Reducing Catastrophic Risks, A Practical Introduction

RyanCarey

While thinking about my own next career steps, I've been writing down some of my thoughts about what's in an impactful career.

In the process, I wrote an introductory report on what seem to me to be practical approaches to problems in catastrophic risks. It's intended to complement the analysis that 80,000 Hours provides by thinking about what general roles we ought to perform, rather than analysing specific careers and jobs, and by focusing specifically on existential risks.

I'm happy to receive feedback on it, positive and negative.

Here it is: Reducing Catastrophic Risks, A Practical Introduction.

While thinking about my own next career steps, I've been writing down some of my thoughts about what's in an impactful career.

I'm happy to receive feedback on it, positive and negative.

Here it is: Reducing Catastrophic Risks, A Practical Introduction.

You're talking mostly about slowing growth or difficulties in rebuilding. But my question is different: given the death of ~10% of the population, why would the civilization collapse at all?

Let's make it a bit more concrete. Assume the Yellowstone supervolcano unexpectedly blows up. Much of North America is rendered temporarily uninhabitable, there are a few years without summer leading to crop failures all around the world with consequent famines. Let's say 10-20% of the people on Earth die within, say, three years.

Given this scenario, why would humanity devolve? No knowledge is lost. Most everyone is much poorer, but that's not a big deal on the "back to stone age" level. We can still build machinery and computers, we can generate electricity, etc. etc.

Given this scenario, why would humanity devolve? No knowledge is lost. Most everyone is much poorer, but that's not a big deal on the "back to stone age" level. We can still build machinery and computers, we can generate electricity, etc. etc.

Agreed, we could probably recover from a natural disaster, or even a war. On the other hand improperly handling the current migrant crisis in Europe may very well ultimately be as disastrous as Emperor Valens' decision to let the Visigothic refugees fleeing the Huns settle south of the Danube.

0MarsColony_in10years11y

Ah, got it. I'd probably agree that if 0.7 billion people just randomly dropped dead, the long term effects would likely be completely recoverable. It would be one more massive tragedy in the history of the human race, but not our downfall. However, people fight awfully hard to survive, so in real life such massive death tolls often happen only after a long, brutal fight for survival. So, GCRs may be accompanied by massive cultural, political, and economic changes. The dust bowl killed very few people, but displaced millions. If 10% of the world died of hunger, I would expect this to coincide with a larger, more severe form of the great depression. However, if the super-volcano or whatever just killed 10% instantly, without the dust in the atmosphere blotting out the sun and inducing years of winter, then I agree that it's not an existential risk. Note for posterity: Apparently the depression started before the dust bowl, although it seems to have been made significantly worse by it. I don't think this negates my conclusion, although it made me update in your direction somewhat. I can track down a couple other potential examples to examine, if you are interested. The conclusion that Xrisk doesn't necessarily scale with number of deaths is potentially useful. It hints that there may be efficient ways to reduce X-risk, even in the face of massive death tolls. In cases where deaths are unavoidable, perhaps there are effective ways to contain the suffering to only one generation.