Really interesting thoughts! Thanks for putting this together. So useful and practical to have a priority list of this kind!
I was quite surprised that policy around nuclear weapons isn’t rated even higher. Looking at your spreadsheet, I think the ‘Australia ROI’ score for nuclear war might be quite strongly underrated at present. It is currently rated on that metric as a 2 (out of 5) meaning “Compared to other countries, Australia has little control and influence on this issue. Australia also has a poor international reputation on this issue and rarely implements best practices. Australia has no comparative advantages for addressing this issue.”
This seems to be a mistake to me. You’re right that Australia has little sway on the likelihood of nuclear war, or on the behaviour of major nuclear powers, and it isn’t a nuclear power itself. However, it still has huge advantage compared to most countries in addressing existential risk—the reason being that (according to a number of experts like Brian Martin and Toby Ord) Australia seems far more likely than almost any other country to survive a nuclear war. So while there likely isn’t much work to be done in Australia to prevent a nuclear war from occurring, it seems like there is a huge amount that could be done in Australia, and maybe only in Australia, in order to prevent the actual extinction risk attached to nuclear war.
In particular a) having plans set up for survival of some portion of the Australian population so that nuclear war doesn’t result in extinction (At present, it’s my understanding that the Australian government has no contingencies in place for population survival after nuclear war at this point) and b) ensuring that Australia doesn’t arm themselves with nuclear weapons/doesn’t take actions that lead it to become a major nuclear target in future. As being a nuclear target would jeopardise one of the places most likely to survive. These two approaches seem like they could be powerful ways to avoid the extinction risk associated with nuclear weapons, and Australia would be better positioned to implement this than almost any other country (possible exceptions/other viable countries might be New Zealand, or possibly Argentina).
Any change of score here—even a change by one point on this one metric—would make nuclear risk the #1 highest priority option to address in Australia in your spreadsheet. As it currently scores as the equal most important option in you list.
It seems valid using your metrics too, as rating it a 3 would mean that “Compared to other countries, Australia has some control and influence on this issue.” and ” “Australia has few comparative advantages for addressing this issue.” (instead of no comparative advantages), which, even under conservative assumptions seems highly likely to be true.
Given Australia’s uniquely good positioning with this issue, is there a reason it wasn’t rated higher on this metric? Perhaps there’s something I’ve missed.
This is a great point, Jack. I agree, I think we should change it to a 3. In fact, I wrote an op-ed last month arguing that Australia could even lead globally on nuclear risk. So you would have thought we should have rated it as a 3 to begin with!
Our instinct when putting nuclear risk (and other issues) at a 2 was not to over-egg Australia’s role. Australia punches above its weight on many issues, but then seems also over-interpret its relative importance. We were probably too wary of falling into that trap. But on nuclear risk, we do have some comparative advantages that would put us a bit higher on our rating scale.
Rumtin, I think Jack is absolutely right, and our research, in the process of being written up will argue Australia is the most likely successful persisting hub of complexity in a range of nuclear war scenarios. We include a detailed case study of New Zealand (because of familiarity with the issues) but a detailed case study of Australia is begging to be done. There are key issues (mostly focused around trade, energy forms, societal cohesion, infectious disease resilience, awareness of the main risks—not ‘radiation’ like many public think, and for Australia not climate impacts or food either, which is where most nuclear impact research has focused) that could be improved ahead of time, with co-benefits for climate impact, health, resilience to other catastrophes etc. Australia is indeed uniquely positioned here (for a number of reasons that go beyond ‘survival’ and into ‘resilience’ and ‘reboot’ capacity, etc) and policy should include interconnections with NZ policy (sustaining regional trade, security alliance, etc, we’ve identified other potentially surviving/thriving regional partners too) Happy to collaborate on this. I can send you a draft of our paper in maybe 2 weeks.
I am a bit late to the party here but I agree that Australia is uniquely well positioned to have an impact on nuclear through increasing it’s resilience and warrants its own case study. The Island state refuge concept was discussed at EAGx Australia as a potential moonshot project. On top of this major new industries relevant to food security in an Abrupt Sunlight Reduction Scenario such as Macroalgae (See seaweed blueprint and Marine Bioproducts Cooperative Research Council) are being set up and scaling so there may be potential to influence the industry towards resilience / response through policy mechanisms e.g. minimizing tight environmental controls for seaweed farming in an ASRS.
If you end up going ahead with the Australia case study I am happy to help on the assessment of food security and infrastructure resilience aspect.
Hi Ross, here’s the paper that I mentioned in my comment above (this pre-print uses some data from Xia et al 2022 in its preprint form, and their paper has just been published in Nature Food with some slightly updated numbers, so we’ll update our own once the peer review comes back, but the conclusions etc won’t change): https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1927222/v1
We’re now starting a ‘NZ Catastrophe Resilience Project’ to more fully work up the skeleton details that are listed in Supplementary Table S1 of our paper. Engaging with public sector, industry, academia etc. Australia could do exactly the same.
