It also resembles the light cone which is nice. I would consider putting more sand in the top though, and less in the bottom. Hopefully we have more time left than that!
An alternative is to just have the hourglass as a symbol/logo, and not a flag. There is an EA symbol (the lightbulb) but no flag.
Also, one might consider making the hourglass less stylised, and to drop the X-risk symbolism. Longtermism isn’t intrinsically tied to X-risk. One approach would be to strictly focus on the long time duration, and drop associations with X-risk, space colonisation, and so on. It depends on how one conceives of longtermism.
I like this much better! I like the colour scheme, I like the simplicity, and I (mostly) like the symbolism.
Per Larks’s comment, I’d like to see a version with the top triangle all yellow and the bottom one all blue, to indicate how much bigger the future could be than the past.
One wrinkle on the symbolism: an hourglass typically represents not just time, but limited time; time that is running out. Think e.g. the fact that Death is often associated with an hourglass.
This works great for the avoiding-X-risks angle, but I’m not sure it best conveys the vast abundance of time the long-term future might contain. Sure, it’s still (probably) finite, but I don’t think its finitude is core to the concept of longtermism.
Of course, we could always change the flag after dealing with the X-risks.
Another, simpler concept:
The hourglass represents time, as well as an “X” shape for X-risk.
It also resembles the light cone which is nice. I would consider putting more sand in the top though, and less in the bottom. Hopefully we have more time left than that!
An alternative is to just have the hourglass as a symbol/logo, and not a flag. There is an EA symbol (the lightbulb) but no flag.
Also, one might consider making the hourglass less stylised, and to drop the X-risk symbolism. Longtermism isn’t intrinsically tied to X-risk. One approach would be to strictly focus on the long time duration, and drop associations with X-risk, space colonisation, and so on. It depends on how one conceives of longtermism.
I think it looks a bit too much like pizza, though.
I like this much better! I like the colour scheme, I like the simplicity, and I (mostly) like the symbolism.
Per Larks’s comment, I’d like to see a version with the top triangle all yellow and the bottom one all blue, to indicate how much bigger the future could be than the past.
One wrinkle on the symbolism: an hourglass typically represents not just time, but limited time; time that is running out. Think e.g. the fact that Death is often associated with an hourglass.
This works great for the avoiding-X-risks angle, but I’m not sure it best conveys the vast abundance of time the long-term future might contain. Sure, it’s still (probably) finite, but I don’t think its finitude is core to the concept of longtermism.
Of course, we could always change the flag after dealing with the X-risks.
(It now occurs that the phrase “time is running out” might actually be an hourglass metaphor.)