because we'd have more time to think about existential risk mitigation while we rebuild society

1. It may be highly unproductive to think about advanced future technologies in very much detail before there's a credible research program on the table on account of the search tree involving dozens of orders of magnitude. I presently believe in this to be the case.

2. I do think that we can get better at some relevant things at present (learning how to obtain as accurate as realistically possible predictions about probable government behaviors, etc.) and that all else being equal we could benefit from more time thinking about these things rather than less time.

3. However, it's not clear to me that the time so gained would outweigh a presumed loss in clear thinking post-nuclear war and I currently believe that the loss would be substantially greater than the gain.

4. As steven0461 mentioned, "some people within SingInst seem to have pretty high estimates of the return from efforts to prevent nuclear war." I haven't had a chance to talk about this with them in detail; but it updates me in the direction of attaching high expected value reduction to nuclear war risk reduction.

My positions on these points are very much subject to change with incoming information.