christian.r

Karma: 1,173

Christian Ruhl, Founders Pledge

I am a Senior Researcher at Founders Pledge, where I work on global catastrophic risks. Previously, I was the program manager for Perry World House’s research program on The Future of the Global Order: Power, Technology, and Governance. I’m interested in biosecurity, nuclear weapons, the international security implications of AI, probabilistic forecasting and its applications, history and philosophy of science, and global governance. Please feel free to reach out to me with questions or just to connect!

christian.r Sep 29, 2023, 4:00 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Prometheus’s comment on: AMA: Christian Ruhl (senior global catastrophic risk researcher at Founders Pledge)
Maybe, but I’m not really qualified to say much about this. I do think we need to think beyond New START (which was going to need a follow-on agreement anyway), and beyond arms control as “formal, legally binding, ratified treaties.” I think some nonprofits and funders have been playing a very reactive kind of whack-a-mole game when it comes to nuclear security, reacting to the latest news about new weapon systems, doctrinal changes, and current events. Instead, are there ways to think bigger about arms control, to make some of these ideas more politically palatable to conservative administrations, and to discuss strategic stability with China as well as Russia?

christian.r Sep 29, 2023, 2:55 PM
3 points
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in reply to: geoffrey’s comment on: AMA: Christian Ruhl (senior global catastrophic risk researcher at Founders Pledge)
I would say cash-constrained. There are plenty of good opportunities out there, and a field of smart scholars, advocates, and practitioners with transferable skills. Just need a lot more money

christian.r Sep 29, 2023, 2:51 PM
12 points
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in reply to: christian.r’s comment on: AMA: Christian Ruhl (senior global catastrophic risk researcher at Founders Pledge)
(It’s a long elevator ride)

christian.r Sep 29, 2023, 2:51 PM
9 points
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in reply to: jackva’s comment on: AMA: Christian Ruhl (senior global catastrophic risk researcher at Founders Pledge)
Thanks for the question, Johannes! My best elevator pitch is roughly an ITN case that starts with neglectedness:
The biggest funder in nuclear security just withdrew from the field, leaving only ~$32 million/year in philanthropic funding. That’s a third of the budget of Oppenheimer, and several orders of magnitude smaller than philanthropic spending on climate change. This is a huge blow to a field that’s already small and aging, and would leave defense contractors and bureaucrats to determine nuclear policy. But it’s also an opportunity to reshape the field for the better to deal with new challenges: unravelling arms control agreements, emerging technologies and new weapons systems, and a new world where there are three nuclear superpowers (two of them revisionist authoritarian states). Best of all, there are cheap funding opportunities! For example, $500,000 lets you triple the number of backchannel diplomatic exchanges between the U.S. and China on strategic nuclear issues. And there is low-hanging fruit that other funders ignore for non-impact-related reasons
For EAs, I would add that we don’t need to get bogged down in the debates about nuclear winter and extinction—nuclear war is:
1. A major global catastrophic risk for current generations in terms of death, suffering, grief, infrastructure and economic damage, and long-term radiation effects. And...
2. A potential existential risk factor with a technology that is already here and deployed. Consider
  1. What cost-benefit calculations would Russia start to make about mass-casualty bioweapons as it depletes its nuclear arsenal in a protracted great power war?
  2. Where do your compute supply chain chokepoints go after a limited nuclear war in the Indo-Pacific?
  3. Do we really want to roll the dice on post-war values, global leadership, and the prospects of international cooperation?
Given this, I think $30 million to double the funding starts looking like a reasonable hits-based bet

