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!
A Project Candor for Global Catastrophic Risks
Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophe, Values and Reflective Processes, Effective Altruism
This is a proposal to fund a large-scale public communications project on global catastrophic risks (GCRs), modeled on the Eisenhower administration’s Project Candor. Project Candor was a Cold War public relations campaign to “inform the public of the realities of the ‘Age of Peril’” (see Unclassified 1953 Memo from Eisenhower Library). Policymakers were concerned that the public did not yet understand that the threats from nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union had inaugurated a new era in human history: the Age of Peril. Today, at the precipice, the Age of Peril continues with possible risks from engineered pandemics, thermonuclear exchange, great power war, and more. Voting behavior and public discourse, however, do not seem attuned to these risks. A new privately-funded Project Candor would communicate to the public the nature of the threats, their probabilities, and what we can do about them. This proposal is related to “a fund for movies and documentaries” and “new publications on the most pressing issues,” but differs in that it would be a unified and coordinated campaign across multiple media.