Executive summary: The post provides a comprehensive overview of how disaster risk reduction scholars conceptualize and model risk, highlighting the limitations of common approaches within the Effective Altruism and forecasting communities, and introducing alternative frameworks from fields like safety science and futures studies that can enrich global catastrophic risk research.
Key points:
The disaster risk reduction field uses the Hazard-Exposure-Vulnerability-Capacity-Response (HEVCR) model to analyze how catastrophic events emerge from the complex interplay of multiple factors, unlike the simplistic “Acts of God” framing common in GCR research.
Normal Accident Theory suggests that certain types of highly complex and tightly coupled systems are inherently prone to unpredictable and cascading failures, which has implications for how to design and manage high-risk organizations.
There is a distinction between “sexy” risks that are epistemically neat and technology-focused, versus “unsexy” risks that are gradual, behaviorally driven, and difficult to study and communicate.
Forecasting methods have limitations, especially for low-probability, high-impact events, and should be complemented by qualitative foresight techniques that explore a broader range of possible futures.
The sociotechnical imaginaries and utopian visions that shape GCR research and discourse deserve critical examination, as they may inadvertently increase the very risks they aim to mitigate.
The post encourages readers to engage with the relevant fields and frameworks beyond just forecasting, in order to develop more comprehensive and effective approaches to global catastrophic risk.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: The post provides a comprehensive overview of how disaster risk reduction scholars conceptualize and model risk, highlighting the limitations of common approaches within the Effective Altruism and forecasting communities, and introducing alternative frameworks from fields like safety science and futures studies that can enrich global catastrophic risk research.
Key points:
The disaster risk reduction field uses the Hazard-Exposure-Vulnerability-Capacity-Response (HEVCR) model to analyze how catastrophic events emerge from the complex interplay of multiple factors, unlike the simplistic “Acts of God” framing common in GCR research.
Normal Accident Theory suggests that certain types of highly complex and tightly coupled systems are inherently prone to unpredictable and cascading failures, which has implications for how to design and manage high-risk organizations.
There is a distinction between “sexy” risks that are epistemically neat and technology-focused, versus “unsexy” risks that are gradual, behaviorally driven, and difficult to study and communicate.
Forecasting methods have limitations, especially for low-probability, high-impact events, and should be complemented by qualitative foresight techniques that explore a broader range of possible futures.
The sociotechnical imaginaries and utopian visions that shape GCR research and discourse deserve critical examination, as they may inadvertently increase the very risks they aim to mitigate.
The post encourages readers to engage with the relevant fields and frameworks beyond just forecasting, in order to develop more comprehensive and effective approaches to global catastrophic risk.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.