METATOOLS FOR PROGRESS
Many projects are dedicated to identifying the threats to human existence but very few offer paths for what to aim for instead. In light of humanity’s countless challenges, pessimism, negativity, and fatalism about the future are likely traps. Instead of lowering our expectations to fit reality, we need to keep in mind that nothing is stopping us from changing reality to meet our hopes and dreams. Here we want to explore what it means to act from a place of existential hope about the future, rather than a place of existential angst.
Illuminating our Constraints: Philosophy of Science
- Flatland - Edwin Abott. On the possibility of phenomena that are beyond our current ability to understand and what progress toward understanding may look like.
- Rejecting the Ideal of Value-Free Science - Heather Douglas. Strips away layer after layer of value-ladenness that shapes our sense-making.
- On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme - Donald Davidson. Even when it seems like science is limited by incommensurable conceptual schemes, we share one conceptual reality in which we can learn to better navigate.
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn. Rather than dripping along discovery by discovery, science jumps in paradigm shifts, each creating a new map that shapes our interpretation of the world.
- The Philosopher’s Toolkit - A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods - Peter Fosl. Gives a brief overview of the different tools at our disposal when making sense of the world.
- Opacity: Lindy Effect & Psychological Findings - Nassim Taleb. On scientific heuristics.
- The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science - Harold Kindcaid. A good overview of major themes in the philosophy of science.Â
- Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick. On factors that complicate our attempts to bring order into the chaos of reality.
- The Open Society And Its Enemies - Karl Popper. On the importance of openness in society, science, and technology for resilience and progress.
- The Weapon of Openness - Arthur Kantrowitz. Argues that openness is our best shot for dealing with civilizational risks and problems as they arise.
- The Use of Knowledge in Society - Friedrich Hayek. On human civilization as a superintelligence composed of individual problem-solving entities.
- The Meaning Of It All - Richard Feynman. Collection of three lectures on the relationship between science and society. If you have superstitions to let go of, also read Cargo Cult Science.
- The Ghost in the Quantum Turing machine - Scott Aaronson. What physics can tell us about free will, chaos, the arrow of time, the holographic principle, Newcomb's paradox, algorithmic information theory, and more.
- A Beautiful Question- Frank Wilczek. Uses the history of science, from Plato to quantum physics to answer the question if the world embodies beautiful ideas and what, if anything, this means for reality.
- The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe itself - Sean Carroll. Science-based exploration of the human position and history in the universe, including implications for our sense of meaning.
- Scale  - Geoffrey West. On the fractal-like scaling laws that govern anything from cells to cities.
- The Best Books on Every Subject - LessWrong. List of books on various subjects, many of them scientific.
- Creon's List of Profound Books - Creon Levit. Ordered according to math, physics, etc.
- Bookshelf, People - Patrick Collison. Lists books and people, many with a science-focused long-termist bend.
- Santa Fe Institute - A research organization exploring the frontiers of complex systems science. Santa Fe Institute Podcast - The science podcast, Complexity, explores the Universe's deepest mysteries, while on Alien Crash Site, every guest imagines one alien technology that could change the course of human advancement.
- WaitButWhy - A long-form, stick-figure-illustrated blog about future-relevant themes.
- Kurz Gesagt - Short explainer videos on questions of importance for humanity.
- Philosophy Bites - An intro level podcast that is good for staying up to date on “current topics” in ethics and philosophy.
- The Journal for Evolution & Technology - Journal for futurist publications.
- Astral Codex, Astral Codex Podcasts - A blog on science, futurism, and rationality.Â
- After-On - Podcast. Intros and interviews on science and technology.
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Who Is Looking Out: The Mind
- The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory? - Karl Friston. While 20th century neuroscience thought the brain extracts knowledge from sensations, he argues for an inversion by which the brain is an inference machine, minimizing average surprise from sensory experience of the world.
- Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter. A classic that uses principles like self-reference to show commonalities across consciousness, intelligence, math, music, art, and language and how simple elements can make up “meaning”.
- The Illusion of Consciousness - Daniel Dennett. In the TED talk and his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, he discusses a "multiple drafts" model of consciousness, in which there is no central consciousness, but a bundle of agencies that make up the story in which the central character is one's self.
