Epistemic status: Meh. I’m not an expert on this, just a LessWronger who spent some amount of hours looking into this some amount of months ago.
Relocating is one thing you could do. I spent some time thinking about this in When should you relocate to mitigate the risk of dying in a nuclear war? and came to the rough conclusion that if you value life at the typical $10M, it’d make sense to relocate if you assign >10% chance of being attacked.
As for how to judge the probability of an attack, you can keep an eye on the ISW’s updates and what forecasters have to say, but I feel like that stuff probably isn’t actually worthwhile. Instead, keeping an eye on LessWrong is probably enough.
I also explored some other ideas in RFC WWIII. I identified building a 1) bomb shelter and 2) buying useful items as other things you could do to prep. Neither seems to move the needle much though. But certain things are cheap, and so my feeling is that you may as well just buy them. Since they’re cheap and they have some amount of value, it’s not worth spending too much time thinking about it. Things I personally bought:
Water
P100 mask
Whistle
Battery powered radio
Duct tape
Safety goggles
Potasium iodide
In googling around there were some other things I came across that you could buy, I just judged that they weren’t worth it. It’s also probably worth figuring out where you would evacuate to if you were alerted of an attack.
Having an emergency kit and supplies is valuable in enough situations to be worth it for most people, even if war is very unlikely to affect you. Do that now.
Evacuation or migration is a lot more limited. If change fees are zero, it may be worth maintaining a ticket outbound that you roll over every week, or at least figuring out where you’d go and having a plan for how to execute and what would trigger it.
Epistemic status: Meh. I’m not an expert on this, just a LessWronger who spent some amount of hours looking into this some amount of months ago.
Relocating is one thing you could do. I spent some time thinking about this in When should you relocate to mitigate the risk of dying in a nuclear war? and came to the rough conclusion that if you value life at the typical $10M, it’d make sense to relocate if you assign >10% chance of being attacked.
As for how to judge the probability of an attack, you can keep an eye on the ISW’s updates and what forecasters have to say, but I feel like that stuff probably isn’t actually worthwhile. Instead, keeping an eye on LessWrong is probably enough.
I also explored some other ideas in RFC WWIII. I identified building a 1) bomb shelter and 2) buying useful items as other things you could do to prep. Neither seems to move the needle much though. But certain things are cheap, and so my feeling is that you may as well just buy them. Since they’re cheap and they have some amount of value, it’s not worth spending too much time thinking about it. Things I personally bought:
Water
P100 mask
Whistle
Battery powered radio
Duct tape
Safety goggles
Potasium iodide
In googling around there were some other things I came across that you could buy, I just judged that they weren’t worth it. It’s also probably worth figuring out where you would evacuate to if you were alerted of an attack.
Having an emergency kit and supplies is valuable in enough situations to be worth it for most people, even if war is very unlikely to affect you. Do that now.
Evacuation or migration is a lot more limited. If change fees are zero, it may be worth maintaining a ticket outbound that you roll over every week, or at least figuring out where you’d go and having a plan for how to execute and what would trigger it.