I feel bad that a lot of people feel like they have no one to call about their concerns about existential risk, or adjacent topics that seem very important to them because of relevance to existential risk. I feel especially bad about this when folks contact me about such topics and I don’t have time to give a good response. This post is meant to encourage behavior that can gradually shift the world in a more positive direction for addressing people’s worries about x-risk.| Andrew Critch
Cemeteries and funerals are beautiful, because they tell a story of the past that we care about. They’re also somewhat expensive: families routinely spend on the order of $10k on funeral and burial rites for their families. There are people whose entire jobs are the preparation of bodies for funeral rites. Can we tell the story of the past better, but for the same cost?| Andrew Critch
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If I’ve sent you a link to this blog post, it’s probably because your .edu email address is not already associated with a Google account, and I got a notification about that when sharing a doc or calendar item with you. To fix this problem permanently, open a browser logged into a gmail account (create a new one if you don’t want to use your personal one), and go to:| Andrew Critch
Summary: a less mathematical account of what I mean by “deserving trust”.| Andrew Critch
I get a lot of email, and unfortunately, template email responses are not yet integrated into the mobile version of Google inbox. So, until then, please forgive me if I send you this page as a response! Hopefully it is better than no response at all.| Andrew Critch
Summary: This is a tutorial on how to properly acknowledge that your decision heuristics are not local to your own brain, and that as a result, it is sometimes normatively rational for you to act in ways that are deserving of trust, for no other reason other than to have deserved that trust in the past.| Andrew Critch
Dear liberal American friends: please pair readings of liberal media with viewings of Fox news or other conservative media on the same topics. This will take work. They will say things you disagree with, using words you are unfamiliar with. You’ll have to stop scrolling down on Facebook and actively google phrases like “Trump executive order to protect America.” That may sound hard, but the integrity of your country depends on you doing it.| Andrew Critch
From an outside view, looking in at the Earth, if you noticed that human beings were about to replace themselves as the most intelligent agents on the planet, would you think it unreasonable if 1% of their effort were being spent explicitly reasoning about that transition? How about 0.1%?| Andrew Critch
I think donating to charity is great, especially if you make more than \$100k per year, placing you well past the threshold where your well-being depends heavily on income (somewhere around \$70k, depending on who does the analysis). I’ve been in that boat before, and donated more than 100% of my disposable income to charity. However, I was also particularly well-positioned to know where money should go at that time, which made donating particularly worth doing. I haven’t made any kind...| Andrew Critch