I finally got around to watching this. It was very well produced. I started crying at the end when the writer was reading about why she wrote her book. I'm really glad you made this. Thank you.

Ah, that's super cool. Thanks for sharing!

Hey Fin,

Thanks for so thoughtfully answering my questions!

Ah, thanks, Charlie! This is super helpful!

Thanks for sharing that. I feel like there cheating a bit by having the user enter in how many DALYs they think $1000 will prevent, lol.

Hi Fin,

I have a lot of questions so I figure I would just share all of them and you could respond to the ones you want to.

1. I think Forethought is a super cool institution. What advice would have for someone who wanted to work there as a researcher? Do you think it's important to have a strong understanding of how LLMs work?
2. I made this post where I categorized flourishing cause areas based on "How To Make The Future Better." I thought I'd share. I'm curious if this categorization generally aligns with how you think about the problem.
   1. Locking-in one’s values
   2. Ensuring the future is aligned with the correct values
      1. Working towards viatopia
      2. Promoting futures with more moral reflection
      3. Improving the ability for people with different views to get their desired futures
   3. Ensuring future people are able to create a good future
      1. Keeping humanity’s options open
      2. Improving global stability
      3. Improving future human’s decision making
      4. Empowering responsible actors
   4. Speeding up progress
3. I made this post which is an overview of longtermism's ideas, writings, individuals, institutions, and history. I thought I'd share since you made the longtermism website.
4. The Better Futures series assumes that the future will be net-positive by default. To me, the ideas presented in the series (strong self-modification, modification of descendants, selection of beliefs by evolutionary pressures) indicate that we should expect future humans to be very different from us, and that, as a result, we should expect the future to be neutral in expectation. Do you agree with this logic or do you think the future will be net-positive by default? Additionally, why?
5. Currently, there are a wide range of ideas about how a post-AGI future will go and what features it will contain. To me, this strongly indicates that we should expect the post-AGI future could go in a very broad range of ways and that we should prepare for the many different ways it could go. At the same time, I get the sense that Forethought has a very specific vision about how a post-AGI future will go (there will be an intelligence explosion, tools for epistemics will be beneficial, we might begin acquiring resources in other solar systems, small sets of actors could use AGI in malicious ways.) I'm wondering how do you decide what ideas you think are likely, and do you guys have any measures in place to ensure you're receiving criticism of your ideas so you don't create an epistemic bubble?
6. I understand that you have done some work related to space governance. A criticism I have of working on this field is that (1) it seems like it has been very intractable due to the lack of space treaties (2) if any great power has a decisive advantage, global treaties won't matter (3) even if you are able to get a law or treaty passed, corporate or state interests could easily override these laws later on (4) there's probably a low chance of success of even getting into a position where you could influence this stuff. As such, I'm wondering, if you think it's valuable for additional people to work in the field, why do you think this?
7. It seems like longtermism is an unhelpful idea since it requires people to believe that our actions could persist for millions of years. I personally am pretty skeptical of this, although I do think it is possible. It also seems like the idea has been somewhat harmful to EA as a movement since people can always point out that some of the founders of the movement are focused on helping people millions of years from now, which sounds pretty crazy. I'm wondering if you agree with this assessment.
8. In "How To Make The Future Better," MacAskill argues that we should make AIs encourage humans to be good people and use them as a source of moral reflection. This seems like it could be deeply problematic in case moral sense theory is true, but AIs lack a moral sense. Do you agree with this?

Hey Toby,

That's a great idea! Thanks for suggesting it!

Yeah, that's totally fair. I think the dynamics around public events probably vary a lot across the US.

And, yeah, I think I pretty much entirely agree with your second paragraph. Creating free in-person events from online platforms can only do so much.

Yeah, I see what you mean.

I'm reasonably idealistic in thinking that we could basically just do a bunch of interventions that make it easier to socialize and that would resolve most of the problem, but I'm definitely pessimistic that we could get much culture change, since it doesn't feel like there's much motion to do that. It seems hard to imagine an American culture that encourages people to actively socialize each week in community settings. And, the problem of "increasingly entertaining other options" is probably intractable.

I do think you're wrong about the platform thing though. As someone in their early 20s, I know pretty much no one who uses platforms other than Meetup and online forums/word of mouth/fliers to find events. As such, to me, it does feel like Meetup has a seriously monopoly. Additionally, a lot of people in my town will commonly say that they wish there more public events to go to so, at least where I live, it seems like supply of events is the real issue and not the events being too low quality.

I also think you're overemphasizing the need for group culture and leaders to be designed well, since I think this stuff just naturally arises in environments where typical people with shared interests come together.