christian.r Sep 29, 2023, 2:18 PM
6 points
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in reply to: Angelina Li’s comment on: AMA: Christian Ruhl (senior global catastrophic risk researcher at Founders Pledge)
Hi Angelina! Thanks for the great question! There are several government actors, like DTRA, the Minerva Research Initiative, and the STRATCOM Academic Alliance, that play an important role in the non-governmental nuclear security space, including with funding. Then there are the National Labs as well as FFRDCs and UARCs that receive government funding and often work on relevant issues. Then there are defense contractors that will provide funding to think tanks and organizations that just so happen to support the latest weapons systems.
But that funding isn’t really optimized for reducing risk from nuclear weapons. I also think it isn’t (as some advocates would have us believe) the evil plans of crazy war-mongers. Rather, it’s just bureaucratic actors pursuing their bureaucratic incentives, and the result is kind of muddled work that mostly just supports programs of record and the conventional wisdom.
So I think that’s where private philanthropy can really do a lot of good. I really like this quote from the recent Vox piece that Matt Gentzel and I wrote:
As James Scouras, a senior expert on the risk of nuclear war at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory recently wrote in response to the Founders Pledge report, philanthropy can help challenge “unimaginative, even wrongheaded and dangerous, government policies.” Nuclear risk, he writes, is “far too important to leave to the generals.”
also:
Philanthropists can devote resources to policy interventions intended to bear fruit beyond the current election cycle and to protect people regardless of what side of an international border they’re on. Without careful philanthropy, policy influence outside government becomes a contest between defense industry lobbying and under-informed activism.
This is the part that I think is in a sorry state. The MacArthur Foundation — previously the biggest funder in nuclear security — withdrew what amounted to about 32% of the field’s total funding, distributing the final grants this year. That leaves the field with funding somewhere around $30-$40 million a year. (The exact numbers here are less important than the order of magnitude — compare it to the numbers on any other major global problem, or even to the $100 million budget of the Oppenheimer movie). This is all happening against the background of an aging field and small talent pipeline, as well as new risks on the horizon (like China potentially quadrupling its arsenal). Then within that, the large funders are fairly homogenous in their worldviews, leading some very important issues to be doubly neglected.
I think there’s a general perception that nuclear security is highly professionalized and well-funded compared to other global catastrophic risks, and that had been partly true for a long time. For various reasons, I wouldn’t argue that nuclear security should receive more funding than biosecurity and risks from transformative technologies, for example. But we’re now in a place where a single wealthy donor could double the philanthropy on nuclear issues, and yet no one has stepped in! So all the changes to the risk landscape are going un-studied and I think we will look back with regret if this funding does not increase.
Hope this answers your question!

christian.r Aug 31, 2023, 1:21 PM
4 points
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nuclear safety/security: Why doesn’t EA prioritize it more?
This does help answer the question, but it conflates extinction risk with existential risk, which is I think a big mistake in general. This chapter in How Worlds Collapse does a nice job of explaining this:
“Currently, existential risk scholars tend to focus on events and processes for which a fairly direct, simple story can be told about how they could lead to extinction. [...] However, if there is a substantial probability that collapse could destroy humanity’s longterm potential [including by recovery with bad values], this should change one’s view of catastrophic risks...”
To be clear, I think there are other good reasons to weight biorisk more (as I do).

christian.r Aug 31, 2023, 1:07 PM
14 points
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in reply to: jackva’s comment on: Nuclear safety/security: Why doesn’t EA prioritize it more?
For anyone who is interested, Founders Pledge has a longer report on this (with a discussion of funding constraints as well as funding ideas that could absorb a lot of money), as well as some related work on specific funding opportunities like crisis communications hotlines.

christian.r Jul 28, 2023, 3:36 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Arturo Macias’s comment on: Nuclear Risk and Philanthropic Strategy [Founders Pledge]
Arturo, thank you for this comment and the very kind words!
I really like your point about beneficially “dual-use” interventions, and that we might want to look for right-of-boom interventions with near-term positive externalities. I think that’s useful for market-shaping and for political tractability (no one likes to invest in something that their successor will take credit for) -- and it’s just a good thing to do!
It feels similar to the point that bio-risk preparedness has many current-gen benefits, like Kevin Esvelt’s point here that “Crucially, any passive defence capable of substantially impeding the spread of a novel pandemic agent would also suppress or outright eliminate many or even most endemic human viruses and pathogenic bacteria”

christian.r Jul 28, 2023, 3:23 PM
2 points
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in reply to: jackva’s comment on: Nuclear Risk and Philanthropic Strategy [Founders Pledge]
Johannes, as he often does, said it better than I could!

