alt Hacker News> The anthropic principle applies here: anyone warning about an existential risk will by necessity never have precedent to point to.
We have precedents of people warning about existential risks in the past, when the warnings turned out to be false, or overblown. In some cases, such overblown warnings led to serious negatives for society (demonization of nuclear power).
Yes, that is precisely my point. Any timeline with humans flourishing will never have a past history of a correct prediction of existential risk, unless you're willing to pay attention to the counterfactuals.
Those counterfactuals are important, though. We do have a history of averted disasters, albeit not as large. Ozone hole, Y2K, think about things that seemed overblown at the time, and consider whether they were actually overblown or whether there was a concerted effort to successfully avert them.