About Me

When I was a kid, I discovered longtermism on my own, and have been one ever since. For most of that time, it has been a lonely journey.

In 2021, I wrote a book draft on longtermism and broad societal strategies to prevent existential risk and achieve the best possible future. I was planning to call it either “Ways to Save the World” or “Paths to Utopia.”

The primary motivations behind writing this book were to:

• Launch a longtermist movement
• Design high level societal mechanisms which simultaneously:
  • Dramatically improve the near-term and long-term future trajectory
  • Create moral progress/progress on values
  • Prevent existential risk.

Then, in January 2022, while preparing for a Master’s degree on Social Entrepreneurship, I discovered there already was a longtermist movement!

I became deeply involved with the Effective Altruism group at my university and dropped out of school to pursue direct longtermist community building and research while living at a longtermist group house in Berkeley, California.

I was quite thrilled when Will MacAskill wrote the book, “What We Owe the Future,” proposing trajectory change as on par with extinction risk due to the threat of value lock-in (1) (2). Trajectory change was half of my book, and I had been sad to see most longtermists had gone sour on “Broad Longtermist” strategies (1) (2), which my book preferred, with most longtermists favoring narrow strategies such as technical AI safety.

In 2024, I requested a debate week on this topic, and in 2025, I got my wish. Unfortunately, I got carried away writing an essay for the competition and spent about half a year writing a 35,000-word (still unfinished) essay—although an intermediate summary version is available here.

When I asked for feedback, and Will MacAskill shared his own essay series with me, I realized I needed to update some of my own ideas on “Seed Reflection,” which was my new name for what I had been calling “Paths to Utopia” in my book, which is quite similar to what Will MacAskill calls “Viatopia.”

While I am in the middle of a much deeper research process that is nearing its final phases, my recent “Building Cooperative Viatopia” series represents some of the ideas that I think are most important from my evolving work.

Jordan Arel