What level of societal risk is too much to dismiss?

Suppose that if we humans keep doing an activity, then we'll have at least a P percent chance of causing the most horrible series of events so far in human history within 50 years. How big does P need to be before it's irresponsible to say, "Well, the horrible event is unlikely to happen, so let's not worry about it"? 50% (1 in 2)?5% (1 in 20)?1% (1 in 100)?0.1% (1 in 1,000)?0.01%? (1 in 10,000)?0.001%? (1 in 100,000)?0.0001%? (1 in 1,000,000)? To me, it seems bizarre to dismiss a thre...
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Tough Questions about Utopia

Some tough questions for you about utopia (along with my very tentative and very likely wrong guesses for answers): If you were attempting to design a true utopia for ten million people on an obscure island deep out in the ocean, and you had total control over institutions and unlimited money, but you could NOT change human nature or human psychology then:(a) what would you hope people would spend their time doing in this utopia?(b) how would you incentivize people to actually spend their t...
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The Value of the Unsaid Obvious

Some thoughts on the, potentially very large, value of ideas that are both obvious and obscure, and why I like to try to state the "unsaid obvious": The space of possible ideas is ABSURDLY, almost UNBELIEVABLY large. If we thought about a different idea every second for our entire lives, we wouldn't begin to scratch the surface. As a simple example, let's consider the number of two-player competitive games played on an 8x8 chessboard, where each player starts with 16 pieces and each piece...
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