Making the future better may matter as much as avoiding extinction

From the conversation

Fantastic. You're also the author of a an a series of essays called Better Futures, which is the main thing we're talking about today. So yeah, tell us about that series. What are you trying to do here? What's the key takeaway? Uh, sure. So this these are a set of ideas I've been thinking about for many years now. And so I'm happy I finally got to write them up [clears throat] properly. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Um, but the basic thought is that if we care about the future going well, there are two different ways in which you can make that future go well. One is that you can prevent uh an existential catastrophe. So that's human extinction or something comparably bad, something that makes the future, you know, very close to zero value. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Or you can try and make the future better given that no existential catastrophe occurs. And historically, most of the focus from people concerned about the long-term future, at least since Nick Bosam's early work on this has been about preventing existential catastrophe. So Nick Bosam even says, you know, follow a maxipo principle. Maximize the probability of an okay outcome where an okay outcome means no existential catastrophe. Mhm. And what I'm arguing in this series is that better futures, namely trying to make the future better, conditional on there being no catastrophe, is at in at least the same ballpark of priority as reducing existential catastrophe itself.…