Today, Forethought and I are releasing an essay series called Better Futures, here.[1] It’s been something like eight years in the making, so I’m pretty happy it’s finally out! It asks: when looking to the future, should we focus on surviving, or on flourishing? In practice at least, future-oriented altruists tend to focus on ensuring we survive (or are not permanently disempowered by some valueless AIs). But maybe we should focus on future flourishing, instead.  Why?  Well, even if we survive, we probably just get a future that’s a small fraction as good as it could have been. We could, instead, try to help guide society to be on track to a truly wonderful future.    That is, I think there’s more at stake when it comes to flourishing than when it comes to survival. So maybe that should be our main focus. The whole essay series is out today. But I’ll post summaries of each essay over the course of the next couple of weeks. And the first episode of Forethought’s video podcast is on the topic, and out now, too. The first essay is Introducing Better Futures: along with the supplement, it gives the basic case for focusing on trying to make the future wonderful, rather than just ensuring we get any ok future at all. It’s based on a simple two-factor model: that the value of the future is the product of our chance of “Surviving” and of the value of the future, if we do Survive, i.e. our “Flourishing”.  (“not-Surviving”, here, means anything that locks us into a near-0 value future in the near-term: extinction from a bio-catastrophe counts but if valueless superintelligence disempowers us without causing human extinction, that counts, too. I think this is how “existential catastrophe” is often used in practice.) The key thought is: maybe we’re closer to the “ceiling” on Survival than we are to the “ceiling” of Flourishing.  Most people (though not everyone) thinks we’re much more likely than not to Survive this century.  Metaculus puts *extinction* risk at about 4

This is a crosspost from my new Substack Power and Priorities where I’ll be posting about power grabs, AI governance strategy, and prioritization, as well as some more general thoughts on doing useful things.  Tl;dr I argue that maintaining nonpartisan norms on the EA Forum, in public communications by influential community members, and in funding decisions may be more costly than people realize. Lack of discussion in public means that people don’t take political issues as seriously as they should, research which depends on understanding the political situation doesn’t get done, and the community moves forward with a poor model of probably the most consequential actor in the world for any given cause area - the US government. Importantly, I don’t mean to say most community members shouldn’t maintain studious nonpartisanship! I merely want to argue that we should be aware of the downsides and do what we can to mitigate them.    Why nonpartisan norms in EA are a big deal Individual politicians (not naming names) are likely the most important single actors affecting the governance of AI. The same goes for most of the cause areas EAs care about. While many prominent EAs think political issues may be a top priority, and politics is discussed somewhat behind closed doors, there is almost no public discussion of politics. I argue the community’s lack of a public conversation about the likely impacts of these political actors and what to do in response to them creates large costs for how the community thinks about and addresses important issues (i.e. self-censorship matters actually). Some of these costs include:  * Perceived unimportance: I suspect a common, often subconscious, thought is, 'no prominent EAs are talking about politics publicly so it's probably not as big of a deal as it seems'. Lack of public conversation means social permission is never granted to discuss the issue as a top priority, it means the topic comes up less & so is thought about less, and i

Context: I’m a senior fellow at Conservation X Labs (CXL), and I’m seeking support as I attempt to establish a program on humane rodent fertility control in partnership with the Wild Animal Initiative (WAI) and the Botstiber Institute for Wildlife Fertility Control (BIWFC). CXL is a biodiversity conservation organization working in sustainable technologies, not an animal welfare organization. However, CXL leadership is interested in simultaneously promoting biodiversity conservation and animal welfare, and they are excited about the possibility of advancing applied research that make it possible to ethically limit rodent populations to protect biodiversity.  I think this represents the wild animal welfare community’s first realistic opportunity to bring conservation organizations into wild animal welfare work while securing substantial non-EA funding for welfare-improving interventions.  Background Rodenticides cause immense suffering to (likely) hundreds of millions of rats and mice annually through anticoagulation-induced death over several days, while causing significant non-target harm to other animals. In the conservation context, rodenticides are currently used in large-scale island rat and mouse eradications as a way of protecting endemic species. But these rodenticides kill lots of native species in addition to the mice and rats. So advancements in fertility control would be a benefit to both conservation- and welfare-focused stakeholders. CXL is a respected conservation organization with a track record of securing follow-on investments for technologies we support (see some numbers below). We are interested in co-organizing a "Big Think" workshop with WAI and BIWFC. The event will launch an open innovation program (e.g., a prize or a challenge process) to accelerate fertility control development. The program would specifically target island conservation applications where conservation groups are already motivated to replace rodenticides, but would likely