I think economic growth is rated too highly by this framework. It gets a very high rating on the first criteria because many organisations think it’s something worth considering—but none of them rate it as their top priority, or even a particularly high priority (to my knowledge). My intuition is that it wouldn’t get such a high rating if the criteria was importance, rather than consensus that it is one of the issues worth considering—and that importance is what matters here?
We incorporated importance in the second part of our criteria after doing the deep-dives, because we wanted to assess the importance of a given issue in the Australian policy context—so it did come through, but a bit later on.
In any case, our deeper policy analyses aren’t complete yet, but on what we’ve found so far we tend to agree that economic growth shouldn’t be prioritised too highly.
Does the scope of the project allow for engagment with academics as well as policy-makers/public servants? While there obvious risks with expanding the scope too broadly, I wonder whether collaboration with academia could be valuable for research efforts. There is also the possibility that some academic work (e.g. gain-of function research) could undermine policy efforts, so perhaps coordination between EA-aligned policy-makers/public servants and academics could reduce this risk?
Thanks for the comment Lucas! Apologies for the delayed response.
We are definitely hoping to coordinate with academics, policymakers and public servants. That will come at a later stage though, after we’ve completed the prioritisation and deep-dives of the issues we found.
Really useful work and well-written post with linked resources!
I’d be curious to see lists of global problems ranked for the policy context of many more countries too, to see how large differences there are and what rare context-related opportunities we might discover (e.g. nuclear weapons in Australia, as argued in other comments here). I think this could also help decide whether or not there’s a strong case for increasing EA policy efforts in smaller countries (and where).
That said, the ordering in the shortlist in this post is a touch confusing—it doesn’t seem to map to the total scores in your spreadsheet? e.g. AI scores as equal 4th-6th most important in your spreadsheet, but is listed 1st in the short list. Meanwhile nuclear war and pandemic risk score as equal 1st-3rd, but are listed 9th and 10th in the shortlist. I wonder if it would make more sense to list the options that scored the highest first (as presumably, they should be prioritised the most)?
Hi Jack, Thanks for the comment! We decided to list it alphabetically in the post. Although some shortlisted items rated higher overall, we felt that the post shouldn’t make too hard of a distinction—mostly because it’s a relatively simple rating system, so we didn’t want to give the impression that we are definitively rating some as higher than others. I’ll edit the post just to make that clear.
Really interesting thoughts! Thanks for putting this together. So useful and practical to have a priority list of this kind!
I was quite surprised that policy around nuclear weapons isn’t rated even higher. Looking at your spreadsheet, I think the ‘Australia ROI’ score for nuclear war might be quite strongly underrated at present. It is currently rated on that metric as a 2 (out of 5) meaning “Compared to other countries, Australia has little control and influence on this issue. Australia also has a poor international reputation on this issue and rarely implements best practices. Australia has no comparative advantages for addressing this issue.”
This seems to be a mistake to me. You’re right that Australia has little sway on the likelihood of nuclear war, or on the behaviour of major nuclear powers, and it isn’t a nuclear power itself. However, it still has huge advantage compared to most countries in addressing existential risk—the reason being that (according to a number of experts like Brian Martin and Toby Ord) Australia seems far more likely than almost any other country to survive a nuclear war. So while there likely isn’t much work to be done in Australia to prevent a nuclear war from occurring, it seems like there is a huge amount that could be done in Australia, and maybe only in Australia, in order to prevent the actual extinction risk attached to nuclear war.
In particular a) having plans set up for survival of some portion of the Australian population so that nuclear war doesn’t result in extinction (At present, it’s my understanding that the Australian government has no contingencies in place for population survival after nuclear war at this point) and b) ensuring that Australia doesn’t arm themselves with nuclear weapons/doesn’t take actions that lead it to become a major nuclear target in future. As being a nuclear target would jeopardise one of the places most likely to survive. These two approaches seem like they could be powerful ways to avoid the extinction risk associated with nuclear weapons, and Australia would be better positioned to implement this than almost any other country (possible exceptions/other viable countries might be New Zealand, or possibly Argentina).
Any change of score here—even a change by one point on this one metric—would make nuclear risk the #1 highest priority option to address in Australia in your spreadsheet. As it currently scores as the equal most important option in you list.
It seems valid using your metrics too, as rating it a 3 would mean that “Compared to other countries, Australia has some control and influence on this issue.” and ” “Australia has few comparative advantages for addressing this issue.” (instead of no comparative advantages), which, even under conservative assumptions seems highly likely to be true.
Given Australia’s uniquely good positioning with this issue, is there a reason it wasn’t rated higher on this metric? Perhaps there’s something I’ve missed.
This is a great point, Jack. I agree, I think we should change it to a 3. In fact, I wrote an op-ed last month arguing that Australia could even lead globally on nuclear risk. So you would have thought we should have rated it as a 3 to begin with!
Our instinct when putting nuclear risk (and other issues) at a 2 was not to over-egg Australia’s role. Australia punches above its weight on many issues, but then seems also over-interpret its relative importance. We were probably too wary of falling into that trap. But on nuclear risk, we do have some comparative advantages that would put us a bit higher on our rating scale.
