Just scanning shortform for kicks and see this. Good thoughts and I find myself cringeing at the term “existential risk” often because of what you say about extinction, and wishing people spoke about utopia.
Can I ask your reasoning for putting this in shortform? I’ve seen pieces on the main forum with much less substance. I hope you write something else up about this. I think utopia framework could also be good for community mental health, while for many people still prompting them to the same career path and other engagement.
I don’t have a strong opinion about this, but I think of shortforms as more quickly dashed off thoughts, while frontpage posts have (relatively) more polish or novelty or both.
Another thing is that this shortform feels like a “grand vision” thing, and I feel like main blog posts that talk about grand visions/what the entire community should do demand more “justification” than either a) shortforms that talk about grand visions/what the entire community should do or b) main blog posts that are more tightly scoped. And I didn’t provide enough of such justification.
Another consideration that jumps to mind is something about things in the shortform being similar to my job but not quite my job, and me not wanting to mislead potential employees, collaborators, etc, about what working on longtermism at Rethink is like. (This is especially an issue because I don’t post job outputs here that often, so a marginal post is more likely to be misleading). Not sure how much to weigh this consideration, but it did pop to mind.
Just scanning shortform for kicks and see this. Good thoughts and I find myself cringeing at the term “existential risk” often because of what you say about extinction, and wishing people spoke about utopia.
Can I ask your reasoning for putting this in shortform? I’ve seen pieces on the main forum with much less substance. I hope you write something else up about this. I think utopia framework could also be good for community mental health, while for many people still prompting them to the same career path and other engagement.
Thanks for your kind words!
I don’t have a strong opinion about this, but I think of shortforms as more quickly dashed off thoughts, while frontpage posts have (relatively) more polish or novelty or both.
Another thing is that this shortform feels like a “grand vision” thing, and I feel like main blog posts that talk about grand visions/what the entire community should do demand more “justification” than either a) shortforms that talk about grand visions/what the entire community should do or b) main blog posts that are more tightly scoped. And I didn’t provide enough of such justification.
Another consideration that jumps to mind is something about things in the shortform being similar to my job but not quite my job, and me not wanting to mislead potential employees, collaborators, etc, about what working on longtermism at Rethink is like. (This is especially an issue because I don’t post job outputs here that often, so a marginal post is more likely to be misleading). Not sure how much to weigh this consideration, but it did pop to mind.