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This is most likely my fault; I think I got confused between allfed.org and allfed.info
To clarify, the cost of preparation does not include the scale up in a catastrophe
For clarity: 1. Your guesstimate model: 3% to 50% mitigation of the impact of war with a 30M to 200M, a war which has a probability 0.02% to 5% per year. You also say that so far, you’ve already mitigated the impact of such a war by 1% to 20%. 2. My model: a 0% to 15% mitigation (previously 0 to 5%, see below) of the impact of such a war with a 50M to 50B investment, where this is maybe not being fully prepared, but does include some serious paranoid preparation, some factories running, supply chains established, etc. 3. Objection: You’re planning to go with the 30M to 200M path; my estimates should be for that path. 4. Answer: I’d have to think about it. Maybe 2x to 10x lower. Essentially I’d expect any preparation to at least fail partially, fail to get implemented, be ignored, not survive in institutional memory, etc.
In this paper, we found that if there were no resilient foods, expenditure on stored foods in a catastrophe would be approximately $90 trillion and about 10% of people would survive. However, if resilient foods could be produced at $2.5 per dry kilogram retail, 97% of people would survive but the total expenditure would only be ~$20 trillion. So one could argue that resilient foods would actually save money in a catastrophe
I’ll read the paper.
Just to make sure we are on the same page, if there were a 10% probability of full-scale nuclear war in the next 30 years and there were a 10% reduction in the long-term future potential of humanity given nuclear war, and if planning and R&D for resilient foods mitigated the far future impact of nuclear war by 50%, then that would improve the long-term potential of humanity by 0.5 percentage points (the product of the three percentages).
I see, thanks, I think I was getting this wrong (I’ve changed this in the guesstimate, but not in the post). With that in mind, your estimates now seem less high (but still very high). It changes my estimates slightly.
Separately, your numbers still seem fairly high. Suppose that in 1980 you had $100M and knew that there was going to be a pandemic (or another global financial crisis) in the next 100 years, but didn’t knew the details; it seems unlikely that you could have made the covid pandemic or the 2008 financial crisis more than 10% better.
This is most likely my fault; I think I got confused between allfed.org and allfed.info
We tried to buy the .org domain, but unfortunately it was not for sale.
Essentially I’d expect any preparation to at least fail partially, fail to get implemented, be ignored, not survive in institutional memory, etc.
There are definitely a lot of failure modes, though part of the money should go to updating institutions as staff turn over.
Thanks for updating the Guesstimate.
Separately, your numbers still seem fairly high. Suppose that in 1980 you had $100M and knew that there was going to be a pandemic (or another global financial crisis) in the next 100 years, but didn’t knew the details; it seems unlikely that you could have made the covid pandemic or the 2008 financial crisis more than 10% better.
Good question. I think these are quite different because billions of dollars had been put into preparedness, at least for a pandemic. Though billions of dollars have been put into preventing a nuclear war (and reducing weapon stockpiles), we could not find anything preparing for feeding populations for a multiyear catastrophe. I think generally there are logarithmic returns, which means the first amount of money spent on a problem has much greater marginal cost effectiveness.
This is most likely my fault; I think I got confused between allfed.org and allfed.info
For clarity:
1. Your guesstimate model: 3% to 50% mitigation of the impact of war with a 30M to 200M, a war which has a probability 0.02% to 5% per year. You also say that so far, you’ve already mitigated the impact of such a war by 1% to 20%.
2. My model: a 0% to 15% mitigation (previously 0 to 5%, see below) of the impact of such a war with a 50M to 50B investment, where this is maybe not being fully prepared, but does include some serious paranoid preparation, some factories running, supply chains established, etc.
3. Objection: You’re planning to go with the 30M to 200M path; my estimates should be for that path.
4. Answer: I’d have to think about it. Maybe 2x to 10x lower. Essentially I’d expect any preparation to at least fail partially, fail to get implemented, be ignored, not survive in institutional memory, etc.
I’ll read the paper.
I see, thanks, I think I was getting this wrong (I’ve changed this in the guesstimate, but not in the post). With that in mind, your estimates now seem less high (but still very high). It changes my estimates slightly.
Separately, your numbers still seem fairly high. Suppose that in 1980 you had $100M and knew that there was going to be a pandemic (or another global financial crisis) in the next 100 years, but didn’t knew the details; it seems unlikely that you could have made the covid pandemic or the 2008 financial crisis more than 10% better.
We tried to buy the .org domain, but unfortunately it was not for sale.
There are definitely a lot of failure modes, though part of the money should go to updating institutions as staff turn over.
Thanks for updating the Guesstimate.
Good question. I think these are quite different because billions of dollars had been put into preparedness, at least for a pandemic. Though billions of dollars have been put into preventing a nuclear war (and reducing weapon stockpiles), we could not find anything preparing for feeding populations for a multiyear catastrophe. I think generally there are logarithmic returns, which means the first amount of money spent on a problem has much greater marginal cost effectiveness.