christian.r Jul 26, 2023, 9:24 PM
14 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Nuclear Risk and Philanthropic Strategy [Founders Pledge]
Thanks, Vasco. I totally forgot to reply to your comment on my previous post—my apologies!
I think you raise a good general point that we’d expect societal spending after a catastrophe to be high, especially given the funder behavior we see for newsworthy humanitarian disasters.
There are a few related considerations here, all of them touching on the issue you also raise: “Coming up with good interventions in little time may be harder.”
1. Fast-Moving Catastrophes—I would expect many nuclear wars to escalate very quickly, far outpacing the timelines that funders and policymakers operate on. Escalation management tools (e.g. better hotlines, relevant changes in nuclear posture and targeting policy) should be implemented before such a catastrophe. That being said, I think the problem of protracted great power wars (including slow-moving nuclear wars) is underappreciated, so there are a few other considerations in the cases where the catastrophe moves more slowly…
2. Post-Catastrophe Funder Resources—Aside from the Patient Philanthropy Fund, I expect most funders will not have thought about the impact of global catastrophes on their portfolios. I’d expect even a regionally limited nuclear war to cause a severe decline in the portfolios of most funders, and possibly a total collapse of the financial infrastructure that funders rely on. So there might not be any liquid funds to move!
3. Post-Catastrophe Funder Additionality—The counterfactual value of farsighted private funders is higher pre-catastrophe; after a catastrophe, we’d expect governments and small-dollar or traditional donors to flood the philanthropic market with humanitarian aid. Pandemic-preparedness and -response spending pre-2020 was more attractive in retrospect than COVID-relief funding 2020-2022.
  1. I think there’s a related point here about the emotional resonance of some classes of disaster-relief spending that probably contribute to the character and allocation of post-catastrophe funding.
4. Pre-Catastrophe Funder Leverage—Relatedly, right now, a funder can beneficially shape the direction of the entire field for less than $10 million. After a catastrophe, that “smart money” might be an unnoticeable drop in the bucket, and would have far less leverage.
5. R&D Timelines—Some “right of boom” interventions have long R&D lead times, especially if they involve more speculative technologies. I’m thinking, e.g., about the development and implementation of technologies for resilient food systems.
6. Policy Implementation Timelines—Similarly, many interventions designed to keep limited war from turning into all-out thermonuclear exchange probably need to go through a fairly slow policy process.
Thanks again for the thoughtful comment! I hope this partly answers it.

christian.r May 26, 2023, 4:07 PM
4 points
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on: It is good for EA funders to have seats on boards of orgs they fund [debate]
Just a note that the Likert scale in the poll is not symmetrical (“Agree” vs. “Strongly Disagree”)

christian.r May 2, 2023, 2:27 PM
9 points
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in reply to: jackva’s comment on: More global warming might be good to mitigate the food shocks caused by abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios
Agree with Johannes here on the bias in much of the nuclear winter work (and I say that as someone who thinks catastrophic risk from nuclear war is under-appreciated). The political motivations are fairly well-known and easy to spot in the papers

christian.r Feb 21, 2023, 9:18 PM
3 points
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in reply to: quinn’s comment on: Call me, maybe? Hotlines and Global Catastrophic Risk [Founders Pledge]
Hi Quinn! Thanks for this comment. Yes, I expect any theory of change for private actors here will run through policy advocacy. This both provides massive leverage (by using government funds) and is just necessary given the subject matter.
I wouldn’t say it stops at a white paper—one could organize track II dialogues to discuss the systems, lobby government, give policy briefings at a think tank, hold side events at international security conferences and treaty review conferences, etc.
This could also take the form of advisory roles (I’m thinking of case studies like Ash Carter and Cooperative Threat Reduction) to government.
Still, I agree that the “get buy-in from governments” is the crucial stage (but I think this is true for many and possibly all GCR-related interventions).

