Ten Skills of Civilization to mature at if we hope to create an amazing world instead of a dumpster fire:

1. Evidence evaluation: converging on a valid consensus about what’s true based on evidence/argument (eg is climate change real, how bad will it get how quickly?)

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2. Coordination: developing and applying mechanisms to avoid collective action problems (eg working to make it in nobody’s interest to engage in weapons arms races, or to unilaterally develop highly dangerous tech)

3. Prioritization: putting more resources into what creates more human flourishing per dollar, rather than just what sounds best (eg, reducing social programs and services that help little per dollar, expanding those that help a lot)

4. Experimentation: trying different low-risk things based on their value of information with an attitude of rapid learning (eg try a societal change at small scale in multiple locations and carefully measure the effects before scaling it up to all of society!)

5. Capitalism: finding areas where companies are making money while making the world worse, and shifting incentives so that they instead make money by creating benefit (eg now most supplements are scams, animals on factory farms live appalling, tortured lives, etc)

6. Science: revamping science funding and the publication process - remove existing rewards for doing bad science using shoddy methods that lead to “pretty” positive results (eg instead incentivize pure truth seeking on the truly important topics, incentivize replication)

7. Compromise: reducing hatred among groups (eg red vs blue) and engaging in much greater cooperation (instead of war) to take actions we all agree make society better (eg you prefer education system X, I prefer Y, so let’s use Z or X+Y which we all agree beats the current crap)

8. Risk: developing a wise approach to proactively and appropriately preparing for big dangers that have relatively low probabilities of occurring each year (eg asteroids, pandemics, superintelligent AI, massive solar flares, nuclear war, etc)

9. Long view: being able to take actions that have a 20 or even 50 year perspective, rather than focussing on short term optimization at the expense of the future (eg is there a safe nuclear power strategy that could transition society to clean, cheap power over 20 years?)

10. Anti-manipulation: somehow creating strong punishments for politicians and media sites that lie or manipulate us (eg a politician should be shamed for using wildly inaccurate facts in writing or a speech - democracy fails when manipulation is unpunished)

We have much work to do if we want our civilization to have a great chance of a bright future.

We may not get another chance... let’s not screw this one up.