Hi Vasco, thank you for this! I agree with you that just extrapolating the power law likely overestimates the chance of an enormous or extinction-level war by quite a bit. I’d mentioned this in my 80,000 Hours article but just as an intuition, so it’s useful to have a mathematical argument, too. I’d be very interested to see you run the numbers, especially to see how they compare to the estimates from other strands of evidence I talk about in the 80K article.
Hi Vasco, thank you for this! I agree with you that just extrapolating the power law likely overestimates the chance of an enormous or extinction-level war by quite a bit. I’d mentioned this in my 80,000 Hours article but just as an intuition, so it’s useful to have a mathematical argument, too. I’d be very interested to see you run the numbers, especially to see how they compare to the estimates from other strands of evidence I talk about in the 80K article.