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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?
LINK: Quora brainstorms strategies for containing AI risk
In case you haven't seen it yet, Quora hosted an interesting discussion of different strategies for containing / mitigating AI risk, boosted by a $500 prize for the best answer. It attracted sci-fi author David Brin, U. Michigan professor Igor Markov, and several people with PhDs in machine learning, neuroscience, or artificial intelligence. Most people from LessWrong will disagree with most of the answers, but I think the article is useful as a quick overview of the variety of opinions that ordinary smart people have about AI risk.
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.
Again, fair point -- if you are reading this, and you have experience designing websites, and you are willing to donate a couple of hours to build a very basic website, let us know!
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.
Sounds good to me. I'll keep an eye out for public domain images of the Earth exploding. If the starry background takes up enough of the image, then the overall effect will probably still hit the right balance between alarm and calm.
A really fun graphic would be an asteroid bouncing off a shield and not hitting Earth, but that might be too specific.
In response to
Help Build a Landing Page for Existential Risk?
I can probably write one of the hundred word descriptions. I also could probably make an image as well.
Great! Pick one and get started, please. If you can't decide which one to do, please do asteroids.
In response to
Help Build a Landing Page for Existential Risk?
Just wondering, where will the donated money actually go? An important thing to think about.
It would go to the best available charity that is working to fight that particular existential risk. For example, the 'donate' button for hostile AI might go to MIRI. The donate button for pandemics might go the Center for Disease Control, and the donate button for nuclear holocaust might go to the Global Threat Reduction Initiative. If we can't agree on which agency is best for a particular risk, we can pick one at random from the front-runners.
If you have ideas for which charities are the best for a particular risk, please share them here! That is part of the work that needs to get done.
In response to
Help Build a Landing Page for Existential Risk?
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/
Hi Dorikka,
Yes, I am also concerned that the banner is too visually complicated -- it's supposed to be a scene of a flooded garage workshop, suggesting both major problems and a potential ability to fix them, but the graphic is not at all iconic. If you have another idea for the banner (or can recommend a particular font that would work better), please chime in.
I am not convinced that www.existential-risk.org is a good casual landing page, because (a) most of the content is in the form of an academic CV, (b) there is no easy-to-read summary telling the reader about existential risks, and (c) there is no donate button.
Help Build a Landing Page for Existential Risk?
The Big Orange Donate Button
Traditional charities, like Oxfam, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International, almost all have a big orange button marked "Donate" right on the very first page that loads when you go to their websites. The landing page for a major charity usually also has vivid graphics and some short, easy-to-read text that tells you about an easy-to-understand project that the charity is currently working on.
I assume that part of why charities have converged on this design is that potential donors often have short attention spans, and that one of the best ways to maximize donations is to make it as easy as possible for casual visitors to the website to (a) confirm that they approve of the charity's work, and (b) actually make a donation. The more obstacles you put between google-searching on the name of a charity and the 'donate' button, the more people will get bored or distracted, and the fewer donations you'll get.
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any such streamlined interface for people who want to learn about existential risks and maybe donate some money to help prevent them. The website on existential risk run by the Future of Humanity Institute reads more like a syllabus or a CV than like an advertisement or a brochure -- there's nowhere to donate money; it's just a bunch of citations. The Less Wrong wiki page on x-risk is more concerned with defining and analyzing existential risks than it is with explaining, in simple concrete language, what problems currently threaten to wipe out humanity. The Center for the Study of Existential Risk has a landing page that focuses on a video of a TED talk that goes on for a full minute before mentioning any specific existential risks, and if you want to make a donation you have to click through three separate links and then fill out a survey. Heck, even the Skoll Global Threats Fund, which you would think would be, you know, designed to raise funds to combat global threats, has neither a donate button nor (so far as I can tell) a link to a donation page. These websites are *not* optimized for encouraging casual visitors to learn basic facts or make a donation.
A Landing Page for Casual Donors
That's fine with me; I imagine the leading x-risk websites are accomplishing other purposes that their owners feel are more important than catering to casual visitors -- but there ought to be at least one website that's meant for your buddy from high school who doesn't know or care about effective altruism, who expressed concern one night over a couple of beers that the world might be in some trouble, and who had a brief urge to do something about it. I want to help capture your buddy's urge to take action.
To that end, I've registered x-risk.com as a domain name, and I'm building a very simple website that will feature roughly 100 words of text about 10 of the most important existential risks, together with a photo or graphic that illustrates each risk, a "donate" button that takes you straight to a webpage that lets you donate to an organization working to prevent the risk, and a "learn more" button that takes you to a website with more detailed info on the risk. I will pay to host the website for one year, and if the website generates significant traffic, then I'll take up a collection to keep it going indefinitely.
Blurbs, Photos, and URLs
I would like your help generating content for the website -- if you are willing to write a 100-word blurb, if you own a useful photo (or can create one, or know of one in the public domain), or if you have the URL handy for a webpage that lets you donate money to mitigating or preventing a specific x-risk, please post it in the comments! I can, in theory, do all of that work myself, but I would prefer to make this more of a community project, and there is a significant risk that I will get bored and give up if I have to literally do it all myself.
Important: to avoid mind-killing debates, please do NOT contribute opinions about which risks are the most important unless you are ALSO contributing a blurb, photo, or URL in the same comment. Let's get the website built and launched first, and then we can always edit some of the pages later if there's a consensus in favor of including an additional x-risk. If you see someone sharing an opinion about the relative priority of risk and the opinion isn't right next to a useful resource, please vote that comment down until it disappears.
Thank you very much for your help! I hope to see you all in the future. :-)
i am curious what the nice use of hebrew is!
It's probably "Song of Light," or if you want a more literal translation, "Hymn to Light."
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"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
Does anyone know what happened to TC Chamberlin's proposal? In other words, shortly after 1897, did he in fact manage to spread better intellectual habits to other people? Why or why not?