Real-life superheroes and troubled institutions, with Tom Ough

Popular movies sometimes feature leagues of superheroes who are ready to defend the Earth against catastrophe. In this episode, we’re going to be discussing some real-life superheroes, as chronicled in the new book by our guest, Tom Ough. The book is entitled “The Anti-Catastrophe League: The Pioneers And Visionaries On A Quest To Save The World”. Some of these heroes are already reasonably well known, but others were new to David, and, he suspects, to many of the book’s readers.

Tom is a London-based journalist. Earlier in his career he worked in newspapers, mostly for the Telegraph, where he was a staff feature-writer and commissioning editor. He is currently a senior editor at UnHerd, where he commissions essays and occasionally writes them. Perhaps one reason why he writes so well is that he has a BA in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, where he was a Casberd scholar.

Selected follow-ups:

• About Tom Ough
• The Anti-Catastrophe League - The book's webpage
• On novel methods of pandemic prevention
• What is effective altruism? (EA)
• Sam Bankman-Fried - Wikipedia (also covers FTX)
• Open Philanthropy
• Conscium
• Here Comes the Sun - book by Bill McKibben
• The 10 Best Beatles Songs (Based on Streams)
• Carrington Event - Wikipedia
• Mirror life - Wikipedia
• Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: final report - by Anders Sandberg
• Oxford FHI Global Catastrophic Risks - FHI Conference, 2008
• Forethought
• Review of Nick Bostrom’s Deep Utopia - by Calum
• DeepMind and OpenAI claim gold in International Mathematical Olympiad
• What the Heck is Hubble Tension?
• The Decade Ahead - by Leopold Aschenbrenner
• AI 2027
• Anglofuturism

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

Art Is Not a Thing
From media art to digital activism: art as critical inquiry and world-building.

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