Cotton-Barratt 2020 says “it’s usually best to invest significantly into strengthening all three defence layers”:
“This is because the same relative change of each probability will have the same effect on the extinction probability”. I agree with this, but I wonder whether tail risk is the relevant metric. I think it is better to look into the expected value density of the cost-effectiveness of saving a life, accounting for indirect longterm effects as I did. I predict this expected value density to be higher for the 1st layers, which respect a lower severity, but are more likely to be requested. So, to equalise the marginal cost-effectiveness of additional investments across all layers, it may well be better to invest more in prevention than in response, and more in response than in resilience.
That paper was explicitly considering strategies for reducing the risk of human extinction. I agree that relative to the balance you get from that, society should skew towards prioritizing response and especially prevention, since these are also important for many of society’s values that aren’t just about reducing extinction risk.
That paper was explicitly considering strategies for reducing the risk of human extinction.
My expected value density of the cost-effectiveness of saving a life, which decreases as catastrophe severity increases, is supposed to account for longterm effects like decreasing the risk of human extinction.
I think if you’re primarily trying to model effects on extinction risk, then doing everything via “proportional increase in population” and nowhere directly analysing extinction risk, seems like a weirdly indirect way to do it—and leaves me with a bunch of questions about whether that’s really the best way to do it.
if you’re primarily trying to model effects on extinction risk
I am not necessarily trying to do this. I intended to model the overall effect of saving lives, and I have the intuition that saving a life in a catastrophe (period over which there is a large reduction in population) conditional on it happening is more valuable than saving a life in normal times, so I assumed the value of saving a life increases with the severity of the catastrophe. One can assume preventing extinction is specially important by selecting a higher value for ϵB (“the elasticity of the benefits [of saving a life] with respect to the ratio between the initial and final population”).
Sorry, I understood that you primarily weren’t trying to model effects on extinction risk. But I understood you to be suggesting that this methodology might be appropriate for what we were doing in that paper—which was primarily modelling effects on extinction risk.
Re.
That paper was explicitly considering strategies for reducing the risk of human extinction. I agree that relative to the balance you get from that, society should skew towards prioritizing response and especially prevention, since these are also important for many of society’s values that aren’t just about reducing extinction risk.
Thanks for all your comments, Owen!
My expected value density of the cost-effectiveness of saving a life, which decreases as catastrophe severity increases, is supposed to account for longterm effects like decreasing the risk of human extinction.
I think if you’re primarily trying to model effects on extinction risk, then doing everything via “proportional increase in population” and nowhere directly analysing extinction risk, seems like a weirdly indirect way to do it—and leaves me with a bunch of questions about whether that’s really the best way to do it.
I am not necessarily trying to do this. I intended to model the overall effect of saving lives, and I have the intuition that saving a life in a catastrophe (period over which there is a large reduction in population) conditional on it happening is more valuable than saving a life in normal times, so I assumed the value of saving a life increases with the severity of the catastrophe. One can assume preventing extinction is specially important by selecting a higher value for ϵB (“the elasticity of the benefits [of saving a life] with respect to the ratio between the initial and final population”).
Sorry, I understood that you primarily weren’t trying to model effects on extinction risk. But I understood you to be suggesting that this methodology might be appropriate for what we were doing in that paper—which was primarily modelling effects on extinction risk.