- The Mind’s I - Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter. An oldie but goldie.
- Panpsychism & Protopanpsychism - David Chalmers. Contra Dennett, panpsychism is the idea that all things have a mind-like quality. Chalmers also wrote Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness, an updated take on his “hard problem of consciousness”.
- On Possible Minds: Philosophy and AI - a conversation between Chalmers and Dennett, covering their disagreements about consciousness and what this means for AI. The comments even bring in Friston to differentiate the implications for AI, something that was taken on as well by this Wired article on Friston and AI.Â
- Anomalous Monism - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A mind-body problem concept developed by Donald Davidson in Mental Events that attempts to reconcile the contradiction that mental events cannot be predicted by strict laws but seem to causally interact with predictable physical events.
- What it’s Like to Be A Bat - Thomas Nagel. A contest classic that asserts that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism", doubting whether those phenomenological features of a subjective experience can be known by others.
- Waking Up - Sam Harris. A book on mind and meditation. His podcast Making Sense with Sam Harris discusses a variety of topics, with worthwhile episodes including Looking for the Self, Mindfulness Meditation, The After On Interview, The Future of Intelligence, Landscapes of Mind, The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence, Finding our Way in the Cosmos, Surviving the Cosmos, The Multiverse & You (& You, & You), Drugs & The Meaning of Life, Culture & Biology.
- REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of Brain Action of Psychedelics - Robin Carhart-Harris, Karl Friston. Combining Friston’s work on free energy with recent studies on psychedelics to explain their therapeutic effect. Also a shorter summary by the SSC Journal Club.
- How To Change Your Mind - Michael Pollan. A mainstream-compatible perspective on the benefits of psychedelics.
- David Pearce on Understanding Psychedelics - Milan Griffes. An Effective Altruism post on the role of psychedelics in consciousness research. Also: Cash prizes for the best arguments against psychedelics being an EA cause area to solicit objections against making psychedelic research part of EA.
- The Book Against the Taboo of Knowing Who You Are - Alan Watts. A Hindu-inspired account of personal identity.
- Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley. Autobiographical book on Huxley’s psychedelic experiences.
- The Ego Tunnel - Thomas Metzinger. About consciousness, the sense of self, and whether it exists.
- Shulgin Archive - A research archive on psychedelics.
- Ten Percent Happier - Podcast. Science-focused interviews and exercises on meditation.
- Qualia Research Institute - A non-profit using philosophy and neuroscience to improve neurotechnology.
- MAPS - A non-profit that develops medical, legal, and cultural contexts to benefit from psychedelics.Â
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Unraveling Moral Beginnings: Evolutionary Psychology
- Human Behavioral Biology - Robert Sapolsky. Entertaining lectures, explaining why and how we make decisions that he expands on in his book Behave by exploring human behavior from the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the moment the behavior occurs to factors in our evolutionary legacy.
- The Structural Evolution of Morality - Jason McKenzie. Also as Foresight Institute podcast. Explains the structural evolution of human-typical morals, such as fairness norms. He builds on Bryan Skyrms’ Evolution and the Social Contract by not only taking natural selection into account but including cultural evolution as well. For more background info on Skyrms’ evolutionary explanations of morality, see Darwin Meets the Logic of Decision.
- Game-theoretic Explanations and the Evolution of Justice - Justin D’Arms. Uses game-theory to show how our justice norms evolved from evolutionary stable strategies in resource distribution problems. For an expansion on this account, see Natural Justice by Ken Binmore.Â
- The Evolution of Cooperation  by Robert Axelrod is an analysis of the success of “tit for tat”, based on his game theory tournament to test different strategies for cooperation. The Grammar of Society by Cristina Bicchieri is a more detailed analysis on the evolution of reciprocity, fairness, and cooperation norms.
- Sense And Nonsense - Kevin Laland, Gilliam Brown. Introduction to five evolutionary psychology schools: sociobiology, human behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, cultural evolution, and gene-culture co-evolution. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology - Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Jerone Barkow. Slightly dated but good primer of evolutionary psychology by the pioneers of the field. Especially good is The Psychological Foundations of Culture.Â
- Bret Weinstein’s Interviews and Bret Weinstein’s Youtube Channel - Bret Weinstein. For more easily digestible bits on evolutionary psychology.
- Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society - David Wilson. An evolutionary explanation of the cultural invention of religion.
- The Enigma of Reason - Hugo Mercier. Argues that our shortcomings in thinking rationally are not surprising, because rather than having evolved as bayesian updaters, our reasoning evolved as an interactive tool to better cooperate in groups. The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich makes a similar claim based on the importance of cultural evolution for human survival. Because the ability to think rationally may infringe on our ability to transmit cultural norms effectively, it was selected against.
- The Elephant in the Brain - Hidden Motives in Everyday Life - Robin Hanson, Kevin Simler. Explains why the reasons we use to justify our actions to ourselves and others are not why we actually act in certain ways in areas like religion, health, politics, and education.
- The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt. Explains how our political differences can be explained by moral foundations that themselves have an evolutionarily adaptive origin. He also wrote The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail on why moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached.
- The Strange Order of Things - Antonio Damasio. On how emotions are essential for all living organisms, the formation of our culture, and a force toward life.
- The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins. Articulates a gene's eye view of evolution, in which organisms can be seen as vehicles for their replication. In The Blank Slate Steven Pinker shows the biological roots of human behavior and morality.
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Which Way is Forward: Value Differences, Drift, & Convergence
- On What Matters - Derek Parfit. The successor to Reasons and Persons provides an overview of classic moral theories, such as deontology, consequentialism, contractualism, and of major moral issues, such as free will and responsibility.
- Meta Ethics Sequence - Eliezer Yudkowsky. Especially The Moral Void, Whither Moral Progress, Existential Angst Factory, Morality as Fixed Computation, Value is Fragile, Could Anything Be Right, and Changing Your Meta Ethics.
- Report on Consciousness and Moral Personhood - Luke Muehlhauser. For figuring out which consciousnesses to include in your ethics and how.
- Crucial Considerations - Nick Bostrom. By thinking a little harder we may often come to opposite conclusions about the desirability of our actions, so it’s worth thinking hard about which crucial considerations should be guiding our actions.
- Facing the Unknown, Infinite Ethics - Nick Bostrom. Our epistemic limitations about the (long-term) consequences of our actions are problematic for making the right decision. In Problems And Solutions In Infinite Ethics, Ben West lays out a few strategies that may help us counter some of those epistemic limitations.
- Normative Uncertainty - Will MacAskill. Argues that we should treat moral uncertainty and empirical uncertainty analogously, and use expected utility theory as framework to decide between our differing moral convictions.Â
- The Moral Parliament - Nick Bostrom, Toby Ord. Suggests to approach moral uncertainty across mutually exclusive moral theories by assigning each of them some probability and letting the theories send a respective number of delegates to a moral parliament.
- Moral Trade - Toby Ord. Argues that we can trade our values similar to how we exchange goods: Just like people with different tastes or needs can exchange goods or services such that they each feel they have been made better off, people with different moral views may be able to exchange those when trying to improve the world.
- Reflective Equilibrium - John Rawls. Another method for handling normative uncertainty. It suggests continuously working back and forth among our moral intuitions about actions, the principles that govern them, and the theoretical considerations behind them, revising them when necessary to achieve coherence among them. The Wide Reflective Equilibrium by Norman Daniels adds that we should actively seek out objections that may refute our convictions.
- In The Balance - Scott Alexander. A tongue in cheek story on handling infinite regress in moral updating: “And you will tell them the story of how once you found the Artifact that gave you mastery of the universe, and you refused to take more than about three minutes figuring out what to use it for, because that would have been annoying.”
- Fundamental Value Differences Are Not That Fundamental, The Whole City is Center, Value Differences as Differently Crystallized Metaphysical Heuristics - Scott Alexander. Argues that human value differences are more shallow than we commonly think and may track the same universal core values that could help us reconstruct a common crude human morality.
- On Value Drift - Robin Hanson. Shows how much values may drift over time. In Let Values Drift, G. Gordon Worley III argues that this is not a cause for concern but only to be expected under the correct (Friston-aligned) conception of valuing.
- Moral Progress vs. the Simple Passage of Time - Holden Karnofsky. How to potentially distinguish value drift from moral progress.
