For what itās worth, my working assumption for many risks (e.g. nuclear, supervolcanic eruption) was that their contribution to existential risk via ādirectā extinction was of a similar level to their contribution via civilisation collapse
I was guessing you agreed the direct extinction risk from nuclear war and volcanoes was astronomically low, so I am very surprised by the above. I think it implies your annual extinction risk from:
Nuclear war is around 5*10^-6 (= 0.5*10^-3/ā100), which is 843 k (= 5*10^-6/ā(5.93*10^-12)) times mine.
Volcanoes is around 5*10^-7 (= 0.5*10^-4/ā100), which is 14.8 M (= 5*10^-7/ā(3.38*10^-14)) times mine.
I would be curious to know your thoughts on my estimates. Feel free to follow up in the comments on their posts (which I had also emailed to you around 3 and 2 months ago). In general, I think it would be great if you could explain how you got all your existential risk estimates shared in The Precipice (e.g. decomposing them into various factors as I did in my analyses, if that is how you got them).
Your comment above seems to imply that direct extinction would be an existential risk, but I actually think human extinction would be very unlikely to be an existential catastrophe if it was caused by nuclear war or volcanoes. For example, I think there would only be a 0.0513 % (= e^(-10^9/ā(132*10^6))) chance of a repetition of the last mass extinction 66 M years ago, the CretaceousāPaleogene extinction event, being existential. I got my estimate assuming:
An exponential distribution with a mean of 132 M years (= 66*10^6*2) represents the time between i) human extinction in such catastrophe and ii) the evolution of an intelligent sentient species after such a catastrophe. I supposed this on the basis that:
Given the above, i) and ii) are equally likely. So the probability of an intelligent sentient species evolving after human extinction in such a catastrophe is 50 % (= 1ā2).
Consequently, one should expect the time between i) and ii) to be 2 times (= 1ā0.50) as long as that if there were no such catastrophes.
An intelligent sentient species has 1 billion years to evolve before the Earth becomes habitable.
Thanks for the context, Toby!
I was guessing you agreed the direct extinction risk from nuclear war and volcanoes was astronomically low, so I am very surprised by the above. I think it implies your annual extinction risk from:
Nuclear war is around 5*10^-6 (= 0.5*10^-3/ā100), which is 843 k (= 5*10^-6/ā(5.93*10^-12)) times mine.
Volcanoes is around 5*10^-7 (= 0.5*10^-4/ā100), which is 14.8 M (= 5*10^-7/ā(3.38*10^-14)) times mine.
I would be curious to know your thoughts on my estimates. Feel free to follow up in the comments on their posts (which I had also emailed to you around 3 and 2 months ago). In general, I think it would be great if you could explain how you got all your existential risk estimates shared in The Precipice (e.g. decomposing them into various factors as I did in my analyses, if that is how you got them).
Your comment above seems to imply that direct extinction would be an existential risk, but I actually think human extinction would be very unlikely to be an existential catastrophe if it was caused by nuclear war or volcanoes. For example, I think there would only be a 0.0513 % (= e^(-10^9/ā(132*10^6))) chance of a repetition of the last mass extinction 66 M years ago, the CretaceousāPaleogene extinction event, being existential. I got my estimate assuming:
An exponential distribution with a mean of 132 M years (= 66*10^6*2) represents the time between i) human extinction in such catastrophe and ii) the evolution of an intelligent sentient species after such a catastrophe. I supposed this on the basis that:
An exponential distribution with a mean of 66 M years describes the time between:
2 consecutive such catastrophes.
i) and ii) if there are no such catastrophes.
Given the above, i) and ii) are equally likely. So the probability of an intelligent sentient species evolving after human extinction in such a catastrophe is 50 % (= 1ā2).
Consequently, one should expect the time between i) and ii) to be 2 times (= 1ā0.50) as long as that if there were no such catastrophes.
An intelligent sentient species has 1 billion years to evolve before the Earth becomes habitable.