I like this, and it's simultaneously exciting and bewildering to take seriously the prospect of punting difficult things.

It could be worth emphasising more clearly that this is about (futurist) strategy, which is about as cognitive as things get. Other types of preparation and problem-solving have other critical inputs, and may face ~inherent delays. For those, 'punting' can look risky, especially if you expect later phases to move quite fast. This has bearing on strategy: it's worth attempting to foretell the kinds of lead-time-constrained preparation that might be needed to face upcoming challenges.

(A concrete example that stands out to me is bio monitoring and defenses. But in general I'd love to see more and richer work on characterising emerging threats, especially technological. Not necessarily from Forethought! Other kinds of lead-time-constrained activities might involve coalition building and spreading well-informed takes about important topics.)

Knowing these authors, my guess on ontology is that they might say that it could be instrumental in things like

• motivating progress in safer paradigms of AI development
• understanding 'hybrid' human-AI-org opportunities and threats
• figuring out what types of 'post early' conditions look favourable for dealing with the next challenges

These all look like activities with bearing on how to tackle 'early' challenges.

Helpful, thanks, I think I understand a little bit better now (still not yet sure what the specific tuple elements are doing)!

In case it's inspiring or can provoke useful critique, here are some areas where I think compounding/reuse can be really useful in epistemic activities are:

• claim decomposition of larger artefacts
• citation (and perhaps provenance) resolution
• clustering related claims and evidence
• collecting 'topics' (including perhaps differing perspectives on broad or narrow subjects)
• relating (especially, backlinking) claims which weaken/elaborate/refute other claims
• detecting loadbearing evidence or subclaims
• flagging scarcity of evidence or analysis

See also the collective epistemics discussion, if you haven't already, which I suspect might also be of interest to you!

Could you explain the community reuse thing again? I don't understand the tuples, but is the idea that query responses (which yield something like document sets?) can be cached with some identifiers? This helps future users by...? (Thinking: it can serve as a tag to a reproducible/amendable/updateable query, it can save someone running the exact same query again, ...)

That looks ambitious and awesome! I haven't looked deeply, but a few quick qs

• what do the costs look like to get embeddings for all those docs? How are you making choices about which embedding models to use and things like that?
• do you have qualitative (or quantitative?) sense of how well the semantic joins work for queries like the examples on the homepage?
• what's your sense of how this compares to tools like elicit?

Basically +1 here. I guess some relevant considerations are the extent to which a tool can act as antidote to its own (or related) misuse - and under what conditions of effort, attention, compute, etc. If that can be arranged, then 'simply' making sure that access is somewhat distributed is a help. On the other hand, it's conceivable that compute advantages or structural advantages could make misuse of a given tech harder to block, in which case we'd want to know that (without, perhaps, broadcasting it indiscriminately) and develop responses. Plausibly those dynamics might change nonlinearly with the introduction of epistemic/coordination tech of other kinds at different times.

In theory, it's often cheaper and easier to verify the properties of a proposal ('does it concentrate power?') than to generate one satisfying given properties, which gives an advantage to a defender if proposals and activity are mostly visible. But subtlety and obfuscation and misdirection can mean that knowing what properties to check for is itself a difficult task, tilting the other way.

Likewise, narrowly facilitating coordination might produce novel collusion with substantial negative externalities on outsiders. But then ex hypothesi those outsiders have an outsized incentive to block that collusion, if only they can foresee it and coordinate in turn.

It's confusing.

A nit

lifestyle supports the planet, rather than taking from it

appeals to me, I'm sure to some others, but (I sense) could come across with a particular political-tribal flavour, which you might want to try neutralising. (Or not! if that'd detract from the net appeal)

On point 1 (space colonization), I think it's hard and slow! So the same issue as with bio risks might apply: AGI doesn't get you this robustness quickly for free. See other comment on this post.

I like your point 2 about chancy vs merely uncertain. I guess a related point is that when the 'runs' of the risks are in some way correlated, having survived once is evidence that survivability is higher. (Up to an including the fully correlated 'merely uncertain' extreme?)