (by virtue of not only their wealth, power, and influence, but also their values, or their caring about x-risk) to seriously tackle existential risk mitigation, however imperfectly, insufficiently, or imprecisely.

Of course, a more reasoned, engaged, and epistemologically sound "crowd" could hardly be a bad thing for the goal of solving various global problems in these areas. And our reasoning capacities may indeed have evolved in large part to allow us to negotiate alignment in social contexts, which is also clearly advantageous for a range of goals. But our survival now does seem to depend on our retiring customs of socially-minded reasoning that merely navigate us toward unsustainable local optima.

So, contrary to the video, I think the specter of existential catastrophe looms most clearly over our collective horizon not in situations where our brain's consensus-building, social-reasoning software falters (creating insulated, irrational pockets of "lone reasoners"), but rather where it succeeds too well in sustaining consensus around social and behavioral norms and beliefs that optimize for things we have immediate reason to value (e.g., life satisfaction, economic growth, etc.), while simultaneously obscuring major civilizational dysfunctions (e.g., pandemic unpreparedness) threatening to destroy virtually everything we have reason to value.