Each week I want to write to you about human flourishing, about your flourishing. Last week the question got much larger with some dire predictions from trusted sources, and they were hard to process and know how to act.

On Wednesday last week, Cal Newport sent a surprisingly alarmist email: Anthropic Just Threatened to Kill Billions of People. This Is Not Okay. He followed it with Superintelligence is a Fairy Tale. But Chasing It Can Still Cause Harm, which was the more useful of the two. The second was a deeper exploration of what he thought we should do: stop building dangerous harnesses, and consider pausing the push on frontier models, so that we give ourselves time to understand how to align that power, and its known potential harms, with the interests of humanity.

Persuasion’s Why Everyone Is Saying AI Could Kill Us All was another thoughtful review of the same ground. Two things in it surprised me. The first was how aligned and how persistent the leaders of the AI companies themselves have been, in the US at least, in supporting the case for more time to prepare (and yet not acting on their own when they could). The second was the bravery of an academic in China preparing to voice these concerns and plead this case there as well.

As someone who cares deeply about humanity thriving and flourishing, it was previously hard to understand what was hyperbole or marketing manipulation. We should still be thoughtful, skeptical and think for ourselves, but any credible prediction that billions could be killed needs action. And it seems like there is a lot of alignment in what we should do, and we need to act together.

If you want to do something with it, these are the resources that have helped me - mostly in letting my representatives know how much this matters to me, and I think to humanity.

• The Pause Giant AI Experiments open letter - the document can be a useful template for your own letter: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/​
• If you are in the US, how to contact your congressional representative and your senators.

The final paragraph of the open letter is beautifully stated:

“Humanity can enjoy a flourishing future with AI. Having succeeded in creating powerful AI systems, we can now enjoy an ‘AI summer’ in which we reap the rewards, engineer these systems for the clear benefit of all, and give society a chance to adapt. Society has hit pause on other technologies with potentially catastrophic effects on society. We can do so here. Let’s enjoy a long AI summer, not rush unprepared into a fall.”

(The examples the letter’s footnote gives are human cloning, human germline modification, gain-of-function research, and eugenics.)

Writing to your representative is not all there is to do, and more debate, discussion, and action will be needed. If you have good resources, good perspectives, good ways to help us act in an aligned way, please share them.

Your weeks, and your ability to act, and to make time to work on what is most important also still matter. The rest of the letter is focused on that scale.

2. Published elsewhere this week

How we work now: YAGNI and JOMO - or don’t spend your time polishing the brass knobs on the Titanic. I want to do more to help us all learn from people who are successfully implementing sustainable cognitive high performance. But this too can have a downside - adding more tools and techniques you should use, or creating more FOMO (fear of missing out). So before starting, I wanted to share with you two principles that I find really helpful:

YAGNI: you ain’t gonna need it (from software development)

JOMO: the joy of missing out (a delightful and powerful counter to FOMO a friend mentioned to me)

More on these here if you are interested: https://narath.substack.com/p/how-we-work-now-yagni-and-jomo - or on LinkedIn​

3. What’s happening in Flow

We started the first Student Superstar cohort - high school and college students, taking cognitive performance techniques into a new academic year. It has been the best part of my week.

The resilience of these amazing students growing up in this incredibly distracted world is palpable. And their consistency in leaning into being a part of making the world a better place is so inspiring. It felt very important to help them dispel some of the myths of high performance out there (grinding, multi-tasking), and to think together about what deeper success means for them (all of us recognize that grades are just a small part of that).

If you know a student who would want this, or you have one at home, reply and tell me - we have one more week of welcoming new students before we close this first cohort.

And a lot shipped in the app last week.

After years of being skeptical about it, I think there is enough to at least test whether the concept of mental energy is useful to those leaning into high performance, so I’ve added the ability for Flow users to track it for themselves and design experiments to help them test what helps them achieve their peak, and how to get out of being Brain-dead.

We’ve always had powerful data in the platform, but I’ve wanted to be mindful about what we reported. What you report has a way of changing what people think is important. It’s a much smaller version of what I discussed first, and it seems that we need to be able to choose the measure that matters most to all of us.

I did not want to choose the default for you, and despite what almost every other platform says, I don’t think that the number of tasks you complete is the major marker of a successful week. It might be one, but that you did what was most valuable is far more important and harder to track. What I do think is of interest to everyone is understanding where their time went and so I have added in Where the Week Went charts to the Data tab in the platform. I particularly love the Sankey diagrams of flow.

​How to read the energy strip is already in the handbook, and the rest is being written now. If you want to try any of it yourself, you can get started here.

4. The question

Did you act on any of this? Let me know. What are the best ways you think we can do this?

And if you have questions, worries or concerns of your own, let me know those too. I read each reply on Friday.

Yours in flow,
Narath

This email is where everything I write lands - one page of what I thought mattered, and a link to all of it, so you never have to be in a feed to keep up.

If forwarded to you, you can subscribe here:https://www.maketimeflow.com/newsletter​