Thanks for your response and the link to your newer post and the Ord and Hanson refs. I’ll just add a thought I had while reading
This is why I explicitly noted that here I was using MVP in a sense focused only on genetic diversity. To touch on the other “aspects” of MVP, I also have “What population size is required for economic specialisation, technological development, etc.?”
It seems fine to me for people to also use MVP in a sense referring to all-things-considered ability to survive, or in a sense focused only on e.g. economic specialisation...
This all makes sense, but sounds to me like to be at risk of leaving out the population/conservation biology perspective (beyond genetic considerations). A large part of what motivated me to write my original post is that I do think it is indeed valuable to use frameworks from population and conservation biology to study human extinction risk - but it is important to include all factors identified in those fields as being important; namely, environmental and demographic stochasticity, as well as habitat fragmentation and degradation, which could pose much greater risks than inbreeding and genetic drift.
Yeah, that sounds right. Those factors were left out just because I didn’t think of including them (because I don’t know very much about these frameworks from population and conservation biology), rather than because I explicitly decided to include them, and I’d guess you’re right that attending to those factors and using those frameworks would be useful. So thanks for highlighting this :)
There are probably also various other “crucial questions” people could highlight, as well as questions that would fit under these questions and get more into the fine-grained details, and I’d encourage people to comment here, comment in the google doc, or create their own documents to highlight those things. (I say this partly because this post has a very broad scope, so a vast array of fields will have relevant knowledge, and I of course have very limited knowledge of most of those fields.)
Thanks for your response and the link to your newer post and the Ord and Hanson refs. I’ll just add a thought I had while reading
This all makes sense, but sounds to me like to be at risk of leaving out the population/conservation biology perspective (beyond genetic considerations). A large part of what motivated me to write my original post is that I do think it is indeed valuable to use frameworks from population and conservation biology to study human extinction risk - but it is important to include all factors identified in those fields as being important; namely, environmental and demographic stochasticity, as well as habitat fragmentation and degradation, which could pose much greater risks than inbreeding and genetic drift.
Yeah, that sounds right. Those factors were left out just because I didn’t think of including them (because I don’t know very much about these frameworks from population and conservation biology), rather than because I explicitly decided to include them, and I’d guess you’re right that attending to those factors and using those frameworks would be useful. So thanks for highlighting this :)
There are probably also various other “crucial questions” people could highlight, as well as questions that would fit under these questions and get more into the fine-grained details, and I’d encourage people to comment here, comment in the google doc, or create their own documents to highlight those things. (I say this partly because this post has a very broad scope, so a vast array of fields will have relevant knowledge, and I of course have very limited knowledge of most of those fields.)