Getting academic here..
The search for impact of improved governance vs governance activity indicators (board hires etc..) will always be tough. This is due to the "prevented disaster" issue: Success is measured by the absence of incidents. In a young, data poor, secretive or poorly defined sector, statistical work with public data may end up with void or misleading result.
In industry , over the last 100+ years, the general trend has been to note the universality of the risks ( as we are all human), the regularity of serious incidents pub...
Dear all
An interesting thread.
For what is worth, I have over 15 years experience observing governance failures at different levels in organization where I work (that shall name anonymous), as well a "bad actor" incident within one of the multiple project specific teams that I have developed and then disbanded or transferred once the work was complete. I fully agree with the analysis and the first part of the response/mitigation measure proposed by Grayden.
In addition, looking the EA sector personnel profiles and reading some of their posts, wha...
Hi Gideon and thanks for the response. Interesting and important project you are working on... I will follow up 1:1.
Specifically on your response on framing efforts, I think any framing or initiating of contingency planning for the failure of mainstream efforts to avert catastrophe is going to be problematic and unpopular. However that does not mean that it should not be addresed and serious work started. Here's my thoughts on this stream...
In simplistic terms, Plan A/ global mainstream efforts, such as CC mitigation, at least in presenta...
Forgive me for dropping a new and potentially shallow point in on this discussion. The intellectual stimulation from the different theoretical approaches, thought experiments and models is clear. It is great to stretch the mind and nurture new concepts – but otherwise I question their utility and priority, given our situation today.
We do not need to develop pure World A and World B style thought experiments on the application of EA concepts, for want of other opportunities to test the model. We (collectively, globally), have literally dozens of...
Dear colleagues.
Thanks Seth for this comprehensive effort.
This is a complex piece of highly personal work, which tries hard to do many different things for a diverse audience in one fluid package. Given this very difficult target, it understandably only partially succeeds. Nonetheless within it I am sure many will find some new information, perspectives and links. Rather than critique it any further, I would prefer to follow on just one of the many discussion topics it opens up : climate change (CC) and existential risk (XR). My argument is tha...
Congratulations on a very interesting piece of work, and on the courage to set out ideas on a topic that by its speculative nature will draw significant critique.
Very positive that you decided on a definition for "civilizational collapse", as this is broadly and loosely discussed without the associated use of common terminology and meaning.
A suggested further/side topic for work on civilizational collapse and consequences is more detailed work on the hothouse earth scenario (runaway cliamte change leading to 6C+ warming + ocean chemistry change...
Interesting discussion, but I suggest in part going back to basics. I feel it would be helpful to mentally divide the nature of what is being discussed and at times hastily tossed into this forum into three general topics:
A. intellectual diversity and an interesting debate space , which helps us all look deeper into the real issues EA was initiated to try to address.
B. Governance failures and personnel misconduct : financial and legal red cards and suspicions, personnel scandals, examples of bad and very bad behaviour within or on the fringes o... (read more)