Summary
I've built a site hosting an EA alternative to the Doomsday Clock.
Doom
The Doomsday Clock is the most prominent symbol of existential risk. While it's helped highlight the risks of nuclear war, it's misaligned with EA values in various ways:
- It does not use quantified probabilities. "100 seconds to midnight" has an ordinal relationship to "90 seconds to midnight" but is not itself a prediction of anything.
- It is fundamentally pessimistic. A doomsday clock implies an inevitable countdown. One can turn back the clock, but midnight still looms.
- It focuses on nuclear war and climate change, whereas EAs tend to see more existential risk in AI.
With this in mind, I thought about what effective altruists would make as an alternative symbol if we got to choose the main symbol of existential risk. Then I made it. Check it out and let me know what you think, I'm hoping to promote it further. I also have open questions below.
Potential
The X-Risk Tree is a symbol of the branching possibilities facing humanity. Its primary audience are people concerned by global catastrophic risk but who feel unable to do anything about it. I think there's a chunk of people in this situation, especially among environmentalists. The tree is intended to show that we can prune the branches of our future, that we have the agency to choose a path that avoids doom. Ideally it feels like an interactive display at a museum.
The numbers are sourced from Metaculus's Ragnarok series. I believe this is an important step up over the Doomsday Clock's non-quantified predictions. However, there are still issues with this approach, as Linch has pointed out.
Note that alternative predictions from EAs are included on the collections page.
Ongoing Questions
- Would people enjoy being able to input data to generate a tree of their own predictions?
- Would a sharing option for social media (image of tree and text of predictions) be useful?
- I am not totally happy with the title. If you can convince me of a better one, I will provide a $100 bounty.
- What could be high-leverage ways to promote it?
- What could be done on the site to more thoroughly communicate the idea of "existential risk is serious but we can work on it"?
- Is there a better word than 'sustenance' for outcomes where humanity does not suffer a global catastrophe?
Credits
This was made possible by a Long-Term Future Fund grant.
Linch's feedback was very helpful.
MichaelA's Database of existential risk estimates was crucial for the Collections page.
By The Way!
Shameless plug: If you need a developer, I am currently working for work!
Beautifully made! I love the visuals and my first impressions are that it communicates x-risk in a more hopeful way. The app looks great on mobile too.
Some quick thoughts:
- I anticipated that clicking on a node would either give me a tooltip to explain what that particular node should represent or take me to another page/section of the site which explained these scenarios in more detail.
- I initially found it strange that all of the green nodes appear to link to the same prediction about population decline. I vaguely understood that this was a source of evidence for the number of green nodes, but the connection is not very clear. I think the app might benefit from a short explanation of why a user might want to click on these nodes. It might also help if hovering over one node highlighted all nodes which send you to the same place.
- I feel that the text on the graph is sufficient enough for me to understand the different clusters in the graph. Yet, I wonder if it might look better to use icons to represent these different clusters, and have the longer text appear on hover instead. Of course, I'd keep it as it is if user testing suggested that this change increased confusion.
- I will cast a vote for being able to input my own data. If I could input my own data, I also think it would be fun to share the resulting graphs.
- I don't think I have any ideas for a better title. I do feel that another title should aim to be of a similar length.
- A few ideas for promoting the app to other EAs. It might be nice to give a talk about the web app, or for someone whose work is closely related to predictions for x-risk to show it off in a talk. Also, perhaps you could reach out to one of the university EA groups to see if they'd be interested in having a visual like this to show in some of their introductory talks.
Lastly, I'd like to congratulate you on launching the site. I'm sure you've put in a lot of work to get it to this point, and as a result it looks fantastic!
Thanks for pushing the fix for Windows. The share buttons work on my device now.