I would like to hear your thoughts on Generalist vs Specialist debate.
Advice for someone early as a generalist?
Did you stumble upon these different fields of interest by your own or did you surround yourself with smart people to get good understandings of various fields?
Thoughts on impact comparissons? (Eg can a generalist maybe bring knowledge/wisdom from intuitively non-adjacent disciplines into a project and help advance it?)
What skills are you lacking \ or which ones would you like to aquire to become a “Jack of all trades”?
Are you even aiming to become even more of a generalist? Yes or no—please elaborate.
Thank you for this work. I appreciate the high-level transparency throughout (e.g what is an opinion, how many sources have been read/incorporated, reasons for assumptions etc.)!
I have few key (dis)agreements and considerations. Disclaimer: I work for ALLFED (Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters) where we look at preparedness and response to nuclear winter among other things.
1) Opportunity Costs
I think it is not necessary for work on either preventing the worst nuclear conflicts or work on preparedness/response to be mutually exclusive with preventing nuclear conflict in general.
My intuition is that if you are working on preventing the worst nuclear conflicts then you (also) have to work on escalation steps. And understanding of how wars escalate and what we can do about it seems to be very useful generally no matter if we go from a war using 0 to ~10 nukes or from a war escalating from 10 to 100 nukes. At each step we would want to intervene. I do not know how a specialization would look like that is only relevant at the 100 to 1000 nukes step. I know me not being able to imagine such a specialization is only a weak argument but I am also not aware of anyone only looking at such a niche problem.
Additionally, preparedness/response work has multiple uses. Nuclear winter is only one source for an abrupt sunlight reduction scenario (ASRS), the others being super volcanic eruptions and asteroid impacts (though one can argue that nuclear winter is the most likely out of the 3). Having ‘slack’ critical infrastructure (either through storage or the capacity to quickly scale-up post-catastrophe) is also helpful in many scenarios. Examples: resilient communication tech is helpful if communication is being disrupted either by war or by say a solar storm (same goes for electricity and water supply). The ability to scale-up food production is useful if we have Multiple Bread Basket Failures due to coinciding extreme weather events or if we have an agricultural shortfall due to a nuclear winter. In both cases we would want to know how feasible it is to quickly ramp up greenhouses (one example).
Lastly, I expect these different interventions to require different skillsets (e.g civil engineers vs. policy scholars). (Not always, surely there will be overlap.) So the opportunity costs would be more on the funding side of the cause area, less so on the talent side.
2) Neglectedness
I agree that the cause area as a whole is neglected and share the concerns around reduced funding. But within the broader cause area of ‘nuclear conflict’ the tail-risks and the preparedness/response are even more neglected. Barely anyone is working on this and I think this is one strength of the EA community to look into highly neglected areas and add more value per person working on the problem. I don’t have numbers but I would expect there to be at least 100 times more people working on preventing nuclear war and informing policy makers about the potential negative consequences because as you rightly stated that one does not need to be utilitarian, consequentialist, or longtermist to not want nukes to be used under any circumstances.
and 3) High uncertainty around interventions
Exactly because of the uncertainty you mentioned I think we should not rely on a narrow set of interventions and go broader. You can discount the likelihood, run your own numbers and advocate your ideal funding distribution between interventions but I think that we can not rule out nuclear winter happening and therefore some funding should go to response.
For context: Some put the probability of nuclear war causing extinction at (only) 0.3% this century. Or here is ALLFED’s cost-effectiveness model looking at ‘agriculture shortfalls’ and their longterm impact, making the case for the marginal dollar in this area being extremely valuable.
In general I strongly agree with your argument that more efforts should go into prevention of any kind of nuclear war. I do not agree that this should happen at the expense of other interventions (such as working on response/preparedness).
4) Premise 1 --> Civilizational Collapse (through escalation after a single nuke)
You write that a nuclear attack could cause a global conflict (agree) which could then escalate to civilizational collapse (and therefore pose an xrisk) even if no further nukes are being used (strong disagree).
I do not see a plausible pathway to that. Even in an all out physical/typical explosives kind of war (I would expect our supply chains to fail and us running out of things to throw at each other way before civilization itself collapses). Am I missing something here?
Tongue in cheek related movie quote:
A: “Eye for an eye and the world goes blind.”
B: “No it doesn’t. There’ll be one guy left with one eye.”
But I do not think it changes much of what you write here even if you cut-out this one consideration. It is only a minor point. Not a crux. Agree on the aspect that a single nuke can cause significant escalation though.
5) Desensitizing / Language around size of events
I am also saddened to hear that someone was dismissive about an India/Pakistan nuclear exchange. I agree that that is worrisome.
I think that Nuclear Autumns (up to ~25 Tg (million tons) of soot entering the atmosphere) still pose a significant risk and could cause ~1 billion deaths through famines + cascading effects, that is if we do not prepare. So dismissing such a scenario seems pretty bad to me