I really appreciate this post (and am curating it). It’s a follow-up to previous work that targets important uncertainties; following up on discussion of an initial piece of work (especially when the discussion is critical) is great — and a focus on the relevant uncertainties or disagreements is really important.
Here’s a quote (I added a link to the original post):
Does the distribution of battle deaths follow a power law?
What do we know about the extreme tails of this distribution?
As always, I really appreciate the summary:
Our findings are:
That battle deaths per war are plausibly distributed according to a power law, but few analyses have compared the power law fit to the fit of other distributions. Plus, it’s hard to say what the tails of the distribution look like beyond the wars we’ve experienced so far.
To become more confident in the power law fit, and learn more about the tails, we have to consider theory: what drives war, and how might these factors change as wars get bigger?
Perhaps some factors limit the size of war, such as increasing logistical complexity. One candidate for such a factor is technology. But while it seems plausible that in the past, humanity’s war-making capacity was not sufficient to threaten extinction, this is no longer the case.
This suggests that wars could get very, very bad: we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that war could cause human extinction.
I also like the uncertainties and ways the tentative conclusions could be incorrect are outlined (e.g. in this section, but also even in the summary). And the conclusion provides suggestions for future research based on those uncertainties.
Somewhat related (discussions of the likelihood of war, not how bad it could get):
I really appreciate this post (and am curating it). It’s a follow-up to previous work that targets important uncertainties; following up on discussion of an initial piece of work (especially when the discussion is critical) is great — and a focus on the relevant uncertainties or disagreements is really important.
Here’s a quote (I added a link to the original post):
As always, I really appreciate the summary:
I also like the uncertainties and ways the tentative conclusions could be incorrect are outlined (e.g. in this section, but also even in the summary). And the conclusion provides suggestions for future research based on those uncertainties.
Somewhat related (discussions of the likelihood of war, not how bad it could get):
80,000 Hours recently released a podcast with Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn’t on the decline.
Stephen shared a related links-post: Economists Chris Blattman and Noah Smith on China, Taiwan, and the likelihood of war
A database: http://www.crisisevents.org/browse.html
And a related chart from Our World in Data (that I discovered via the podcast summary linked above — more on counting conflict deaths):