H-risks are risks where an adverse outcome would bring about hunger on an astronomical scale, vastly exceeding all hunger that has existed on Earth so far. Imagine a universe filled with perpetually hungry beings. These are risks of outcomes even worse than extinction in two respects. First, with respect to their scope, they not only threaten the future generations of humans or our successors, but all sentient life in the whole universe. Second, with respect to their severity, they not only remove everything that would be valuable but also come with a lot of disvalue - that is, features we'd like to avoid no matter what. All plausible value systems agree that hunger, all else being equal, is undesirable. That is, everyone agrees that we have reasons to avoid hunger. H-risks are risks of massive hunger, so I hope you agree that it's good to prevent h-risks. ~~~~~~~~~ This argument is a critique of S-risks, as explained in: https://longtermrisk.org/s-risks-talk-eag-boston-2017 This critique reveals how the argument is too rooted in human/animal experience. Because we are so familiar with hunger/suffering we assume it is more fundamental that it really is. Life itself (as defined in https://hrynuik.com/thoughts/argument-for-life.txt) does not experience hunger or suffering. Life would go on even if every one of its constituents lived its entire life 'hungry'. Hunger is only a mechanism that some constituents of life have evolved to experience as it increased their evolutionary fitness. It is conceivable that humans could evolve into a state where we don't experience things like hunger or suffering because they are no longer evolutionarily beneficial for us. The mistake we are making is applying our individual level goals (avoiding suffering/hunger) to a group (all of Life). Instead, we should consider Life-level goals and from those determine individual level goals that are aligned. Another way to see the absurdity of over-focussing on suffering is my employing the "discussion with an Alien" thought experiment. Consider explaining to an alien that the goal of Life is to prevent the suffering of all the beings that make up life. The alien would likely respond: what is suffering? Well, we would say, some elements of life have evolved this sense that is highly correlated with us being in a situation where we will die. We've therefore evolved to really not like suffering, so we think that is the most important thing for us to optimize for. I would expect the alien to quickly point out that we've been misguided by our embodied experience and should try to look past it in order to determine where to focus our long term efforts.