More to explore on 'What could the future hold? And why care?'

Global historical trends

• How big a deal was the Industrial Revolution? (1 hour 20 mins.)
• Three wild speculations from amateur quantitative macrohistory (10 mins.)
• Modeling the Human Trajectory - Open Philanthropy Project (30 mins.)

Learn about forecasting

• How accurate are Open Phil’s predictions? (18 mins.)
• Efforts to Improve the Accuracy of Our Judgments and Forecasts (10 mins.) - exploring the ways to work on and importance of improving our calibration
• Intro to Forecasting (Video - 7 mins.)

Try forecasting

• Metaculus (Forecasting platform) - try doing some forecasting on a variety of tech and geopolitical questions
• Pastcasting (Interactive tool) - train your forecasting skills by practicing on historical questions for instant feedback

The case for longtermism

• What We Owe the Future - Will MacAskill's 2022 book arguing that improving humanity’s long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.
• Orienting towards the long-term future (Video - 25 mins.)
• The Case for Strong Longtermism - Global Priorities Institute (1 hour 20 mins.)
• The epistemic challenge to longtermism (2 min. Discussion of a somewhat longer paper)
• The Precipice, Appendix B - Population Ethics and Existential Risk (10 mins.)
• Representing future generations - Political institutions generally operate on 2-to-4-year timescales which aren’t long enough to address global issues (as the issue of climate change has shown). This talk analyzes sources of political short-termism and describes institutional reforms to align government incentives with the interests of all generations. (Video - 30 mins.)
• Blueprints (& lenses) for longtermist decision-making - How are we supposed to apply longtermism in practice?  The author outlines two concepts of a ‘blueprint’ and a ‘lens’ to clarify this issue. (7 mins.)
• Major UN report discusses existential risk and future generations (summary) (18 mins.)

Criticism of longtermism

• Against Longtermism (1 min. summary, 5. min read)
• This short comment, and the more academic pieces that it links to (2 mins. for the comment, lots to explore)
• How the simulation argument dampens future fanaticism
• Should longtermists mostly think about animals? (30 mins.)
• This comment, with ten reasons to work on near-term causes (2 mins.)

Suffering risks

• S-risks: Why they are the worst existential risks, and how to prevent them (20 mins.)