This might be a dumb question, but shouldn’t we be preserving more elementary resources to rebuild a flourishing society? Current EA is kind of only meaningful in a society with sufficient abundant resources to go into nonprofit work. It feels like there are bigger priorities in the case of sub-x-risk.
I’ve definitely thought about this and short answer: depends on who “we” is.
A sort of made up particular case I was imagining is “New Zealand is fine, everywhere else totally destroyed” because I think it targets the general class of situation most in need of action (I can justify this on its own terms but I’ll leave it for now)
In that world, there’s a lot of information that doesn’t get lost: everything stored in the laptops and servers/datacenters of New Zealand (although one big caveat and the reason I abandoned the website is that I lost confidence that info physically encoded in eg a cloud server in NZ would be de facto accessible without a lot of the internet’s infrastructure physically located elsewhere), everything in all its university libraries, etc.
That is a gigantic amount of info, and seems to pretty clearly satisfy the “general info to rebuild society” thing. FWIW I think this holds if only a medium size city were to remain intact, not certain if it’s say a single town in Northern Canada, probably not a tiny fishing village, but in the latter case it’s hard to know what a tractable intervention would be.
But what does get lost? Anything niche enough not to be downloaded on a random NZers computer or in a physical book in a library. Not everything I put in the archive, to be sure, but probably most of it.
Also, 21GB of the type of info I think you’re getting at is in the “non EA info for the post apocalypse folder” because why not! :)
That was my first thought, but I expect many other individuals/institutions have already made large efforts to preserve such info, whereas this is probably the only effort to preserve core EA ideas (at least in one place)? And it looks like the third folder—“Non-EA stuff for the post-apocalypse”—contains at least some of the elementary resources you have in mind here.
But yeah, I’m much more keen to preserve arguments for radical empathy, scout mindset, moral uncertainty etc. than, say, a write-up of the research behind HLI’s charity recommendations. Maybe it would also be good to have an even small folder within “Main content (3GB)” with just the core ideas; the “EA Handbook” (39MB) sub-folder could perhaps serve such a purpose in the meantime.
Might be worth buying a physical copy of The Knowledge too (I just have).
And if anyone’s looking for a big project...
If we take catastrophic risks seriously and want humanity to recover from a devastating shock as far and fast as possible, producing such a guide before it’s too late might be one of the higher-impact projects someone could take on.
Another easy thing you can do, which I did several years ago, is download Kiwix onto your phone, which allows you to save offline versions of references such as Wikipedia, WikiHow, and way, way more. Then also buy a solar-powered or hand-crank USB charger (often built into disaster radios such as this one which I purchased).
For extra credit, store this data on an old phone you no longer use, and keep that and the disaster radio in a Faraday bag.
This might be a dumb question, but shouldn’t we be preserving more elementary resources to rebuild a flourishing society? Current EA is kind of only meaningful in a society with sufficient abundant resources to go into nonprofit work. It feels like there are bigger priorities in the case of sub-x-risk.
I’ve definitely thought about this and short answer: depends on who “we” is.
A sort of made up particular case I was imagining is “New Zealand is fine, everywhere else totally destroyed” because I think it targets the general class of situation most in need of action (I can justify this on its own terms but I’ll leave it for now)
In that world, there’s a lot of information that doesn’t get lost: everything stored in the laptops and servers/datacenters of New Zealand (although one big caveat and the reason I abandoned the website is that I lost confidence that info physically encoded in eg a cloud server in NZ would be de facto accessible without a lot of the internet’s infrastructure physically located elsewhere), everything in all its university libraries, etc.
That is a gigantic amount of info, and seems to pretty clearly satisfy the “general info to rebuild society” thing. FWIW I think this holds if only a medium size city were to remain intact, not certain if it’s say a single town in Northern Canada, probably not a tiny fishing village, but in the latter case it’s hard to know what a tractable intervention would be.
But what does get lost? Anything niche enough not to be downloaded on a random NZers computer or in a physical book in a library. Not everything I put in the archive, to be sure, but probably most of it.
Also, 21GB of the type of info I think you’re getting at is in the “non EA info for the post apocalypse folder” because why not! :)
That was my first thought, but I expect many other individuals/institutions have already made large efforts to preserve such info, whereas this is probably the only effort to preserve core EA ideas (at least in one place)? And it looks like the third folder—“Non-EA stuff for the post-apocalypse”—contains at least some of the elementary resources you have in mind here.
But yeah, I’m much more keen to preserve arguments for radical empathy, scout mindset, moral uncertainty etc. than, say, a write-up of the research behind HLI’s charity recommendations. Maybe it would also be good to have an even small folder within “Main content (3GB)” with just the core ideas; the “EA Handbook” (39MB) sub-folder could perhaps serve such a purpose in the meantime.
Anyway, cool project! I’ve downloaded :)
Yeah i guess that makes sense. But uh.… have other institutions actually made large efforts to preserve such info? Which institutions? Which info?
Huh, maybe not.
Might be worth buying a physical copy of The Knowledge too (I just have).
And if anyone’s looking for a big project...
Another easy thing you can do, which I did several years ago, is download Kiwix onto your phone, which allows you to save offline versions of references such as Wikipedia, WikiHow, and way, way more. Then also buy a solar-powered or hand-crank USB charger (often built into disaster radios such as this one which I purchased).
For extra credit, store this data on an old phone you no longer use, and keep that and the disaster radio in a Faraday bag.
All done :-) (already had a solar/crank charger+radio). Thank you!