Existential risk- I'm not sure. That's what I'm researching now. I've decided to become more strategic (because I'm not automatically) and so I have a copy of Bostrom's "global catastrophic risks" that I'm reading right now. I also tried to read the FOOM debate between Hanson and Yudkowsky, but I felt that I wasn't knowledgeable enough to assign probabilities to the scenarios. I feel that in order to better understand the risks I need to 1. Encourage people to use more structured forms of debate like this website called knowledgemapping or debategraphs.org. 2. Study math.
Talents- being young (17), smart , athletic, funny, ambitious, well-read. I'm learning programming and business right now through self-study (in addition to my coursework).
Being 18 I'm in a pretty similar situation to yourself, and I've looked extensively into the whole problem.
The things you mention as talents are actually qualities, programing on the other hand counts as a skill (of course if you're particularly good at it, it counts as a talent).
What you need to look for is your Element (to use Sir Ken Robinson's concept). While it is all well and noble to pick what you want to do on the basis of mitigating existential risk your best bet is to find something you're both good at and passionate about (your talent). Then wor...
It's one thing to read about a subject, but one gains a deeper understanding by seeing it applied to real problems, and an even deeper understanding by applying it yourself. This applies in particular to the closely related subjects of rationality, cognitive biases, and decision theory. With this in mind, I'd like to propose that we create one or more discussion topics each devoted to discussing and analyzing one decision problem of one person, and see how all this theory we've been discussing can help. The person could be either a Less Wrong member or just an acquaintance of one of us.
I'll commit to actively participating myself. Does anyone want to put forth a problem to discuss?