Writings mostly about systemic cascading risks.
Richard R
Karma: 303
Hey Johannes! I really appreciate the feedback, and I love the work you guys are doing through Founder’s Pledge. I appreciate that you also believe sociopolitical existential risk factors are an important element worth consideration.
I wish there was a lot more quantitative evidence on sociopolitical climate risk — I had to lean to a lot of qualitative expert sociopolitical analyses for this forum post. I acknowledge a lot of the scenarios I talk about here lean on the pessimistic side. In scenarios where there is high(er) governmental competence and societal resilience (than I predicted), it could be that very few of these x-risk multiplying impacts manifest. It could also be that they manifest in ways I don’t predict initially in this forum post.
I therefore agree with the critique about the overly confident statements. I ended up changing quite a bit of the phrasing in my forum post as a result of your feedback — I absolutely agree that some of the phrasing was a little too certain and bold. The focus should have been more on laying out possibilities rather than statements of what would happen. Thank you for that feedback.
To address your criticism/feedback on IPCC climate reports:
I think it is known that the IPCC’s climate reports, being consensus-driven, will not err in favor of extreme effects but rather include climate effects agreed upon by the broader research community. There was a recent Washington Post article I was considering including as well, where many notable climate scientists comment on the conservative, consensus nature of the IPCC and how this may impact their climate reports.
I cited the Scientific American article initially because it showed evidence of how a conservative consensus-driven organization has historically underestimated climate impacts. The article highlights specific examples of when IPCC predictions have been conservative from 1990 to 2012 — for instance, a 2007 report in which the IPCC dramatically underestimated Arctic summer ice , or a 2001 report where the IPCC predicts of sea level were 40% lower than actual sea level rise.
However, I absolutely acknowledge the accuracy of IPCC reports may have changed since 2012. I agree this evidence is not sufficient to warrant a statement that IPCC climate reports may lean conservative currently — so I’ve modified my statement to emphasize that certain past IPCC reports have leaned conservative. Thank you for the catch.
Overall, I appreciate your feedback — and I hope to speak to you sometime! I’d love to contribute to the research in the future quantifying the sociopolitical impacts of climate change, and I’m particularly interested in the work you do at Founder’s Pledge.
(Note for transparency: This comment has been edited.)
Acknowledgements to Esban Kran, Stian Grønlund, Liam Alexander, Pablo Rosado, Sebastian Engen, and many others for providing feedback and connecting me with helpful resources while I was writing this forum post. :-)
Interested in the forthcoming successor to EA Hub—to what extent do EA organizations require software engineers to build these networking platforms? I (and probably many other college student EAs over the summer) would be really interested working on a software engineering project to create a Swapcard-and-EA-hub-but-better.
It’d be cool to gather a team of part-time or interning CS/SWE college students and invest in them, given how much effort and money goes into EA conference events but how difficult and time-consuming post-conference followups are.
I really, really like this approach! I like how this exercise doesn’t box in your thinking—rather, it is a very simple and plain “What do you want to do, now how do you get there?” reflection. It leaves a lot of room for imagination, creativity, and interpretation that will differ based on how you imagine solving your specific cause area.
Thanks a ton Darren! I’d love to connect with you — and I found the ideas you linked to interesting. Thanks for introducing me to these ideas.
I completely agree with you — I think I ended up focusing on climate change specifically because it is the most clear, well-studied manifestation of “Earth Systems Health” gone wrong and potentially causing existential risk. However, emphasizing a broader need to preserve the stability of Earth’s systems is extremely valuable — and encompasses climate change.
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions may be the most important issue currently, but given our current societal inability to interface with our environment in a way that doesn’t damage it, there may be many other environmental crises in the future that manifest as well that damage our ability to survive. A broader framework encompassing environmental preservation may be necessary to address all of these issues at once.