All existential risks are of such vastly low probability it would be beyond human comprehension to rank them, and utterly pointless to anyway. And even if I were to rank them, extinction by comet, asteroid or cosmological gamma ray burst vastly outranks any manmade cause. Even extinction by supervolcano vastly outranks any manmade cause. So I don’t concern myself with this (except to call for more investment in earth impactor detection, and the monitoring of supervolcano risks).
This POV, while radically different from EY’s, makes a lot more sense to me, and probably to most ordinary people. I wonder if there is a believable mathematical calculation either way.
Can you describe in what way this makes sense to you? Do you mean that it doesn’t instantly clash with your intuition or do you mean that you have some reason to believe it?
You can actually quantify many external existential risks, give probabilities and error bars. No believable estimate has been done for man-made existential risks, because we have never (yet) destroyed ourselves on a grand enough scale.
no believable estimate has been done for man-made existential risks, because we have never (yet) destroyed ourselves on a grand enough scale.
Am I reading you right? You seem to be arguing using the form:
no believable likelihood estimate has been done for X, because X hasn’t happened yet.
But since when does an event have to occur in order for us to get a reasonable probability estimate?
What if we look at one salient example? How about assessments of the probability of a global nuclear war? Any decent assessment would provide a reasonable lower bound for a man-made human extinction event. In addition to the more recent article I linked to, don’t you suppose that RAND or another group ever devised a believable estimate of the likelihood of extinction via global nuclear war some time between the 1950′s and the 1989?
It seems hard to believe that nuclear war alone wouldn’t have provided a perpetual lower-bound of greater than 10% on a man-made extinction scenario during most of the cold war. Even now, this lower-bound though smaller doesn’t seem to be totally negligible (hence the ongoing risk assessments and advocacy for disarmament).
Even if it were the case that natural risks greatly outweighed the risk of man-made extinction events,
All existential risks are of such vastly low probability it would be beyond human comprehension to rank them
Doesn’t follow (I’m assuming this part of the POV made sense to you as well) given my counter example. Of course you might have a good reason to reject my counter-example, and if so I’d be interested in seeing it.
How about assessments of the probability of a global nuclear war? Any decent assessment would provide a reasonable lower bound for a man-made human extinction event.
No, it wouldn’t. One needs a probability of extinction conditional on global nuclear war (generally considered quite unlikely). Perhaps this might happen if it turns out that the Industrial Revolution is a fluke that could not be repeated without fossil fuels, or if nuclear winter was extraordinarily severe (the authors of the recent nuclear winter papers think it very unlikely that a global nuclear war using current arsenals could cause extinction), or if nuclear-driven collapse prevented us from deflecting an extinction-level asteroids, but there’s a further step in the argument. I think reasonable assignments of probabilities will still give you more nuclear existential risk in the next century than risk from natural disasters, but the analysis will depend on right-tail outcomes and model uncertainty.
Is there anything, in particular, you do consider a reasonably tight lower bound for a man-made extinction event? If so, would you be willing to explain your reasoning?
Mega-scale asteroid impacts (dinosaur-killer size) come close. Uncertainty there would be about whether we could survive climatic disruptions better than the dinosaurs did (noting that fish, crocodiles, mammals, birds, etc, survived) using technology.
This doesn’t really answer the “man-made” part of “man-made extinction event” (unless you know something about mad scientists with ion engines mounted on large asteroids that I don’t know).
Sorry, I misread your question. I don’t think we have rigid uncontroversial frequentist estimates for any man-made extinction event. There are estimates I would say are unreasonably low, but there will be a step along the lines of “really?!? You seriously assign less than a 1 in 1 billion probability to there being a way for bioweapons programs of the next 50 years to create a set of overlapping long-latency high virulence pathogens that would get all of humanity, in light of mousepox and H5N1 experiments, the capabilities of synthetic biology, the results of these expert elicitations, etc?”
I have been unable to find any comparable estimates of the time horizon for an even more dire event, a failure of nuclear deterrence resulting in a nuclear war. The risk analysis component of our effort therefore asks the international scientific community “to undertake in-depth risk analyses of nuclear deterrence and, if the results so indicate, to raise an alarm alerting society to the unacceptable risk it faces as well as initiating a second phase effort to identify potential solutions.”
