New Project: Sentinel

So far in life I’ve only been contributing to the cause I care most about (securing humanity’s long-term future) financially while working on unrelated things. Recent circumstances aligned to give me the opportunity to work on the cause directly for the first time.

The latest experiment, along with my cofounder Nuño, is Sentinel.

It’s a forecasting team along with an emergency response team that responds to globally catastrophic and/or existential threats. It’s like The Avengers with more probability distributions and less spandex.

My logic in working on this is basically:

• Humanity is getting powerful faster than it’s getting wise and we’re going through a high-risk period where we could fumble our future.

  • People are directly working on this problem in different ways, primarily

    • Technical work like AI safety research, biodefense

    • Political work like AI regulation, diplomacy to reduce background risk of great power war

  • The ways people are working on this problem necessarily focus on things they can hypothesize or make progress on far in advance. However, more Black Swan-y things happen, and are definitionally not like that. If the way we fumble our future is more sensitive to interactions unfolding on relatively short time frames, most of what we’ll need in that potential future are capable generalists who are watching closely and reacting quickly.

    • This is a real base that I can realistically try to cover. It doesn’t mean that I think this is how humanity is going to go down if it goes down. It means that it’s an under-addressed niche in our collective “secure the future” plan. If we can just be responsible for the world reacting hours or a day earlier to some catastrophe, we could save many lives in expectation.

• I like working with people but very few people meet my bar for collaboration. Even so, Nuño clears the bar substantially. He’s relentlessly truth-seeking, demonstrably better at finding that truth than most others in highly decision-relevant ways, has a bias for action, and has that founder edge to him. I can’t pull people like him, and a dynamic like ours, out of a hat. Even if I had concrete, promising plans alone, it is still correct to sequence Sentinel ahead of it because we’re both ready now to work on something together now and I need to capitalize on that.

• There is a lot of surface area for luck here. Growing my fundraising abilities, building social capital, investment opportunities borne of the foresight team’s early insights, having a reason to learn about the things I naturally care about alongside the job.

If you’re interested in chatting with me about Sentinel, just respond to this email with literally any word and I’ll take the lead on finding some time to chat with you.

P.S. For those interested in what happened with Crush Sleep. I realize it needs to be built by someone, but not me. It was a clear problem, with a clear solution, that people were starting to pay good money for. But even then it really wasn’t rewarding. Someone more passionate about bio-hacking would love the journey of it and be able to build a personally lucrative business. I have more specifics about what I learned in my postmortem on it.