- My Outlook - Paul Christiano. On the probability of civilizational survival, and the relative influence, distribution and entrenchment of human values.
- Three Worlds Collide - Eliezer Yudkowsky. A novella about how much values can differ across different mind-architectures.
- Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment - Iason Gabriel. On AI Alignment but discusses the problem of different people with different values, and how Contractualism, Rights, Rawl’s Veil of Ignorance, or Social Choice Theory may help us reach overlapping consensus.
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Sharpening our Best Tool: Rationality
- Rationality: From AI to Zombies - Eliezer Yudkowsky. Intro to rationality, divided into 6 books. Especially the chapters on Twelve Virtues of Rationality, My Bayesian Enlightenment, Raising the Sanity Waterline, Three Levels of Rationality Verification, When Not To Use Rationality, The Real Prisoner’s Dilemma, Rationalists vs Barbarians, Church vs Task Force, Can Humanism Match Religious Output, Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate. See Heuristics & Biases for a shorter talk by Yudkowsky or Harry Potter And The Methods of Rationality for a fan-fictional account of rationality.Â
- LessWrong - an online community dedicated to improving human reasoning and decision-making. A Map That Reflects The Territory - Lesswrong book series on epistemology, agency, coordination, curiosity, and alignment.
- Gwern, Overcoming Bias, Second Enumerations, Ribbonfarm, Nintil, MeltingAsphalt and especially AstralCodexTen are blogs that apply rational thinking to a plethora of long-termist topics. In podcast form, Rationally Speaking has excellent rationalist interviews with a range of thinkers. Graph Of The AXC Blogosphere - Jacob Wood. An overview of AXC- related blogs to get a sense of the space.
- Crony Beliefs - Kevin Simler. Why we find it hard to let go of some beliefs. Goes well with What You Can’t Say in which Paul Graham illuminates why it’s bad if we can’t discuss what we believe in.
- Cognitive Biases in Catastrophic Risks Map - Alexey Turchin. How our biases can influence how we make sense of crucial risks to humanity. Other compilations of biases include List of Biases  by Rationalwiki and the Cognitive Bias Codex poster.
- Incerto: Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Taleb. The whole collection is worth reading.Â
- Thinking Fast & Slow - Daniel Kahneman. A classic contrasting fast, instinctive, heuristic thinking with slow, reasoned thought, including when we use which one.
- Tools to Transform Our Thinking - Daniel Dennett, A talk on how to get better at reasoning, including popular methods such as the “intuition pump”.
- Arguably - Christopher Hitchens. An essay collection.
- Superforecasting - Philip Tetlock. Why we are bad at forecasting and how to get better. For more tips, see The Art of Predicting, a podcast with Anthony Aguirre and Andrew Critch, and Tetlock on Predicting, a podcast with Robert Wiblin and Philip Tetlock.Â
- Metaculus - A community forecasting platform working to improve human decision-making and coordination on topics of global importance through a process of collective reasoning and aggregated prediction. Other projects that actively try to improve our ability to predict, forecast and estimate include Good Judgment and Guesstimate.Â
- Prediction, Replication, Decision Markets - Foresight Institute. Interview with Robin Hanson, Chis Hibbert, Anthony Aguirre and other prediction market builders on various versions of prediction markets.
- Clearerthinking.org - Offers mini-courses and provides tools using research about human behavior to improve our decision-making.
- Center for Applied Rationality - Offers workshops to improve people’s thinking and has this Rationality Reading List on further introductory material to rationality.
- Recommended Rationalist Reading - Eliezer Yudkowsky. Collection of rationalist resources.‍
- Rational Choice in an Uncertain World - Reid Hastie, Robin Dawes. Coursework-style info on how to update your thinking. Similarly extensive resources on rationality include Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by E.T. Jaynes, and Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving (dropbox).
Confronting Stagnation: What’s Going Wrong?
- An Era of Stagnation and Universal Institutional Failure - Peter Thiel, Eric Weinstein. On why and how innovation and scientific progress are declining.
- A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, Patrick Collison, and Tyler Cowern - Tech & Society. Zuckerberg interviews Collison and Cowen on slowing scientific progress and how to accelerate it.
- What’s Our Problem? - Tim Urban. Introducing a new framework for thinking about our socio-economic turmoil.
