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 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.
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 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.