All of elteerkers's Comments + Replies

Thanks for your comment!

Agree with your pros and cons.

"Existential security" seems like a great one within EA.

Have not seen the "procedural visions" one! Thanks for recommending it, will look.

On your course question: As we are currently working on something similar to this at Foresight right now I will answer similarly to what we are thinking of adding there. Which is to do ambitious worldbuilding in groups of 4-5 people with complementary skill sets. Will share more when our resources are online for that!

Thank you! :)

1
SebastianSchmidt
5mo
Glad it was useful. Looking forward to seeing the course (fortunate that you had reached out to request feedback on it). 

Thanks for the question!

I would say that it's not that people aren't aware of risks, my broad reflection is more in terms of how one relates to it. In the EA/X-risk community it is clear that one should take these things extremely seriously and do everything one can to prevent them. I often feel that even though researchers in general are very aware of potential risks with their technologies, they seem to get swept up in the daily business of just doing their work, and not reflecting very actively over the potential risks with it.

I don't know exactly why t... (read more)

That's a good point. I'm unsure of what the best way of facilitating these meetings would be, so that it doesn't downplay the seriousness of the questions. But assuming good intentions, allowing for disagreements, and acknowledging the differences is enough and the best option.

Agree it doesn't represent “the STEM community”. As in my reply to Jessica's longer comment, I agree there isn’t really such a thing as “the STEM community”, and if I were to write the post now I would want to better reflect the fact that this was asked to the Foresight community, in which most participants are working in one of our technical fields: neurotech, space tech, nanotech, biotech or computation. In the survey I ask if people identify themselves as STEM professionals, a question to which most answered yes (85% of respondents in this v. small survey).

Hi Jessica, thank you so much for your thorough read and response! I found it very useful.

I agree there isn’t really such a thing as “the STEM community”, and if I were to write the post now I would want to better reflect the fact that this was asked to the Foresight community, in which most participants are working in one of our technical fields: neurotech, space tech, nanotech, biotech or computation. In the survey I ask if people identify themselves as STEM professionals, a question to which most answered yes (85% of respondents in this v. small survey)... (read more)

Good point! Are there any other X-risk communities you think we should look at, other than the ones already active within EA?

3
DavidNash
1y
I meant the communities/organisations that have overlap with EA but focused on a specific cause, but it would be useful to connect people to less EA related orgs like the Nuclear Threat Initiative, CEPI, etc. It seems like there is less field building for existential risk but also not that much within specific causes compared with the amount of EA specific field building there has been. This seems to be changing though with things like the Summit on Existential Security this year, and updates being made by people at EA organisations (mentioned by @trevor1 in another comment).

i've been considering it also actually! thank you for recommendation :)

1
Devin Kalish
1y
No problem! To be clear I only went once, years ago, so I might try to talk to someone who has been more recently too if you consider it.

Thank you for the recommendation! Will reach out.

Wow I appreciate this document! Especially the "Pressing problems" section. Thank you. I will look more closely at it later.

Agree that the range is very large, we tried to narrow it down to feature film documentaries, but probably ended up including a bit more in terms of format. For example the question of Youtube vs. Documentary movie on streaming platform is interesting to me. My initial thinking on it is that movie documentaries are better for reaching "top down" - it might be able to get you more mainstream media attention, etc. But Youtube is better for "bottom up" - reaching people directly. So the different formats are probably better for different topics.

FLI's short clips on slaughterbots are interesting as a concept in relation to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rDo1QxI260

Yes! Will actually also mentioned Participant media in his chat. He mentioned it in relation to them funding the movie "Contagion".

7
jared_m
2y
Didn't realize Participant had produced Contagion, as well! Reviewing the list of Participant films , I realize that I saw three of the four 2005 movies they were involved in (the trio that doesn't include Murderball) in theaters or shortly after they came out. All three had a lasting impact on my thinking re: ethics, society, etc.

Again, speaking only for myself and not my co-author in these comments!

I like your framing of trying out smaller (still ambitious enough though!) and potentially growing. I also think that if we were to produce this type of material on the EA movement that there is so much high quality work that has already been done that could be re-used (while still giving credit to the original creators) that could at least guarantee a relatively high quality to the production in terms of content.

In terms of how one could make a documentary impactful, I also think there... (read more)

Speaking only for myself and not my co-author, but my spontaneous reaction to your reply is that I agree with what you are saying regarding that this (an EA mindset documentary) would be what would stand out the most among the content that is already out there.

My feeling is still that EA movement would be very opposed to this? My perception has always been that there is such a large emphasis on nuanced communication regarding EA and a preference to always err on the side of caution regarding any "promotion" of the EA movement. Maybe what would be better wo... (read more)

Hi! We just wrote a post on EA documentaries so would be interested to hear more about your thoughts on it and discuss further: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rF7D78va9pf3mtHFh/should-we-produce-more-ea-related-documentaries-1

Thanks for posting about this David! 

I work at Foresight Institute and I just wanted to let people who are interested in these sort of things know that we interviewed Christine Peterson (Foresight's founder) and asked her what she thought would be a potential Eucatastrophe, and she suggested "a dog that has died and been brought back to life from cryogenics", so we also have a bounty up on describing that (+ an art piece visualizing it) ! All the bounties + the podcast episode are linked from here: https://www.existentialhope.com 

No we haven't! But that sounds like something that could be super impactful. What language would be the most important ones? Mandarin and Spanish?

I loved this post!! This website has a bunch of art collected that people have submitted because it  inspires them to feel existential hope: https://www.existentialhope.com. It's not been updated for a few years now but I work for Foresight Institute who created the website and this year we are going to do a big re-vamping of it. If you have more of this type content I think it would be great to feature on the XHope web :)