The Voicing of Fear

By Daniel Speyer

How much we have to lose and how little chance we have to keep it

This song speaks of X-risks and S-risks.

It’s a big song. It needs to be paired with something personal. It must not be paired with Stopping in the Woods because the harmonies are too similar.

The heart of the song is the middle. The second stanza speaks of all that might be destroyed. It does not speak of specific dangers, only treats the sand beneath our feet as less of a certainty and more of a desperate hope. The third stanza speaks of human values, which could be destroyed by over-optimization even if our lives aren’t (a prospect I for one find more frightening).

The ending very deliberately drops the “else” from The Comet King’s motto (“Someone must and no one else will”). This is, AFAICT, the actual viewpoint of most X-risk mitigators. MIRI doesn’t say “we can do this”, only “no one else is trying”.

I tried to make it timeless. It should fit a neolithic farmer facing winter or a MIRI researcher facing endgame (whatever that turns out to be). I think it mostly succeeds. The bit about oceans burning isn’t very neolithic, but induction without a model is hard, so maybe it is something you have to worry about if you can’t get a chemistry textbook.

If you’re using this song, make sure to get the sheet music to the pianist early, so they have enough time to learn and rehearse it – and to raise an objection if necessary. Thus far every pianist who’s taken it on has managed, but the part is more difficult than most of what we have here.

Earlier versions of the sheet music used lots of eighth notes, which tended to mislead pianists into playing to quickly. So it was reformatted in quarter notes, leaving a bunch of double-whole notes in the piano harmony. Here’s hoping lilypond’s right about that notation.

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