So much of the thinking and inquiry into what constitutes effectiveness among this community is highly logical and linear. Yet for areas like extinction risks, there is a severe analytical danger in missing the full spectrum of possibilities. Here the community seems like it could benefit from speculative fiction, particularly in the spirit of things like the Yak Collective’s Astonishing Stories project: https://www.yakcollective.org/projects/astonishing-stories.html Stories help us understand and get beyond our implicit biases. That’s particularly important today as so many assumptions, axioms and all manner of first principles that many of us take for granted in many countries in the world—particularly in the Anglosphere where I live—are shifting and changing. That even more important considering the potentially catastrophic risk of challenges like climate change. The following scenario might ultimately be very much in the long tail, but it is profoundly humbling to remember that in each of the five previous mass extinctions, every time involved climate change and the dominant species on Terra was obliterated. We are living through the sixth. Just because we have iPhones doesn’t mean that we too might not go the way of the dinosaurs. So in sum, I’m basically saying that we need to take the possibility that earth gets overrun, taken over and transformed into a planet of apes. (Or more realistically given the likely collateral damage from humanity’s collapse, aquatic species and specifically cetaceans have a greater likelihood of taking the top ring off our collective human hand. And if we want to get really scientific about it, the fungi have in all likelihood got all the charismatic megafauna beat in the planet wide competition to upset humanity: https://alltrades.substack.com/p/mushrooms-global-warming-and-the ) The fact that this type of very plausible future isn’t taken more seriously around here is clearly a profound reflection on the poor imagination of this community. We need to do better. We need speculative fiction. Not just for EA but damnit the future of humanity, people! C’mon. We need to take this stuff more seriously. In that severely serious spirit, I must again ask: where might be a good place to post that type of inquiry via speculative fiction?
[Question] Is there a space in effective altruism for speculative fiction?
So much of the thinking and inquiry into what constitutes effectiveness among this community is highly logical and linear. Yet for areas like extinction risks, there is a severe analytical danger in missing the full spectrum of possibilities. Here the community seems like it could benefit from speculative fiction, particularly in the spirit of things like the Yak Collective’s Astonishing Stories project: https://www.yakcollective.org/projects/astonishing-stories.html Stories help us understand and get beyond our implicit biases. That’s particularly important today as so many assumptions, axioms and all manner of first principles that many of us take for granted in many countries in the world—particularly in the Anglosphere where I live—are shifting and changing. That even more important considering the potentially catastrophic risk of challenges like climate change. The following scenario might ultimately be very much in the long tail, but it is profoundly humbling to remember that in each of the five previous mass extinctions, every time involved climate change and the dominant species on Terra was obliterated. We are living through the sixth. Just because we have iPhones doesn’t mean that we too might not go the way of the dinosaurs. So in sum, I’m basically saying that we need to take the possibility that earth gets overrun, taken over and transformed into a planet of apes. (Or more realistically given the likely collateral damage from humanity’s collapse, aquatic species and specifically cetaceans have a greater likelihood of taking the top ring off our collective human hand. And if we want to get really scientific about it, the fungi have in all likelihood got all the charismatic megafauna beat in the planet wide competition to upset humanity: https://alltrades.substack.com/p/mushrooms-global-warming-and-the ) The fact that this type of very plausible future isn’t taken more seriously around here is clearly a profound reflection on the poor imagination of this community. We need to do better. We need speculative fiction. Not just for EA but damnit the future of humanity, people! C’mon. We need to take this stuff more seriously. In that severely serious spirit, I must again ask: where might be a good place to post that type of inquiry via speculative fiction?