We no longer live in fear of the sun disappearing. But there are still plenty of things worth worrying about. One of the goals of this community is to fight off existential risks – catastrophes that could destroy humanity. Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord, two members of the British branch of our conspiracy, founded this field, and you can read Toby’s book “The Precipice” to learn more. This next song is dedicated to them - except we only mention Nick, because Toby’s name doesn’t fit the beat.
So, one thing worth noting about this song – it’s a lot less obvious which things are literal ‘x-risks’ that’d literally kill everybody. Like, the last analysis I read said nuclear war probably wouldn’t actually kill all of humanity. New Zealand will be fine. A lot of people think climate change is an x-risk but my understanding is that could only kill everyone if we really really really screw up a geoengineering project trying to stop climate change.
So, with that in mind here’s an updated title we considered for the song:
[
Title changes to:
The X Days Of X-Risk
The Y Days of Global Catastrophic Risk
]
But that’s a terrible title so let’s try
[
Title changes to
The X Days Of X-Risk
The Y Days of Global Catastrophic Risk
The X Days of X-Risk•
]
Turns out it’s easy to be poetic and truthtelling if you just liberally apply asterixes everywhere.
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