As someone who helped raise the alarm about Covid (and is trying to do so for this one as well), I have wondered if my actions were actually harmful. I posted an update on Facebook in I think May 2020 something to the effect that more harm may come from EAs losing productivity than from the actual disease. I consider myself a pretty good updater for these situations but a lot of people are subject to information cascades. I do think some people remained, frankly, way too fucking neurotic about this longer than was reasonable. I wish more people grokked the coordination cost of imposing more friction along their collaboration surface area. As an example, there was a post I think last autumn that was like “what is EAG doing about Covid?” and I considered that annoying and felt sorry for EAG people.
One argument in favor of your viewpoint is that if global nuclear war happens, there’s really not much EA work left to do in the aftermath besides help a few people around you if you survived. That might be comparable to global health and development relief? Maybe global poverty people who live in these cities and think they have alpha on what lifesaving efforts they could somehow participate in in a way that more than offsets the expected disvalue of leaving and is more expected value than their current charity work should leave.
On the other hand, there’s so much social pressure to be sanguine as well. Very few people left the cities when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened IIRC. Nukes are a different beast than Covid. In some ways it’s easier to prepare and some ways it’s harder.
I wish people could update and decide fast in any direction. The ability to really admit WW3 could happen before it hits rather than bury one’s head in the sand, and also the ability to set-and-forget a policy regarding the threat that maintains productivity. I am inclined towards ‘everyone should have their panic period early and get it out of their system’.
Part of the issue may be that there are status incentives that come into play to talk a whole bunch and cogitate about the current thing while it’s happening. I know that I need to stay away from social media right now.
There is a significant probability of WW3 happening over this century, so I don’t think it’s virtuous to skip over the prepping work that most people have neglected and now is the Schelling time to at least buy some potassium iodide pills in case the U.S. and China go to war over Taiwan in the next decade. Though it may be next to impossible to reach adequacy.
FWIW I am pretty confident the Samotsvety forecast or others like that are consistently understating risks due to outside view reasoning biases or what Thiel calls indefinite thinking.
I definitely think now is a good time to stock up on food and water if one hasn’t.
Thanks for this thoughtful reflection. I do want to register that I think I disagree there wouldn’t be much EA to do post- a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia—it would be a scary hard world to live in, and one where many of our previous priorities are no longer relevant, but it’s work I think we could do and could improve the trajectory of civilization by doing.
I’d be a bit surprised if EAs were even good at surviving post-apocalypse. We’ve spent all this time learning how best to live in a civilization… we’re not preppers, we’re not experts in agriculture or building water wells or keeping raiders away from food stashes, I’m not sure how we’ll communicate without the internet (but Starlink may well survive), and does ALLFED have any solutions to offer within the next year?
If there is a loss of civilization, I agree there would not be that much that EAs could do. However, I think there is a lot we could do to try to prevent the loss of civilization after nuclear war, which is part of what theseposts were about. Yes, ALLFED is working on solutions that could be scaled up quickly in the case of nuclear war.
As someone who helped raise the alarm about Covid (and is trying to do so for this one as well), I have wondered if my actions were actually harmful. I posted an update on Facebook in I think May 2020 something to the effect that more harm may come from EAs losing productivity than from the actual disease. I consider myself a pretty good updater for these situations but a lot of people are subject to information cascades. I do think some people remained, frankly, way too fucking neurotic about this longer than was reasonable. I wish more people grokked the coordination cost of imposing more friction along their collaboration surface area. As an example, there was a post I think last autumn that was like “what is EAG doing about Covid?” and I considered that annoying and felt sorry for EAG people.
One argument in favor of your viewpoint is that if global nuclear war happens, there’s really not much EA work left to do in the aftermath besides help a few people around you if you survived. That might be comparable to global health and development relief? Maybe global poverty people who live in these cities and think they have alpha on what lifesaving efforts they could somehow participate in in a way that more than offsets the expected disvalue of leaving and is more expected value than their current charity work should leave.
On the other hand, there’s so much social pressure to be sanguine as well. Very few people left the cities when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened IIRC. Nukes are a different beast than Covid. In some ways it’s easier to prepare and some ways it’s harder.
I wish people could update and decide fast in any direction. The ability to really admit WW3 could happen before it hits rather than bury one’s head in the sand, and also the ability to set-and-forget a policy regarding the threat that maintains productivity. I am inclined towards ‘everyone should have their panic period early and get it out of their system’.
Part of the issue may be that there are status incentives that come into play to talk a whole bunch and cogitate about the current thing while it’s happening. I know that I need to stay away from social media right now.
There is a significant probability of WW3 happening over this century, so I don’t think it’s virtuous to skip over the prepping work that most people have neglected and now is the Schelling time to at least buy some potassium iodide pills in case the U.S. and China go to war over Taiwan in the next decade. Though it may be next to impossible to reach adequacy.
FWIW I am pretty confident the Samotsvety forecast or others like that are consistently understating risks due to outside view reasoning biases or what Thiel calls indefinite thinking.
I definitely think now is a good time to stock up on food and water if one hasn’t.
Thanks for this thoughtful reflection. I do want to register that I think I disagree there wouldn’t be much EA to do post- a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia—it would be a scary hard world to live in, and one where many of our previous priorities are no longer relevant, but it’s work I think we could do and could improve the trajectory of civilization by doing.
I’d be a bit surprised if EAs were even good at surviving post-apocalypse. We’ve spent all this time learning how best to live in a civilization… we’re not preppers, we’re not experts in agriculture or building water wells or keeping raiders away from food stashes, I’m not sure how we’ll communicate without the internet (but Starlink may well survive), and does ALLFED have any solutions to offer within the next year?
If there is a loss of civilization, I agree there would not be that much that EAs could do. However, I think there is a lot we could do to try to prevent the loss of civilization after nuclear war, which is part of what these posts were about. Yes, ALLFED is working on solutions that could be scaled up quickly in the case of nuclear war.
With the chance of Putin nuking Ukraine being ~7% in the next 3 months, perhaps a campaign to share ALLFED’s ideas would be wise right now. Related: most recent post about ALLFED.