>I like the idea of building “resilience” instead of going after specific causes.
That’s almost exactly the approach we took in ALLFED, treating the more likely GCR and Xrisk scenarios as a “basket of risks”...
… and then looking at how to build resilience and recovery capacity for all of them, with an initial focus on recovering food supply.
We now have more than 20 EA volunteers at ALLFED, in a range of disciplines from engineering to history, so clearly this makes sense to people.
>For instance, if we spend all of our attention on bio risks, AI risks, and nuclear risks, it’s possible that something else weird will cause catastrophe in 15 years.
Indeed!
Most likely a “cascading risk scenario” … (as covid is, without yet being a GCR) …
.… or what EA Matthijs Maas calls a “boring apocalypse”.
>So experimenting with broad interventions that seem “good no matter what” seems interesting. For example, if we could have effective government infrastructure, or general disaster response, or a more powerful EA movement, those would all be generally useful things.
yes the DRR (disaster risk reduction) discipline gave us structures and processes, and enabled us to bridge across to UNDRR, a profession of disaster people, insights into preparedness-response-recovery which we are scaling up to whole-continent and whole-planet scale, etc
>I like the idea of building “resilience” instead of going after specific causes.
>For instance, if we spend all of our attention on bio risks, AI risks, and nuclear risks, it’s possible that something else weird will cause catastrophe in 15 years.
>So experimenting with broad interventions that seem “good no matter what” seems interesting. For example, if we could have effective government infrastructure, or general disaster response, or a more powerful EA movement, those would all be generally useful things.