- Growth, Progress, Culture - Patrick Collison. Asks if growth, progress, and culture are declining and what we can do about it.
- Where is My Flying Car? - J. Storrs Hall. An account of technological stagnation since the 1970s and an imaginative blueprint for a richer, more abundant future.
- What Intellectual Progress Did I Make in the 2010s - Scott Alexander. Reviews his shift in thinking positively to negatively about progress, including a host of references: “In the 2000s, people debated Kurzweil’s thesis that scientific progress was speeding up superexponentially. By the mid-2010s, the debate shifted to whether progress was actually slowing down. In Promising The Moon, I wrote about my skepticism that technological progress is declining. A group of people including Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen have since worked to strengthen the case that it is; in 2018 I wrote Is Science Slowing Down?, and late last year I conceded the point. Paul Christiano helped me synthesize the Kurzweillian and anti-Kurzweillian perspectives into 1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled. In 2017, I synthesized some thoughts that had been bouncing around about rising prices into Considerations On Cost Disease, still one of this blog’s most popular posts. The first would-be-general-answer that made me sit up and take notice was Alex Tabarrok’s book (link goes to my review) The Prices Are Too Damn High – but I explain there why I don’t think it can be the full answer.”
- Institutional Failure as Surprise - Samo Burja. A historic account of why institutions fail.
- The Case Against Education - Bryan Caplan. Discusses the problems with today’s educational system and gives a few suggestions for alternatives.
- Against News - Robin Hanson. On why consuming the news may be overvalued.
- Scientism and The Study of Society - Friedrich Hayek. On the risks of “scientisim”.
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Building Resilience: Strengthening Civilization
- Antifragile - Nassim Taleb. An appeal to design our systems such that they get stronger under pressure and can resist low probability scenarios of devastating consequences as described in The Black Swan. One way to do that: Include incentive structures that make people have more Skin in the Game, another book by Taleb.
- Seeing Like A State - James Scott. On the problems of top-down nation state planning and what we can learn from that for building future cooperative architectures.
- Rules for a Flat World - Gillian Hadfield. Because current legal rules are too slow, costly, and localized for increasingly complex advanced economies, we need a new set of rules that enhance complex societies and economic interdependence. Dated but with a similar complaint about our legal system: Simple Rules for a Complex World by Richard Epstein.
- Legal Systems Very Different From Ours - David Friedman. Reviews exotic past and present legal systems that encourage experimentation with legal structures. Also good by Friedman: The Machinery of Freedom, Law's Order.
- Nudge - Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler. On how decision-makers can leverage architectures that help people make better decisions.
- Solving the Generator Function for Existential Risks - Daniel Schmachtenberger. Here as a blog post.
- Creating A Manual For Civilization - LongNow. On collecting resources to rebuild civilization in case of collapse.
- 21 Lessons for the 21st Century- Yuval Harari. On large-scale trends that will shape this century and how to avoid risks arising from them.Â
- The Listening Society - Hanzi Freinacht. Analyzes psychological and cultural pathologies of society, and what a society would look like that enabled people to break out of them.
- Re.Silience - Blog. On resilience and systems-thinking.
- ALLFED - The Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED) is a non-profit with a mission to help build resilience to global food shocks (to feed everyone no matter what!).
- John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences - “The advancement and application of the risk sciences to save lives, protect the environment and improve system performance.”
- Centre for Long-Term Resilience - Think tank with a mission to transform global resilience to extreme risks.
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Getting Unstuck: Advancing Progress
- Radical Markets  Eric Posner, Glen Weyl. Explore strategies for rethinking the underlying dynamics of markets and tools for redesigning them.
- Futarchy - Robin Hanson. A manifesto for a system in which representatives define and manage a measurement of national welfare, while market speculators would say which policies they expect to raise national welfare.
- Power Tools for Progress - Thomas Kalil. Identifies meta tools for progress with multiplier effects. Related, Kalil’s What ifs are ambitious but achievable goals for the US, and the Innovation Toolkit by The Obama Administration identified a number of different innovation approaches.
- Differential Technology Development - Jack. On slowing down technologies that increase existential risk, while advancing those that reduce it.
- Marginal Revolution - Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok. Blog on economics, progress, and future-relevant macro trends.
