I think “it’s easy to overreact on a personal level” is an important lesson from covid, but much more important is “it’s easy to underreact on a policy level”. I.e. given the level of foresight that EAs had about covid, I think we had a disappointingly small influence on mitigating it, in part because people focused too much on making sure they didn’t get it themselves.
In this case, I’ve seen a bunch of people posting about how they’re likely to leave major cities soon, and basically zero discussion of whether there are things people can do to make nuclear war overall less likely and/or systematically help a lot of other people. I don’t think it’s bad to be trying to ensure your personal survival as a key priority, and I don’t want to discourage people from seriously analysing the risks from that perspective, but I do want to note that the overall effect is a bit odd, and may indicate some kind of community-level blind spot.
I strongly agree with your comment, but I want to point out in defense of this trend that nuclear weapons policy seems to be unusually insulated from public input and unusually likely to be highly sensitive/not good to discuss in public.
I’m not just talking about preventing nuclear war, though, but also mitigations in the case where it happens. If there’s something you can do to reduce risk for yourself, there’s probably also something you can do to reduce risk for a thousand or ten thousand other people.
I think “it’s easy to overreact on a personal level” is an important lesson from covid, but much more important is “it’s easy to underreact on a policy level”. I.e. given the level of foresight that EAs had about covid, I think we had a disappointingly small influence on mitigating it, in part because people focused too much on making sure they didn’t get it themselves.
In this case, I’ve seen a bunch of people posting about how they’re likely to leave major cities soon, and basically zero discussion of whether there are things people can do to make nuclear war overall less likely and/or systematically help a lot of other people. I don’t think it’s bad to be trying to ensure your personal survival as a key priority, and I don’t want to discourage people from seriously analysing the risks from that perspective, but I do want to note that the overall effect is a bit odd, and may indicate some kind of community-level blind spot.
I strongly agree with your comment, but I want to point out in defense of this trend that nuclear weapons policy seems to be unusually insulated from public input and unusually likely to be highly sensitive/not good to discuss in public.
I’m not just talking about preventing nuclear war, though, but also mitigations in the case where it happens. If there’s something you can do to reduce risk for yourself, there’s probably also something you can do to reduce risk for a thousand or ten thousand other people.
Good point, I didn’t think of that.