Ten Skills Our Civilization Needs

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 in...
More

Robust Good

People often underestimate how brittle attempts to improve the world are. Altruism, at a large scale, often hinges on a chain of assumptions/requirements, such as: A & B & C & D & E One broken link in the chain means it looks like you're doing good but you're not really doing it. For example, to help the world by delivering medicine, the chain might look like this: The medicine reliably cures the disease & the side effects are not worse than being...
More