Here are ten skills I believe our civilization needs, if we hope to create an amazing world instead of a dumpster fire.
1. Evidence evaluation
Converging on a valid consensus about what’s true based on evidence/argument (e.g., being able to converge as a society on questions like “climate change real, how bad will it get if we don’t act, and how quickly?”).
2. Coordination
Developing and applying mechanisms to avoid collective action problems (e.g., working to make it in nobody’s interest to engage in arms races, or to unilaterally develop highly dangerous tech).
3. Prioritization
Putting more resources into what creates more human flourishing per dollar, rather than just what sounds best (e.g., reducing spending on social programs and services that help little per dollar, and expanding spending on those that help a lot per dollar).
4. Experimentation
Trying different low-risk things based on their value of information with an attitude of rapid learning (e.g., try a societal change at small scale in multiple locations and carefully measure the effects before scaling it up to all of society).
5. Wise Capitalism
Finding areas where companies are making money by doing things that make the world worse, and purposely shifting incentives so that they can’t make money that way, or even better, so that they instead make money by creating benefit (e.g., right now many supplements are scams, animals on factory farms unnecessarily live appalling lives).
6. Science
Revamping science funding and the publication process. Remove existing rewards for doing bad science using shoddy methods that lead to “pretty” positive results ( instead incentivize pure truth seeking on the truly important topics, and incentivize replication).
7. Positive-sum Compromise
Reducing negative-sum fighting among groups and engaging in much greater positive-sum cooperation (instead of war) to take actions we all agree make society better (e.g., you prefer education system X, we prefer Y, so let’s use Z or X+Y which we all agree beats the current crap).
8. Risk
Developing a wise approach to proactively and appropriately preparing for big dangers that are uncertain (e.g., asteroids, pandemics, superintelligent AI, massive solar flares, nuclear war).
9. Long view
Being able to take actions that have a 10- or even 50-year perspective, rather than focusing on short-term optimization at the expense of the future (e.g., is there a safe nuclear power strategy that could transition society to clean, cheap power over 20 years?).
10. Anti-manipulation
Somehow creating strong punishments for politicians and media sites that lie or manipulate us (e.g., a politician should be disincentivized for using wildly inaccurate facts in writing or a speech). Democracy fails when manipulation is unpunished.
We have much work to do if we want our civilization to have a great chance of a bright future.
We may not get another chance. So let’s not screw this up.
This piece was first written on October 10, 2020 and first appeared on my website on July 29, 2026.
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