New blog: Cold Takes

I’ve started a (free) blog/​newsletter at https://​​www.cold-takes.com .

The target audience for many posts will be people who are interested in EA-ish topics, but don’t necessarily have any background in them. Sharing the blog and/​or its posts in ways that are likely to find readers like that would be appreciated.

The longer and more EA-relevant pieces will be cross-posted here, and will contain links to the Forum for people interested in discussing them (I won’t be hosting my own comments section). I’ll also sometimes post a companion piece to a blog post on the Forum only, when the companion piece requires more existing familiarity with EA.

I’m expecting to put out one long piece and a couple of shorter pieces each week (for at least the first few months). The first set of long pieces will be a series laying out the case as I see it that we’re in the most important century ever for humanity; this will include topics like “consequences of mind uploading” as well as extensive discussion of the various approaches to forecasting when transformative AI will be developed (a lot of this will be summarizing work like Ajeya Cotra’s timelines analysis).

After that I’m going to write about a number of other topics, including whether life has gotten better over the course of history, whether the world is getting worse at innovation, and pros and cons of the epistemology and ethics common in the rationalist and effective altruist communities.