Survive

The book answers the question "how do I survive this?" in one line: you don't, so prevent it. That answer is correct in one of the worlds the argument allows and useless in the others, and the others are where most of the tractable thinking is.

This section takes the question seriously as a personal one. Not "how does humanity survive," which is the Avoid section, but what a single person with ordinary resources should do differently, if anything, given that the argument on the previous pages might be right, might be right in part, or might be wrong in a way that still produces a very bad decade.

The order of the pages is the order of the reasoning. First, what "survive" can even mean, since the word does different work in different scenarios. Second, the scenarios in which individual choices bear on the outcome at all. Third, how to make decisions when one of the outcomes is total, which is a genuinely strange problem and one that most advice, including the book's, handles badly. Last, a first list of moves, ranked and explicitly provisional.

These pages are a first pass drafted by Claude for the site's owner to revise, and they say so. They do not contain a plan for surviving a superintelligence, because there is none. They contain a way of thinking about the years between now and whatever happens, which everyone alive is going to have to live through regardless.