- Conversations with Tyler - Podcast. Conversations include Audrey Tang on Democracy as Technology, Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth, Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard, Philip Tetlock on Forecasting, Mark Zuckerberg, Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen on the Nature of Progress, Neal Stephensons on Depictions of Reality.
- EconTalk - Podcast. Conversations include Rob Wiblin and Russ Roberts discuss Charity, Science and Utilitarianism, Steven Levitt on Freakonomics, Nassim Taleb on Rationality, Risk, and Skin in the Game, Gillian Hadfield on Law and the Rules for a Flat World, Marc Andreessen on Software, Immortality and Bitcoin.
- Translation Podcast - 50 Years podcast on translation science.
- HackerNews - YCombinator technology-focused news forum.
- ProgressForum - A place for long-form discussion of progress studies and the philosophy of progress. Founded by Jason Crawford, who founded Roots of Progress - a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century.
- New Science - A 501c3 research nonprofit with the mission to facilitate scientific breakthroughs by empowering the next generation of scientists and building the 21st century institutions of basic science. Founded by Alexey Guzey who blogs on metascience, biology, philanthropy with Twitter digest.
- Astera Institute - We empower visionary, high-leverage science and technology projects with the capacity to create transformative progress for human civilization.
- UltraRare - A podcast at the intersection of science and web3.
- PARPA - We’re riffing on the DARPA model to design, fund, and coordinate ambitious research programs that shift the impossible to the inevitable.
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Prototyping New Architectures:Â
- Network State - Balaji Srinivasan. Also as Foresight Institute podcast. On how to create a city in the clouds with physical embassies. More: 1729.Â
- The Sovereign Individual - James Davidson, Lord William Rees-Mogg. On the chances of individual prosperity in the face of technological changes.Â
- Ideal Governance (for Companies, Countries and More) - Holden Karnofsky. Principles and considerations for experimenting with novel governance mechanisms.
- The Melancholy of Subculture Society - Gwern. Explores the ideal size of human communities, how cities affect those, and how internet subcultures enable new opportunities to build beneficial relationships.
- Archipelago & Atomic Communitarianism - Scott Alexander. A fictional vision of society defined as an archipelago of value-aligned communities coexisting peacefully.
- Open Borders - Bryan Caplan. On how opening all borders could eliminate absolute poverty and benefit our worldwide economy.
- Your Next Government? - Tom W. Bell. Introduces the concept of stateless nations, and how legal innovations can get us there.
- New Sovereignties | Tom Bell, David Ernst, Eduardo Beltrane, Charter Cities | Patri Friedman - Foresight Institute. Discussion and demo of new sovereignty projects.
- Charter Cities Institute - A non-profit institute dedicated to creating the ecosystem for charter cities.Â
- Institute for Competitive Governance - A non-profit institution studying special jurisdictions across the world.Â
- Seasteading Institute - Empowers people to build floating startup societies with innovative governance models. Based on the book Seasteading - Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman. Explores Seasteading concepts, projects, and future opportunities.Â
- Startup Societies - Studies and connects the industry of small experimental governments, or startup societies. Based on the manifesto Founding Startup Societies by Joseph McKinney, Mark Frazier.
- Haight Street Commons - A network of not-for-profit co-ops and intentional communities in San Francisco.
- RadicalxChange - Advancing pluralist social technologies for 21st century democracy.
- MetaGov - We build standards and infrastructure for digital self-governance.
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Choosing Altruism: EA
- Introduction to Effective Altruism - Centre for Effective Altruism. A brief primer on EA (Effective Altruism).
- Doing Good Better - William MacAskill. An introduction to EA by one of its leading figures.
- 13 Articles That Might Change Your Life - Tyler Alterman. A curated list of EA and long-termist posts.
- EA Concept Map - Conceptual overview of the EA space.
- The Most Good You Can Do - Peter Singer. One of the first books on Effective Altruism themes.
- Fear And Loathing at Effective Altruism - Scott Alexander. A tongue-in-cheek account of an EA conference.
- Criticism of EA Criticism Contest - Zvi Mowshovitz. Critiques an EA contest to constructively criticize EA.
