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.
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.
A really fun graphic would be an asteroid bouncing off a shield and not hitting Earth
Yes, that would work as well, as long as it's clear to the viewer what is going on.
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.
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
On the other hand, commercial sites have long and detailed sales-letter-like pages, to select motivated customers and compel them better.
It might be worth to test this approach too. Copywriting would be however a necessary skill.
The audience who is interested in X-risk is probably cautious about big orange buttons anyway.
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.
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?
We belive that one asteroid(just one!) could be worth $1,000,000,000,000.
At... current market prices, or market prices once the asteroid is successfully caught and mining begins?
I don't know the exact numbers, nor how carefully that was found out. The point is that asteroids contain mor metals than we ever mined ever and that adds up to be a lot of money.
Well, if you consider that the asteroids would presumably be made of more-or-less the same stuff as the Earth, only spread out in small chunks instead of lumped into one great big ball that we can only get to a thin portion of the outer layer of (like Earth) it's easy to see that there's a great potential wealth of minerals and metals in there. (No oil or coal, though, as those require organics in order to form).
If you're going to be quoting exact figures, though, then you probably need to be aware of exactly where the figure comes from. Especially if the figure is particularly surprising.
Actually the number in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining is even larger than that: $20,000,000,000,000 .
This amount seems so large that I would expect metal prices to decrease substantially, but even if they would do so, the potential value is huge when someone finds a commercially viable manner to extract and especially fetch the ore.
Hmmm, looking at the citation brings me to this page...
According to John Lewis (a University of Arizona planetary scientist), for example, the smallest Earth-crossing asteroid 3554 Amun (see orbit) is a mile-wide (2,000-meter) lump of iron, nickel, cobalt, platinum, and other metals; it contains 30 times as much metal as Humans have mined throughout history, although it is only the smallest of dozens of known metallic asteroids and worth perhaps US$ 20 trillion if mined slowly to meet demand at 2001 market prices.
It seems that, as you point out, that value entirely fails to take into account the severe drop in price caused by the vast amount of metal suddenly on the market...
If all of those asteroids are owned by one company, then they can sell the metal of the asteroids for as much as it was before because they would be the only people with that much metal, having something similar to a monopoly. They would have the choice of lowering the value of the metals, because if they only made $10/ton. of metal and they sold 1 million tons, then they make ten million dollars. However, if a different company with ten tons of metal making $10/ton. of metal would make one hundred dollars, perhaps not be able to pay their workers, and go out of business. That would reduce competition for the company that caught the asteroid. However, if the company sold them for the same prices long-term they could make trillions of dollars.
Yeah, but in order to pull that off, they need to dribble the metal slowly enough into the market. Considering that they have significant up-front costs in getting the stuff, and furthermore considering that they have to deal with an economics phenomenon called the time value of money (basically, $100 now is worth more than $100 next year because if you have it now you can earn interest on it for a year), dribbling it into the market like that might just mean that they can never quite recover the value of their initial investment.
It seems to me that roughly similar capabilities are useful for mining asteroids and deflecting asteroids with known impact trajectories (i.e. step 2 in the Don't Die plan), and this puts this into the class of opportunities where succeeding gives you more than just not dying (like AGI).
On the other hand, asteroid mining technologies have some risks of their own, although this only reaches "existential" if somebody starts mining the big ones.
The largest nuclear weapon was the Tsar Bomba: 50 megatonnes of TNT, roughly equivalent to a 3.3-million-tonne impactor. Asteroids larger than this are thought to number in the tens of millions, and at the time of writing only 1.1 million had been provisionally identified. Asteroid shunting at or beyond this scale is by definition a trans-nuclear technology, which means a point comes where the necessary level of trust is unprecedented.
I hope the front page would be utilize some graphics. See this image for AGI risks: http://lesswrong.com/lw/mid/agi_safety_solutions_map/
If there would be similar graphics which you can press on, that would be great.
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. :-)