When I read ‘On the Future’ I wasn’t that much of a fan. My memory is pretty hazy of it because I read it a few years ago, but my feeling about it was that it wasn’t very content dense and some of it didn’t seem quite correct to me. I was reading expecting to want to recommend it to others, but actually decidedly preferred the Precipice (and they cover fairly similar things, so I’m unlikely to recommend both). Not sure if others feel that way, but if they do it might contribute to (at least this book) being relatively less mentioned in introductory materials.
I agree that if I could only recommend one book, it would probably be the Precipice - as its more up-to-date and comprehensive. I was thinking a wider bibliography / reading list. However, I really would prioritise the two Ted talks as short, interesting, credible intros.
I’ve got a real soft spot for “Our Final Century: Will Civilisation Survive the Twenty-first Century?” as it was the book that originally got me interested in existential risk. I still think its really important for the field, and is usefully included alongside 2008′s GCR and Bostrom’s 2002 paper. We’re actually working on an “updated after 20 years” version of the book, hopefully out next year.
Probably just Oxford vs Cambridge founder effects/path dependency.
EDIT: By ‘Oxford founder effects’ I mean something like “many of the early xrisk researchers came up through Oxford & naturally tend to cite Oxford folks; and two of the best book-length recent intros are from Toby and Will at Oxford; so the introductory materials are skewed towards Oxford”.
He also provided a blurb for Emile Torres’ book, well after Torres said that Nick Bostrom, Will MacAskill, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Toby Ord, Hilary Greaves etc endorse white supremacist ideology and eugenics.
I guess if that were the reason it’d probably be because people worry that implies Rees might agree with a bunch of Torres’ views they think are very bad. though I think that forwarding someone’s book or blurbing someone’s book is pretty consistent with disagreeing strongly with a bunch of their stuff (if you even know about it).
unsure why downvoted. upvoted for being a possible reason he might not be mentioned more (not saying it’s a good reason ).
sidenote: if we’re so parochial that Cambridge is too far for Oxford-doninated ea to take notice of what goes on there.… that seems like pretty bad news.
Oxford vs Cambridge seems more likely to me than the blurb explanation because Torres’ book was published in 2017 and would only explain changes after that time, but I don’t have any particular reason to think anything changed at that time. Happy to be corrected though.
On the face of it, Rees has indeed been neglected in introductory materials on this topic. Any idea why?
When I read ‘On the Future’ I wasn’t that much of a fan. My memory is pretty hazy of it because I read it a few years ago, but my feeling about it was that it wasn’t very content dense and some of it didn’t seem quite correct to me. I was reading expecting to want to recommend it to others, but actually decidedly preferred the Precipice (and they cover fairly similar things, so I’m unlikely to recommend both). Not sure if others feel that way, but if they do it might contribute to (at least this book) being relatively less mentioned in introductory materials.
Tbc, I’m still a big fan of Lord Martin Rees’ work!
I agree that if I could only recommend one book, it would probably be the Precipice - as its more up-to-date and comprehensive. I was thinking a wider bibliography / reading list. However, I really would prioritise the two Ted talks as short, interesting, credible intros.
I’ve got a real soft spot for “Our Final Century: Will Civilisation Survive the Twenty-first Century?” as it was the book that originally got me interested in existential risk. I still think its really important for the field, and is usefully included alongside 2008′s GCR and Bostrom’s 2002 paper. We’re actually working on an “updated after 20 years” version of the book, hopefully out next year.
Probably just Oxford vs Cambridge founder effects/path dependency.
EDIT: By ‘Oxford founder effects’ I mean something like “many of the early xrisk researchers came up through Oxford & naturally tend to cite Oxford folks; and two of the best book-length recent intros are from Toby and Will at Oxford; so the introductory materials are skewed towards Oxford”.
He also provided a blurb for Emile Torres’ book, well after Torres said that Nick Bostrom, Will MacAskill, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Toby Ord, Hilary Greaves etc endorse white supremacist ideology and eugenics.
Can you give a link for verifying this claim?
Also, I’d be pretty surprised if this were the reason for EA avoiding heavy promotion of Rees’s work.
https://www.xriskology.com/books
I guess if that were the reason it’d probably be because people worry that implies Rees might agree with a bunch of Torres’ views they think are very bad. though I think that forwarding someone’s book or blurbing someone’s book is pretty consistent with disagreeing strongly with a bunch of their stuff (if you even know about it).
Rees has also written multiple blurbs for Will MacAskill, Nick Bostrom et al.
unsure why downvoted. upvoted for being a possible reason he might not be mentioned more (not saying it’s a good reason ).
sidenote: if we’re so parochial that Cambridge is too far for Oxford-doninated ea to take notice of what goes on there.… that seems like pretty bad news.
Oxford vs Cambridge seems more likely to me than the blurb explanation because Torres’ book was published in 2017 and would only explain changes after that time, but I don’t have any particular reason to think anything changed at that time. Happy to be corrected though.