Write a Book?

If you wrote a book about many different ways to feel about being a parent in a world of x-risk, I think that would get a lot of bites. Write about what it's like for everything to seem normal and boring and safe, but being a parent means you have to live your life while knowing that it isn't. "I changed my career because it's more important to me that my kids are alive in 20 years than inherit a lot of money in 40 years" or something like that.

Writing about life as a parent in a world of x-risk would get a ton of interest, easily, and you could easily pull it off. Gently touching on society's moral confusion is harder, especially mixing that in with being a parent in a world of x-risk, because people would be picking up in the first place to read about being a parent in a world of x-risk. You might be able to pull it off by writing about being a parent in a world where society is generally confused, including morally confused, with the existence of x-risk being the first big point that demonstrates that the world is confused (e.g. "being a parent in an insane world, where another pandemic could be thousands of times worse"). The Viliam-Valentine debate [LW · GW] describes how today's math education is utterly deranged, and ~5 pages on that would be the perfect amount, parents would feel very grateful to have read that. Tons of parents are already anxious about the world going bad by the time their kids get married, both the left and the right thing that totalitarianist elements are at large domestically (blaming eachother of course, but the fear is real), vague lab leak claims, climate change etc, and talking about a second pandemic within 20 years would be the perfect hook into the obviously realer world of x-risk and thinking about winning strategies/results. Many of them have children who are teens or in college or early career, and replacing their anxiety with a crystalline, logically coherent/consistent understanding of the risks would be an interesting conversation topic with the kids at thanksgiving/winter break and also with other parents who have vague anxiety. Just describing life as a parent would make couples feel like having kids, and describing life as a parent in a world of x-risk would make couples feel like not having kids, so if backers/funders are concerned about the book making more people have kids, then let them decide on a balance that they find suitable.

There's a ton of other things related to community building that I suspect you're uniquely capable of writing some really great stuff about, but it would require galaxy-brain thinking to find safe ways to fit them into the book, such that the info benefits EA more than harms. But x-risk parenting, on the other hand, is a simple, consistent, solid foundation that you can build a lot of thinking on top of.

I'm writing a book [? · GW]. Here's how I think about it and fit it into my life:

• I decided to write the book because I felt like a book was the best way to convey some important insights about epistemology. Why a book?
  • higher prestige than blog posts
  • forces me to explain things without relying on links
  • more likely to be able to reach a wider audience
  • more likely to create a focal point to convey a few key memes that may spawn follow up work by others exploring similar ideas
  • posterity
• I'm writing about my topic at all because I think it's relevant to building aligned AI. I think AI safety research would go better if more relevant AI folks understood the key ideas at the core of the book.
  • there's very little new in the book, other than linking the ideas together to tell a particular story about why these ideas matter
  • I see most of the value in creating a compelling presentation and putting the ideas together in a single place so people don't have to go searching so hard for the same ideas I had
  • I don't worry too much if others have written similar things; I trust that because I had a hard time figuring out how the puzzle I see fit together, others likely have the same trouble and will benefit from the book
• I work on the book in place of writing blog posts or pursuing other hobbies.
  • this is not exclusive, just a tradeoff on the margin
• I have a rough goal of finishing the first draft of the book in 2 years
  • outlined at 9 chapters
  • that's roughly 1 chapter a quarter
  • I'm slightly ahead of schedule with 5 chapters done at the 13 month mark
• My goal is to be to publication in ~3 years from start, figuring I'll need about 1 year for initial revisions, finding a publisher, then doing additional revisions based on publisher editing.
  • I realize that due to delays in publication cycles I may end up seeing it on shelves as late as 4 years in
  • I'm also not worrying about publication too early, since worst case I can self publish
    • I'm focused on writing the book I want to see in the world first, writing a book that can get published second
    • this only works because I don't really care much about getting paid (any money I make will just go into marketing & distribution to get the book read by more people)

Maybe this is because of my vantage point (as your friend and someone who has deliberately distanced themself somewhat from EA as a whole), but I tend to think of you and Julia as relatively central figures in EA.  Like, I’m not sure if you’re among the very most centrally-connected circles of that community, but I’d also guess that you’re not really more than about one rung out from there.  In that case, I’m unsure how much you as an author would contribute to “de-centralizing” author representation?

That said, I do think that EA would absolutely benefit from raising some more approachable / less academic voices to a higher public profile.  I’d certainly enjoy reading a book from you about the topics you describe, even though that book would be unlikely to shift my personal skepticism about the wisdom of EA as a movement.  Your other listed advantages as an author do make sense to me, and I think that your “relevant credentials” disadvantage isn’t meaningful given the desire to focus on a less philosophical lens and to diversify the types of centrally-public EA voices.

Do it! You've always been a better spokesman for EA than any of the people with the big audiences and big platforms. I think your book would, correspondingly, be a better book than any of the ones we've seen published so far. Less prestigious, probably, but higher quality.

A lot of this depends on how I approach it: is this something I should work on after the kids go to bed, when I typically write blog posts? Or should I consider trying to go part-time at work, take leave, or quit? I haven't yet talked to people at work about this, but I would lean towards taking leave or going part time: if this is worth doing it's probably worth focusing on. That I think what I'm currently doing is valuable, though, means that there's a higher bar than just "does this seem like a good book to exist."

I wonder if it would make sense to write it as a series of blog posts (like the sequences, HPMOR, and "Wait But Why Year One: We finally figured out how to put a blog onto an e-reader"), at least for the first few chapters.

It seems it could provide the usual advantages of agile development, and get you some quick (self-)feedback in a lower-stakes environment (even though as you mention this has many downsides).

As someone who's trying a bit of community building, I would love more books, and the topics you are suggesting are super interesting in terms of helping many people do more good.