All investments go to zero in the case of existential risk, so it’s hard to price it correctly… I thought that the article was great, but I would have appreciated a more comprehensive treatment.
You may be interested in reading my long-form (albeit meandering) thoughts on this exact issue! Here is the post, wherein I analyze and respond to an essay by Peter Thiel on this same subject of the interaction between markets and apocalyptic risks that would end those very markets. Among other things, I wonder if (precisely because markets are incentivized to ignore X-risk), we can somehow use markets (including specially-created prediction markets) to indirectly measure X-risk or related quantities.
On the subject of Hanania’s “Why War Forecasting is Hard”, I’m surprised that he didn’t mention the unpredictable effects of… I’m not sure what to call this, maybe “preference cascades” or just the nature of coalitional fights? Experts & forecasters alike were surprised on the downside at how quickly the Afghanistan army gave up against the Taliban, and they were surprised on the upside at how stalwart the Ukrainian forces have been against Russia. I don’t think this is all just the physical complexity of war (ie, the difficulty of assessing whether tire maintenance is a crucial factor) or the difficulty of assessing deep cultural factors (“are Ukranians too westernized to be willing to fight”, “do Russians really consider Ukraine a part of their ancestral homeland”, and similar). It seems like the decision of whether to fight or give up is perhaps just a volatile and uncertain thing, dependent on social perception of which way the wind is blowing and whether other people have decided to fight or give up.
ie, in another universe, if for whatever reason more Ukrainian leaders had fled the country (perhaps the government relocates from Kiev to Lviv) and there were fewer early stories of heroic resistance (like the tales about Snake Island, etc), perhaps many Ukranians would have started giving up and Russia would have had much more success with their invasion, despite no change whatsoever in the fundamental factors (military hardware or cultural stuff or etc). This is just my own pundit-like speculation, I know, but it strikes me as perhaps a more plausible explanation of why war forecasting might be especially/uniquely tricky, compared to other similarly complex things like forecasting the success of a new rocket’s first launch or the growth of a nation’s economy—rockets and economies can be just as vexing as unmaintained tires!
You may be interested in reading my long-form (albeit meandering) thoughts on this exact issue! Here is the post, wherein I analyze and respond to an essay by Peter Thiel on this same subject of the interaction between markets and apocalyptic risks that would end those very markets. Among other things, I wonder if (precisely because markets are incentivized to ignore X-risk), we can somehow use markets (including specially-created prediction markets) to indirectly measure X-risk or related quantities.
On the subject of Hanania’s “Why War Forecasting is Hard”, I’m surprised that he didn’t mention the unpredictable effects of… I’m not sure what to call this, maybe “preference cascades” or just the nature of coalitional fights? Experts & forecasters alike were surprised on the downside at how quickly the Afghanistan army gave up against the Taliban, and they were surprised on the upside at how stalwart the Ukrainian forces have been against Russia. I don’t think this is all just the physical complexity of war (ie, the difficulty of assessing whether tire maintenance is a crucial factor) or the difficulty of assessing deep cultural factors (“are Ukranians too westernized to be willing to fight”, “do Russians really consider Ukraine a part of their ancestral homeland”, and similar). It seems like the decision of whether to fight or give up is perhaps just a volatile and uncertain thing, dependent on social perception of which way the wind is blowing and whether other people have decided to fight or give up.
ie, in another universe, if for whatever reason more Ukrainian leaders had fled the country (perhaps the government relocates from Kiev to Lviv) and there were fewer early stories of heroic resistance (like the tales about Snake Island, etc), perhaps many Ukranians would have started giving up and Russia would have had much more success with their invasion, despite no change whatsoever in the fundamental factors (military hardware or cultural stuff or etc). This is just my own pundit-like speculation, I know, but it strikes me as perhaps a more plausible explanation of why war forecasting might be especially/uniquely tricky, compared to other similarly complex things like forecasting the success of a new rocket’s first launch or the growth of a nation’s economy—rockets and economies can be just as vexing as unmaintained tires!