This is an excellent question, and it points out that I haven’t done what I often recommend to others with somewhat vague fears: make an actual threat model. And I’m not sure I even think it’s likely enough for me to do so—but I will lay out a few concrete scenarios and see if they seem plausible enough over the coming weeks for me to formalize them and try to identify ways to predict better.
Some of the (again, low-probability, but nonzero and I’m not sure how to analyze) are:
COVID plus protests break supply chains to the point that there are HUGE numbers of desperate people, killing each other for the last can of beans. And no travel is possible because the roads are full of abandoned cars and rioters.
Martial law or other travel restrictions prevent flight, THEN members of my demographic (old white intellectuals) are rounded up, their valuables confiscated, and sent to the work farms.
Contested election leads to localized fighting which I can avoid, but also to closing of borders and unwillingness of other countries to accept refugees. And then fighting intensifies and I cannot avoid it.
In breaking it down, the things I’m willing to give up a lot in order to avoid, but don’t want to give up very much if they don’t happen, are related to asset forfeiture (I want to keep some portion of my life savings), personal mobility limits (I don’t want to be trapped), and direct violence in my neighboorhood.
COVID zombie apocalypse seems unlikely, because it didn’t happen in Italy, Spain, Sweden, or UK, which have it worse;
if you were a white male student at a woke university, it would make sense to try moving to another university, but people being rounded up is generally what happens to unpopular minorities (which you are not) or after revolution (seems unlikely the US armed forces would allow it);
Trump already won once and it did not happen.
On meta level, I think your concerns make sense on a longer time scale, so maybe try to think about where specifically would you like to go, get familiar with local laws (and language?), and make some contacts so that if you decide to go, you have local people to help you.
If it wasn’t clear, I currently put extremely low probability on these, and on the general class of things that would make it simultaneously desirable and difficult to move from where I am now. However, the probability has risen by orders of magnitude (from vanishing to vaguely worrying to almost enough to invest in serious consideration) in the last few years, and then the last few months, and then the last few weeks. Still well below half a percent, say, across all possibilities.
I currently plan to stay and work toward preventing the worst possibilities. But at some point, if it gets another 1-2 orders of magnitude worse, my strategy will flip. And I’d like to figure out low-effort and low-expected-loss actions I can take to measure more closely, and to minimize the pain if I do have to switch.
get familiar with local laws (and language?), and make some contacts so that if you decide to go, you have local people to help you.
This is brilliant. The value of social/cultural connections is easy to undervalue, and likely has rewards commensurate with the effort even if nightmare scenarios don’t come to pass. We don’t give or hear the advice “make friends” often enough in the context of rational life strategies. We probably do hear it enough in the context of fluffy psychological strategies, but at least my mind has a strong partition between those domains.
Probably because I am not in the US, I do not exactly understand this. Who would be the people having to flee?
This is an excellent question, and it points out that I haven’t done what I often recommend to others with somewhat vague fears: make an actual threat model. And I’m not sure I even think it’s likely enough for me to do so—but I will lay out a few concrete scenarios and see if they seem plausible enough over the coming weeks for me to formalize them and try to identify ways to predict better.
Some of the (again, low-probability, but nonzero and I’m not sure how to analyze) are:
COVID plus protests break supply chains to the point that there are HUGE numbers of desperate people, killing each other for the last can of beans. And no travel is possible because the roads are full of abandoned cars and rioters.
Martial law or other travel restrictions prevent flight, THEN members of my demographic (old white intellectuals) are rounded up, their valuables confiscated, and sent to the work farms.
Contested election leads to localized fighting which I can avoid, but also to closing of borders and unwillingness of other countries to accept refugees. And then fighting intensifies and I cannot avoid it.
In breaking it down, the things I’m willing to give up a lot in order to avoid, but don’t want to give up very much if they don’t happen, are related to asset forfeiture (I want to keep some portion of my life savings), personal mobility limits (I don’t want to be trapped), and direct violence in my neighboorhood.
On object level:
COVID zombie apocalypse seems unlikely, because it didn’t happen in Italy, Spain, Sweden, or UK, which have it worse;
if you were a white male student at a woke university, it would make sense to try moving to another university, but people being rounded up is generally what happens to unpopular minorities (which you are not) or after revolution (seems unlikely the US armed forces would allow it);
Trump already won once and it did not happen.
On meta level, I think your concerns make sense on a longer time scale, so maybe try to think about where specifically would you like to go, get familiar with local laws (and language?), and make some contacts so that if you decide to go, you have local people to help you.
If it wasn’t clear, I currently put extremely low probability on these, and on the general class of things that would make it simultaneously desirable and difficult to move from where I am now. However, the probability has risen by orders of magnitude (from vanishing to vaguely worrying to almost enough to invest in serious consideration) in the last few years, and then the last few months, and then the last few weeks. Still well below half a percent, say, across all possibilities.
I currently plan to stay and work toward preventing the worst possibilities. But at some point, if it gets another 1-2 orders of magnitude worse, my strategy will flip. And I’d like to figure out low-effort and low-expected-loss actions I can take to measure more closely, and to minimize the pain if I do have to switch.
This is brilliant. The value of social/cultural connections is easy to undervalue, and likely has rewards commensurate with the effort even if nightmare scenarios don’t come to pass. We don’t give or hear the advice “make friends” often enough in the context of rational life strategies. We probably do hear it enough in the context of fluffy psychological strategies, but at least my mind has a strong partition between those domains.
- German Jew, 1920