Rumtin, I think Jack is absolutely right, and our research, in the process of being written up will argue Australia is the most likely successful persisting hub of complexity in a range of nuclear war scenarios. We include a detailed case study of New Zealand (because of familiarity with the issues) but a detailed case study of Australia is begging to be done. There are key issues (mostly focused around trade, energy forms, societal cohesion, infectious disease resilience, awareness of the main risks—not ‘radiation’ like many public think, and for Australia not climate impacts or food either, which is where most nuclear impact research has focused) that could be improved ahead of time, with co-benefits for climate impact, health, resilience to other catastrophes etc. Australia is indeed uniquely positioned here (for a number of reasons that go beyond ‘survival’ and into ‘resilience’ and ‘reboot’ capacity, etc) and policy should include interconnections with NZ policy (sustaining regional trade, security alliance, etc, we’ve identified other potentially surviving/thriving regional partners too) Happy to collaborate on this. I can send you a draft of our paper in maybe 2 weeks.
I am a bit late to the party here but I agree that Australia is uniquely well positioned to have an impact on nuclear through increasing it’s resilience and warrants its own case study. The Island state refuge concept was discussed at EAGx Australia as a potential moonshot project. On top of this major new industries relevant to food security in an Abrupt Sunlight Reduction Scenario such as Macroalgae (See seaweed blueprint and Marine Bioproducts Cooperative Research Council) are being set up and scaling so there may be potential to influence the industry towards resilience / response through policy mechanisms e.g. minimizing tight environmental controls for seaweed farming in an ASRS.
If you end up going ahead with the Australia case study I am happy to help on the assessment of food security and infrastructure resilience aspect.
Hi Ross, here’s the paper that I mentioned in my comment above (this pre-print uses some data from Xia et al 2022 in its preprint form, and their paper has just been published in Nature Food with some slightly updated numbers, so we’ll update our own once the peer review comes back, but the conclusions etc won’t change): https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1927222/v1
We’re now starting a ‘NZ Catastrophe Resilience Project’ to more fully work up the skeleton details that are listed in Supplementary Table S1 of our paper. Engaging with public sector, industry, academia etc. Australia could do exactly the same.
Note that in the Xia paper, NZ’s food availability is vastly underestimated due to quirks of the UNFAO dataset. For an estimate of NZ’s export calories see our paper here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.05.13.22275065v1
And we’ve posted here on the Forum about all this here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7arEfmLBX2donjJyn/islands-nuclear-winter-and-trade-disruption-as-a-human
This is really great to see!
I think economic growth is rated too highly by this framework. It gets a very high rating on the first criteria because many organisations think it’s something worth considering—but none of them rate it as their top priority, or even a particularly high priority (to my knowledge). My intuition is that it wouldn’t get such a high rating if the criteria was importance, rather than consensus that it is one of the issues worth considering—and that importance is what matters here?
Thanks Riley! Apologies for our late response.
We incorporated importance in the second part of our criteria after doing the deep-dives, because we wanted to assess the importance of a given issue in the Australian policy context—so it did come through, but a bit later on.
In any case, our deeper policy analyses aren’t complete yet, but on what we’ve found so far we tend to agree that economic growth shouldn’t be prioritised too highly.
Thanks for writing this up Rumtin and Krystal!
Does the scope of the project allow for engagment with academics as well as policy-makers/public servants? While there obvious risks with expanding the scope too broadly, I wonder whether collaboration with academia could be valuable for research efforts. There is also the possibility that some academic work (e.g. gain-of function research) could undermine policy efforts, so perhaps coordination between EA-aligned policy-makers/public servants and academics could reduce this risk?
Thanks for the comment Lucas! Apologies for the delayed response.
We are definitely hoping to coordinate with academics, policymakers and public servants. That will come at a later stage though, after we’ve completed the prioritisation and deep-dives of the issues we found.
Really useful work and well-written post with linked resources!
I’d be curious to see lists of global problems ranked for the policy context of many more countries too, to see how large differences there are and what rare context-related opportunities we might discover (e.g. nuclear weapons in Australia, as argued in other comments here). I think this could also help decide whether or not there’s a strong case for increasing EA policy efforts in smaller countries (and where).
This was a great post! Really enjoyed reading it!
That said, the ordering in the shortlist in this post is a touch confusing—it doesn’t seem to map to the total scores in your spreadsheet? e.g. AI scores as equal 4th-6th most important in your spreadsheet, but is listed 1st in the short list. Meanwhile nuclear war and pandemic risk score as equal 1st-3rd, but are listed 9th and 10th in the shortlist. I wonder if it would make more sense to list the options that scored the highest first (as presumably, they should be prioritised the most)?
Hi Jack, Thanks for the comment! We decided to list it alphabetically in the post. Although some shortlisted items rated higher overall, we felt that the post shouldn’t make too hard of a distinction—mostly because it’s a relatively simple rating system, so we didn’t want to give the impression that we are definitively rating some as higher than others. I’ll edit the post just to make that clear.
Ahhhh I see! Thanks for clarifying!
And thanks again—this was a great read.