"The remedy lies, indeed, partly in charity, but more largely in correct intellectual habits, in a predominant, ever-present disposition to see things as they are, and to judge them in the full light of an unbiased weighing of evidence applied to all possible constructions, accompanied by a withholding of judgment when the evidence is insufficient to justify conclusions.

I believe that one of the greatest moral reforms that lies immediately before us consists in the general introduction into social and civic life of that habit of mental procedure which is known in investigation as the method of multiple working hypotheses. "

-T. C. Chamberlin from: http://www.mantleplumes.org/WebDocuments/Chamberlin1897.pdf

This is my blurb.

Asteroids pose a risk towards life on earth. An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. They pose enough threat that [U.S. and Russia are working together to hunt down asteroids](https://newsela.com/articles/asteroid-crowdsource/id/3960/). In fact, [an asteroid landed in Russia in February 2013 and was 65-feet wide with the force of 500,000 tons of TNT](https://newsela.com/articles/asteroid-crowdsource/id/3960/). However, asteroids could be very valuable to us.If caught, asteroids could be worth one-trillion dollars! They contain more metals than we have ever mined ever! In space, the value of asteroids could be more because of one substance: water. We could potentially separate the water into hydrogen and then use the hydrogen as fuel. This is very money saving because it takes a lot of fuel to move places because if you take fuel to move farther that fuel adds weight so you have to add fuel to carry that fuel and add fuel to carry that fuel… If we make more fuel in space then we get out of that loop. Asteroids pose a potential value to earn lots of money and send space ships farther out than we have before but also a threat of killing thousands.

Also, can I write in my asteroid essay the potential helpfullness of asteroids? We belive that one asteroid(just one!) could be worth $1,000,000,000,000. In other words, catching one asteroid could be worth one-trillion dollars. Could I mention that in my hundred word blurb?

Do you know anyone who has done website design, like as an actual job? May want to ask them. I can really just say whether something does or doesn't look right to me - honestly wouldn't know where to start recommending fonts and stuff.

I agree with Dorikka - that banner image is, well, not the best. I did not even notice that the workshop was flooded until I saw you point it out in this post; I thought it merely had a shiny floor and a low workbench (and took no particular notice of either detail).

If I may make a recommendation, I would suggest a mostly-black banner, with a few stars (i.e. a view of space) with, on the far right, a picture of Earth blowing up (something along the lines of this image - though, of course, not exactly that image because of copyright, but along those lines).

Have the text white, in one image, with a transparent background, left-aligned; and the space/Earth image as a different image behind it, right-aligned; then your banner will still look good on any screen resolution.

I think that would make a good, attention-grabbing banner.

I can probably write one of the hundred word descriptions. I also could probably make an image as well.

Just wondering, where will the donated money actually go? An important thing to think about.

Thanks for your effort. As with many PR efforts, I would classify this one as either positive or negative; I would not intuitively expect a neutral result to occur (unless you had very few unique visitors), but that the website would shape visitor's perceptions of x-risk, either positively or negatively. Just something to keep in mind. On a more concrete level, I have trouble parsing the banner shown behind the "Existentially Risky" title in your screenshot. The combination of font and banner seems sketchy to me.

It doesn't appear to be optimized as you mention, but are you familiar with this page? http://www.existential-risk.org/

i am curious what the nice use of hebrew is!

You might be wrestling with a hard trade-off between wanting to do as much good as possible and wanting to fit in well with a respected peer group. Those are both good things to want, and it's not obvious to me that you can maximize both of them at the same time.

I have some thoughts on your concepts of "special snowflake" and "advice that doesn't generalize." I agree that you are not a special snowflake in the sense of being noticeably smarter, more virtuous, more disciplined, whatever than the other nurses on your shift. I'll concede that you and them have -basically- the same character traits, personalities, and so on. But my guess is that the cluster of memes hanging out in your prefrontal cortex is more attuned to strategy than their meme-clusters -- you have a noticeably different set of beliefs and analytical tools. Because strategic meme-clusters are very rare compared to how useful they are, having those meme-clusters makes you "special" in a meaningful way even if in all other respects you are almost identical to your peers. The 1% more-of-the-time that you spend strategizing about how best to accomplish goals can double or triple your effectiveness at many types of tasks, so your small difference in outlook leads to a large difference in what kinds of activities you want to devote your life to. That's OK.

Similarly, I agree with you that it would be bad if all the nurses in your ward quit to enter politics -- someone has to staff the bloody ward, or no amount of political re-jiggering will help. The algorithm that I try to follow when I'm frustrated that the advice I'm giving myself doesn't seem to generalize is to first check and see if -enough- people are doing Y, and then switch from X to Y if and only if fewer-than-enough people are doing Y. As a trivial example, if forty of my friends and I are playing soccer, we will probably all have more fun if one of us agrees to serve as a referee. I can't offer the generally applicable advice "You should stop kicking the ball around and start refereeing." That would be stupid advice; we'd have forty referees and no ball game. But I can say "Hm, what is the optimal number of referees? Probably 2 or 3 people out of the 40 of us. How many people are currently refereeing? Hm, zero. If I switch from playing to refereeing, we will all have more fun. Let me check and see if everyone is making the same leap at the same time and scrambling to put on a striped shirt. No? OK, cool, I'll referee for a while." That last long quote is fully generalizable advice -- I wish literally everyone would follow it, because then we'd wind up with close to an optimal number of referees.