It seems to be challenging to figure out what the the chances of even this much milder event are.
Of course, ignorance should not lead to complacency.
This POV, while radically different from EY’s, makes a lot more sense to me, and probably to most ordinary people. I wonder if there is a believable mathematical calculation either way.
What? Seriously? Most ordinary people think that human caused extinction events are vastly less likely than natural ones? But.… that’s crazy! I must really be out of touch.
I suspect it’s one of those cases where the answer you get from most people depends on how you ask the question… that is, on what kinds of priming/anchoring effects are in play.
This POV, while radically different from EY’s, makes a lot more sense to me, and probably to most ordinary people. I wonder if there is a believable mathematical calculation either way.
Can you describe in what way this makes sense to you? Do you mean that it doesn’t instantly clash with your intuition or do you mean that you have some reason to believe it?
You can actually quantify many external existential risks, give probabilities and error bars. No believable estimate has been done for man-made existential risks, because we have never (yet) destroyed ourselves on a grand enough scale.
Am I reading you right? You seem to be arguing using the form:
But since when does an event have to occur in order for us to get a reasonable probability estimate?
What if we look at one salient example? How about assessments of the probability of a global nuclear war? Any decent assessment would provide a reasonable lower bound for a man-made human extinction event. In addition to the more recent article I linked to, don’t you suppose that RAND or another group ever devised a believable estimate of the likelihood of extinction via global nuclear war some time between the 1950′s and the 1989?
It seems hard to believe that nuclear war alone wouldn’t have provided a perpetual lower-bound of greater than 10% on a man-made extinction scenario during most of the cold war. Even now, this lower-bound though smaller doesn’t seem to be totally negligible (hence the ongoing risk assessments and advocacy for disarmament).
Even if it were the case that natural risks greatly outweighed the risk of man-made extinction events,
Doesn’t follow (I’m assuming this part of the POV made sense to you as well) given my counter example. Of course you might have a good reason to reject my counter-example, and if so I’d be interested in seeing it.
No, it wouldn’t. One needs a probability of extinction conditional on global nuclear war (generally considered quite unlikely). Perhaps this might happen if it turns out that the Industrial Revolution is a fluke that could not be repeated without fossil fuels, or if nuclear winter was extraordinarily severe (the authors of the recent nuclear winter papers think it very unlikely that a global nuclear war using current arsenals could cause extinction), or if nuclear-driven collapse prevented us from deflecting an extinction-level asteroids, but there’s a further step in the argument. I think reasonable assignments of probabilities will still give you more nuclear existential risk in the next century than risk from natural disasters, but the analysis will depend on right-tail outcomes and model uncertainty.
Is there anything, in particular, you do consider a reasonably tight lower bound for a man-made extinction event? If so, would you be willing to explain your reasoning?
Mega-scale asteroid impacts (dinosaur-killer size) come close. Uncertainty there would be about whether we could survive climatic disruptions better than the dinosaurs did (noting that fish, crocodiles, mammals, birds, etc, survived) using technology.
This doesn’t really answer the “man-made” part of “man-made extinction event” (unless you know something about mad scientists with ion engines mounted on large asteroids that I don’t know).
Sorry, I misread your question. I don’t think we have rigid uncontroversial frequentist estimates for any man-made extinction event. There are estimates I would say are unreasonably low, but there will be a step along the lines of “really?!? You seriously assign less than a 1 in 1 billion probability to there being a way for bioweapons programs of the next 50 years to create a set of overlapping long-latency high virulence pathogens that would get all of humanity, in light of mousepox and H5N1 experiments, the capabilities of synthetic biology, the results of these expert elicitations, etc?”
Hellman says:
It seems to be challenging to figure out what the the chances of even this much milder event are.
Of course, ignorance should not lead to complacency.
What? Seriously? Most ordinary people think that human caused extinction events are vastly less likely than natural ones? But.… that’s crazy! I must really be out of touch.
I suspect it’s one of those cases where the answer you get from most people depends on how you ask the question… that is, on what kinds of priming/anchoring effects are in play.