Thanks Aaron! We got to know Yasmine during our time based at the Cambridge Conservation Initiative. She was working there at the time, became a regular at our talks and discussions, and has remained involved with us since.
Ground Zero Earth is her initiative, although she has sought intellectual input from us throughout. She secured funding for it through an arts council grant. So from our side, it was a low-cost way to be involved with a pretty cool project.
This hasn’t been an explicit part of our agenda, although it fits with our broader aim of engaging across society on existential risk and long-term thinking. With that said, we’ve engaged with and included a number of artists and cultural scholars who have reached out to us (e.g. Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox: https://kathrynbrimblecombeart.blogspot.com/2018/06/existential-risk-research-art.html and a few of our researchers including Adrian Currie and myself have spoken at cultural events of different sorts. E.g. recently, CSER’s Luke Kemp took part in an event organised by the Long Term Inquiry in London (https://medium.com/@thelongtimeinquiry/the-long-time-3383b43d42ab) which aims to be a cultural equivalent of CSER, considering topics such as our responsibility to future generations, etc.
Re: audiences and benefits of this sort of engagement, I don’t think I can give an answer of EA-level rigour here (as a scientist, this isn’t my area of comparative competence) so I’ll wait for someone else from our group to chime in. But I’d make the broad (and I imagine, obvious) point that there’s probably a lot to be said for engaging with arts and culture when it comes to engaging broader communities (and probably also scientific and policy experts) in thinking about somewhat abstract ideas such as existential risk and our responsibility to the future. I see this as complementary to the sort of scientific and governance-focused research that makes up the mainstay of our work.
Thanks Aaron! We got to know Yasmine during our time based at the Cambridge Conservation Initiative. She was working there at the time, became a regular at our talks and discussions, and has remained involved with us since.
Ground Zero Earth is her initiative, although she has sought intellectual input from us throughout. She secured funding for it through an arts council grant. So from our side, it was a low-cost way to be involved with a pretty cool project.
This hasn’t been an explicit part of our agenda, although it fits with our broader aim of engaging across society on existential risk and long-term thinking. With that said, we’ve engaged with and included a number of artists and cultural scholars who have reached out to us (e.g. Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox: https://kathrynbrimblecombeart.blogspot.com/2018/06/existential-risk-research-art.html and a few of our researchers including Adrian Currie and myself have spoken at cultural events of different sorts. E.g. recently, CSER’s Luke Kemp took part in an event organised by the Long Term Inquiry in London (https://medium.com/@thelongtimeinquiry/the-long-time-3383b43d42ab) which aims to be a cultural equivalent of CSER, considering topics such as our responsibility to future generations, etc.
Re: audiences and benefits of this sort of engagement, I don’t think I can give an answer of EA-level rigour here (as a scientist, this isn’t my area of comparative competence) so I’ll wait for someone else from our group to chime in. But I’d make the broad (and I imagine, obvious) point that there’s probably a lot to be said for engaging with arts and culture when it comes to engaging broader communities (and probably also scientific and policy experts) in thinking about somewhat abstract ideas such as existential risk and our responsibility to the future. I see this as complementary to the sort of scientific and governance-focused research that makes up the mainstay of our work.