christian.r Feb 15, 2023, 3:19 PM
2 points
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in reply to: JamesÖz 🔸’s comment on: Philanthropy to the Right of Boom [Founders Pledge]
Thank you, James :)

christian.r Feb 15, 2023, 3:18 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Denkenberger🔸’s comment on: Philanthropy to the Right of Boom [Founders Pledge]
Thanks, David! I really appreciate this comment. One reason I find this left/right framework more intuitive than “prevention, response, and resilience” is that there are right-of-boom interventions that I would classify as “prevention.” For example, I think of escalation management after limited first use as “preventing” the largest nuclear wars (especially if we think such a war poses qualitatively different problems).
Your cost-effectiveness models are very helpful, and I plan to cite them in the bigger project :)

christian.r Feb 15, 2023, 3:12 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Stephen Clare’s comment on: Philanthropy to the Right of Boom [Founders Pledge]
Thanks for the kind comment, Stephen! You’re right I phrased that wrong—it is about tractability, not probability. I agree with you that the tractability of escalation control is probably the biggest issue here, but I also think we should expect low-hanging fruit given the relative neglectedness. There are a couple of concrete projects that I am/would be be excited about:
- Escalation management with North Korea -- How can we keep nuclear war limited with North Korea? As I understand it, the problem of deterrence after DPRK first use has gotten relatively little attention, despite its relevance to U.S.-China conflict. A project to study this and help the U.S. and China find guardrails, CBMs, etc. to work on this seems especially valuable. The broader class of interventions here is something like “keeping ‘smaller’ nuclear wars geographically and politically limited”;
- Intrawar crisis communications projects—especially understanding China’s attitude to crisis communications. How can states better communicate the desire to terminate a war and the terms of peace once nuclear war has broken out?
- Three-body escalation control—Like you, I’m concerned about a future where China has a much larger arsenal (see China Military Power Report), and the fact that U.S. planners have barely begun to think about the “nuclear three body problem” with China and Russia. A large-scale project that seeks to better understand these dynamics and what, if any, of the game theory from the Cold War applies to three-way escalation control, how different theories of limited war might interact, etc. would be valuable.

christian.r Feb 14, 2023, 9:07 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Conor Barnes 🔶’s comment on: Philanthropy to the Right of Boom [Founders Pledge]
Thanks, Conor!

christian.r Jan 24, 2023, 10:38 PM
7 points
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in reply to: ParetoPrinciple’s comment on: Call me, maybe? Hotlines and Global Catastrophic Risk [Founders Pledge]
Hi ParetoPrinciple! I appreciate your engaging with the document :)

I quote Schelling throughout (and think he actually makes some of the points you hint at more clearly in The Strategy of Conflict — eg the quote in footnote 61 here). You’re definitely right that no hotlines discussion would be complete without this!

christian.r Jan 24, 2023, 6:22 PM
7 points
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in reply to: Will Aldred’s comment on: Call me, maybe? Hotlines and Global Catastrophic Risk [Founders Pledge]
Thanks, will! Really appreciate this comment :)
Credit for the title actually goes to my colleagues on the FP research team (I believe it was Tom or Johannes who first came up with it).

christian.r Sep 16, 2022, 4:08 PM
18 points
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on: The Pugwash Conferences and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as a case study of Track II diplomacy
Hi Rani, it’s great to see the report out. It’s good to have this clear deep dive on the canonical case. I especially like that it points to some attributes of track II dialogues that we should pay special attention to when evaluating them as potential interventions. Great work!