What disruptions are EAs especially well placed to mitigate?
I like this one. If you plan to do good in an uncertain future, it makes sense to take advantage of altruism’s risk neutrality and put a lot of effort into scenarios that are reasonably likely but also favour your own impact.
In the event of a major disruption or catastrophe such as a war or negative political event in the EA heartland, this would mean that global health work would suddenly become pretty useless—no-one would have the will or means to help distant (in space) people. But we would suddenly have much more leverage to help people who are distant in time, by trying to positively affect any recovery of civilisation. That could be by making it happen sooner, or by giving it some form of aid that is cheap for us. Robust preservation of information is a good idea. If there were a major disaster that destroyed the internet and most servers, and then a long period of civilisational downtime, it might make sense to try and save and distribute key information, for example Wikipedia, the, certain key books, sites, courses, etc.
There might also be attempts to distort history in a very thorough way. Perhaps steps can be taken against this.
I like this one. If you plan to do good in an uncertain future, it makes sense to take advantage of altruism’s risk neutrality and put a lot of effort into scenarios that are reasonably likely but also favour your own impact.
In the event of a major disruption or catastrophe such as a war or negative political event in the EA heartland, this would mean that global health work would suddenly become pretty useless—no-one would have the will or means to help distant (in space) people. But we would suddenly have much more leverage to help people who are distant in time, by trying to positively affect any recovery of civilisation. That could be by making it happen sooner, or by giving it some form of aid that is cheap for us. Robust preservation of information is a good idea. If there were a major disaster that destroyed the internet and most servers, and then a long period of civilisational downtime, it might make sense to try and save and distribute key information, for example Wikipedia, the, certain key books, sites, courses, etc.
There might also be attempts to distort history in a very thorough way. Perhaps steps can be taken against this.