Vasco Grilo🔸 comments on Speedrun: Demonstrate the ability to rapidly scale food production in the case of nuclear winter

[Vasco Grilo🔸]

Great work, Marie!

X-risk from nuclear war this century: ~0.18%. (based on the numbers below and sanity checked against Toby Ord’s estimate in The Precipice (p. 287) of ~0.1%)

FWIW, I got an estimate twice as large here:

I estimate globally mitigating food shocks caused by abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios (ASRSs) between 2024 and 2100 leads to an increase in future potential of 37.8 bp (5th to 95th percentile, −73.7 to 201).

Regarding:

Overall, the downsides of this project seem relatively limited to me.

I estimated here:

nationally mitigating food shocks is harmful not only in pessimistic cases, but also in expectation in 40.7 % (= ⁵⁹⁄₁₄₅) of the countries I analysed. The reasons are (see discussion here):

• I suppose (see here) real gross domestic product (real GDP) is a good proxy for (good or bad) influence in the future.

• Mitigating the food shocks of a country counterfactually increases its real GDP in the worst year of the ASRS.

• Consequently, mitigating the food shocks of a country with low^[10] socioeconomic indices^[11] leads to lower global socioeconomic indices weighted by influence. I assume this is bad, although with significant uncertainty (see 2nd paragraph of the previous section).