How hopeful are you that governments will respond effectively and proportionately to catastrophic risks in the future? Does your experience fit with the idea that existential risk is under-served due to it being an ‘intergenerational global public good’?
And bonus: have you seen Cass Sunstein’s recent book ‘Averting Catastrophe’? If so, what do you make of it?
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.
How hopeful are you that governments will respond effectively and proportionately to catastrophic risks in the future? Does your experience fit with the idea that existential risk is under-served due to it being an ‘intergenerational global public good’?
And bonus: have you seen Cass Sunstein’s recent book ‘Averting Catastrophe’? If so, what do you make of it?
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!