I would not ever expect governments to respond to catastrophic risks to a degree that I (for one) think is proportionate to the importance of the risks. This is because I would rate the risks as being more important than most other people would. There are a variety of reasons for this, including the intergenerational nature of it, and the global nature, and some psychological and institutional factors. Jonathan Wiener’s paper The Tragedy of the Uncommons is a good read on this.
That said, I do see potential for governments to have some effective responses to catastrophic risks. Indeed, they already are doing a variety of worthwhile things. There is also opportunity to get them to do more. Some of the opportunity is in persuading governments to care more about it, but a lot of the opportunity is on improving their capacity for skilled work on the risks. In my “Common points of advice” write up, there’s a section on Work across the divide between (A) humanities-social science-policy and (B) engineering-natural science, which addresses a major aspect of the challenge.
And no, I have not seen this book; thanks for suggesting it. At a quick glance here, it seems that the book is advocating for a maximin decision rule and for a frequentist probability theory “in which it is not possible to assign probabilities to various outcomes”. I would disagree with both of those positions. But Sunstein is a distinguished legal scholar, and the book may nonetheless contain a lot of worthy insight.
Thanks for your questions. In reply:
I would not ever expect governments to respond to catastrophic risks to a degree that I (for one) think is proportionate to the importance of the risks. This is because I would rate the risks as being more important than most other people would. There are a variety of reasons for this, including the intergenerational nature of it, and the global nature, and some psychological and institutional factors. Jonathan Wiener’s paper The Tragedy of the Uncommons is a good read on this.
That said, I do see potential for governments to have some effective responses to catastrophic risks. Indeed, they already are doing a variety of worthwhile things. There is also opportunity to get them to do more. Some of the opportunity is in persuading governments to care more about it, but a lot of the opportunity is on improving their capacity for skilled work on the risks. In my “Common points of advice” write up, there’s a section on Work across the divide between (A) humanities-social science-policy and (B) engineering-natural science, which addresses a major aspect of the challenge.
And no, I have not seen this book; thanks for suggesting it. At a quick glance here, it seems that the book is advocating for a maximin decision rule and for a frequentist probability theory “in which it is not possible to assign probabilities to various outcomes”. I would disagree with both of those positions. But Sunstein is a distinguished legal scholar, and the book may nonetheless contain a lot of worthy insight.
Thanks!