All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild

post by Tristan H (Kythe) · 2021-07-24T03:28:03.650Z · ? · GW · 0 comments

Weekly OBNYC events are often only posted to the mailing list but this week I remembered to post it here

This week's meetup I'll lead a discussion on why all possible views about humanity's future are wild.

Holden Karnofsky (founder of GiveWell, head of Open Philanthropy) recently started a blog and wrote about how All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild. In this meetup we'll be discussing the ideas presented in the post:

• Our understanding of history, technology and the universe seems to imply that there's a vast galaxy of resources that nobody has harnessed and a future civilization might.
• Why doesn't it seem to already harnessed? Shouldn't we be surprised to find ourselves just before a possible galaxy-scale expansion on a long time scale?
• Are we right before extinction instead? Does the Fermi Paradox imply a Great Filter ahead?

Holden lays out the various reasonable cases you can make for why we will or won't colonize the galaxy, and why all of them are kind of wild in different ways.

I'll give an overview of Holden's case and my starting thoughts on each of these topics and we'll talk about how wild or not wild we think the future and our place in history is. There's no need to read the post before coming, but it's a great post and might prompt more thoughts.

It'll be at an apartment in the financial district in Manhattan. Sign up to the Google Group and if you say you found this meetup on LessWrong in the "application" you will be accepted and get more details.

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