The Guardian recently ran an article about my scholarly and journalistic work, including my new book Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation and many criticisms of the TESCREAL cult. Parts of the article are quite good, but overall I think it gives readers a very…

200,000 words condensed into 20,000 — You can also listen to this article on YouTube at the linke above. A PDF version is on my website here. Follow me on Twitter: @xriskology, and support my work, if you’d like, here. Introduction The main text of my new book, Human Extinction: A History of the Science and…

Thomas Moynihan is an intellectual historian currently based at the Future of Humanity Institute. I read his book X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction with great interest, but to my disappointment found a very large number of mistakes throughout the manuscript (at least one on almost every page). …

When the fate of the human species is at stake, panic is the right response — if it’s followed by action — During a recent speech at the European Union parliament, the teenage activist Greta Thunberg began her talk as follows: “My name is Greta Thunberg. I’m 16 years old. I come from Sweden. And I want you to panic.” Her reasoning goes like this: While panicking is counterproductive when there’s nothing…

SOME CLARIFICATIONS: Oy vey. Re: Robin Hanson’s statement: “rape and slavery are far from the only possible levers!” Maybe I could have been clearer: at no point have I thought, and nowhere have I claimed, that Hanson endorses rape and slavery. Rather, my point is this: Imagine that I make…

There is a good chance that a child born today will live to see colonies on Mars, and perhaps beyond. …

Last February, Buzzfeed reported on “many wide-ranging allegations of [Lawrence] Krauss’s inappropriate behavior [toward women] over the last decade — including groping women, ogling and making sexist jokes to undergrads, and telling an employee at Arizona State University, where he is a tenured professor, that he was going to buy…

Is the world getting better? The Harvard psychologist and polymath Steven Pinker wants you to think that it is. …

The “new atheist” movement was founded on an affirmation of good cognitive habits: a commitment to objective truth, acknowledging one is wrong when this is the case, an awareness of how cognitive prejudices can distort one’s beliefs, and a rejection of the sort of tribalism and loyalism that one finds…