- The 80’s Futurist Movement & It’s Lessons for Today’s Idealists - Robert Wilbin. Summarizing an interview with Christine Peterson on 80’s futurist influences on today’s EA.
- Global Priorities Project Research Agenda - Hilary Greaves, William MacAskill. Overview of EA-focused research priorities.
- Rationality: From AI to Zombies - Eliezer Yudkowsky. Especially relevant to EA are the chapters on Purchase Warm Fuzzies and Utils Separately, and Money: The Unit of Caring, Helpless Individuals.Â
- You Have a Set Number of Weirdness Points, Spend Them Wisely - Peter Wildeford. “If we have a notion of weirdness as a kind of currency that we have a limited supply of, we can spend it wisely, without looking like a crank.”
- Evaluating Hard-To-Measure Projects From An Effective Altruism Perspective - Foresight Institute. Workshop recording on how to possibly include early-stage scientific projects into the EA cause prioritization framework.Â
- Centre for Effective Altruism - CEA Youtube Channel.
- Centre for Effective Altruism - Helps to grow and maintain the EA movement.
- EA Newsletter - EA Newsletter archive and sign-up.
- EA Hub - Hub for projects, people, and news on EA.
- Open Philanthropy Project - Through research and grantmaking, we hope to learn how to make philanthropy go especially far in terms of improving lives.
- 80 000 Hours - We’re here to give you the information you need to find that fulfilling, high-impact career. Our advice is all free, tailored for talented graduates, and based on five years of research alongside academics at Oxford. Especially the 80,000 Hours Podcast is worth listening to for staying up to date on EA topics.
- GiveWell - Searches for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar.
- Legal Priorities Project - Independent, global research project founded by researchers from Harvard University. We conduct and support legal research that tackles the world’s most pressing problems – we call this “legal priorities research.”
- Foundational Research Institute - Our mission is to identify cooperative and effective strategies to reduce involuntary suffering. We believe that in a complex world where the long-run consequences of our actions are highly uncertain, such an undertaking requires foundational research.
- Happier Lives Institute - Conducts and promotes clear, useful, and rigorous research into how best to measure and increase global well-being.
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Leaning into the Long-term
- FutureFundingList - Lists various philanthropic and venture funding sources for future-focused projects.Â
- Future of Humanity Institute - A multidisciplinary research institute working on Existential Risk at the University of Oxford.
- Future of Life Institute - FLI is an independent non-profit working to reduce large-scale, extreme risks from transformative technologies, as well as steer the development and use of these technologies to benefit life. Future of Life Institute Podcast - FLI podcast with prominent individuals working on beneficial long-term futures.Â
- Forethought Foundation - Aims to promote academic work that addresses the question of how to use our scarce resources to improve the world by as much as possible.
- LongView Philanthropy - Designs and executes bespoke giving strategies for major donors. Our grant recommendations are driven by the conviction that we can use evidence and reason to find the highest-impact opportunities in the world.Â
- Foresight Institute - Supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies to make great futures more likely.Â
- GCR Organization Directory - Lists organizations focused on catastrophic and existential risks.
- Center for the Study of Existential Risk - An interdisciplinary research centre within the University of Cambridge dedicated to the study and mitigation of risks that could lead to human extinction or civilisational collapse.
- Global Catastrophic Risk Institute - A think tank leading research, education, and professional networking on global catastrophic risk.
- Global Priorities Institute - Our Vision: A world in which global priorities are set by using evidence and reason to determine what will do the most good. Our Mission: To conduct and promote foundational academic research on how most effectively to do good.
- Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative - Our mission is to improve human civilization’s long-term prospects for survival and flourishing. Currently, our main strategy is to take on ethical and legal responsibility, as a collaborator, for projects deemed to be important for reducing existential risk.
- Global Challenges Foundation - Aims to promote the development of global decision-making models capable of more effectively and equitably mitigating and, preferably, eliminating the major global catastrophic risks threatening humanity.
- Simon Institute - Aims to advance the long-term institutional fit of governments and multilateral organizations.
- Innogen Institute - The Innogen Institute produces high quality research and supports the delivery of innovation that is profitable, safe and societally useful.‍
- Rethink Priorities - A research organization that conducts critical research to inform policymakers and major foundations about how to best help people and nonhuman animals in both the present and the long-term future.