What (other) posts are you planning on writing?

Thanks for making this question, and last year's version! I think this is a great idea.

In last year's one, you wrote:

We think this will accomplish a few things:

1. Encourage people to publish the posts

2. Help them prioritize between post ideas based on community feedback

3. Get directed to useful readings/resources

4. (For everyone) Get a sense of what the community is working on

I think there's another benefit, related to (or perhaps meant as implicit) in the 4th item you list: Having this public record of what people are planning on writing can help people discover whether other people are planning on writing similar things to them. This could lead to:

• them collaborating
• one person just passing their notes/drafts/thoughts to the other and then moving on to other things
• one person just dropping that plan and move onto other things (this seems less good, but still maybe better than doubled-up-effort)

It seems like it's relatively rare for two people to have very similar planned posts, but I've seen it happen at least occasionally. And there's of course no harm in two posts on a similar idea, and each person probably has a somewhat different angle. But it still seems better for the people to be made aware of each other, so they can collaborate and/or make informed decisions about whether pursuing their plan should still be their top priority.

Which suggests also a sixth, somewhat more speculative benefit: It seems possible that some people have good ideas worth writing up, but they're worried that maybe someone else has written them already or will do so soon. So they don't want to waste their effort. But if publicising one's planned posts here (or somewhere like it) becomes common practice, then these people could check here, see that no one's mentioned a similar idea, and feel more confident to invest time into the post. And if they post here, others could let them know if similar things have already been written about in the past (related to your 3rd item).

I'm planning to probably post about a lot of my planned posts here, primarily for those two extra benefits, as well as the 3rd item you mention.

A bunch of posts related to The Precipice

I recently finished Toby Ord's The Precipice, and thought it was an excellent and very important book. I plan to write a bunch of posts that summarise, comment on, or take inspiration from various parts of it. Most are currently very early-stage, but the working titles are below.

Key uncertainties/questions:

• Is there anyone who's already planning to write similar things? I probably won't have time to write all the things I've planned. So if someone else is already likely to pursue ideas similar to some of these, we could potentially collaborate, or I could share my notes and thoughts, let you take that particular topic from there, and allocate my time to other things.

Working titles:

• Defining existential risks and existential catastrophes
• My thoughts on Toby Ord's policy & research recommendations
• Existential security
• Civilizational collapse and recovery: Toby Ord's views and my doubts
• The Terrible Funnel: Estimating odds of each step on the x-risk causal path (this title is especially "working")
• The idea here would be to adapt something like the "Great Filter" or "Drake Equation" reasoning to estimating the probability of existential catastrophe, using how humanity has fared in prior events that passed or could've passed certain "steps" on certain causal chains to catastrophe.
• E.g., even though we've never faced a pandemic involving a bioengineered pathogen, perhaps our experience with how many natural pathogens have moved from each "step" to the next one can inform what would likely happen if we did face a bioengineered pathogen, or if it did get to a pandemic level.
• This idea seems sort of implicit in the Precipice, but isn't really spelled out there. Also, as is probably obvious, I need to do more to organise my thoughts on it myself.
• This may include discussion of how Ord distinguishes natural and anthropogenic risks, and why the standard arguments for an upper bound for natural extinction risks don’t apply to natural pandemics. Or that might be a separate post.
• Developing - but not deploying - drastic backup plans
• “Macrostrategy”: Attempted definitions and related concepts
• This would relate in part to Ord’s concept of “grand strategy for humanity”
• Collection of notes
• A post summarising the ideas of existential risk factors and existential security factors?
• I suspect I won’t end up writing this, but I think someone should. For one thing, it’d be good to have something people can reference/link to that explains that idea (sort of like the role EA Concepts serves).