I’m curious who is the target audience for this scale…
People who have an interest in global risks will find it simplistic—normally I would think of the use of a color scale as aimed at the general public, but in this case it may be too simple even for the curious layman. The second picture you linked, on the other hand, seems like a much more useful way to categorize risks (two dimensions, severity vs urgency).
I think this scale may have some use in trying to communicate to policy makers who are unfamiliar with the landscape of GCRs, and in particularly to try to get them to focus on the red and orange risks that currently get little interest. But where is the platform for that communication to happen? It seems like currently the key conversations would be happening at a more technical level, in DoD, DHS, or FEMA. A focus on interventions would be helpful there. I couldn’t get the whole paper, but from what you wrote above it sounds like you have some interesting ideas about ranking risks based on a combination of probability and possible interventions. If that could be formalized, I think it would make the whole idea a lot stronger. Like you say, people are reasonably skeptical about probabilities (even if they’re just an order of magnitude) but if you can show that the severity of the risk isn’t very sensitive to probability, maybe it would help to overcome that obstacle.
It has a section of who could use the scale: that is communication to public, to policy-makers and between reserchers of different risks. The still don’t have global platphorm for communication about global catastrophic and existential risks, but I think that something like a “Global risk prevention” commettee inside UN will be evntually created, which will work on global coordination of risk prevention. The commettee will use the scale and other instruments the same way other organisations use their 5 − 10 levels scales, including DEFCON, hurricane scale, asteroids scale, VEI (volcanic scale) etc.
I’m curious who is the target audience for this scale…
People who have an interest in global risks will find it simplistic—normally I would think of the use of a color scale as aimed at the general public, but in this case it may be too simple even for the curious layman. The second picture you linked, on the other hand, seems like a much more useful way to categorize risks (two dimensions, severity vs urgency).
I think this scale may have some use in trying to communicate to policy makers who are unfamiliar with the landscape of GCRs, and in particularly to try to get them to focus on the red and orange risks that currently get little interest. But where is the platform for that communication to happen? It seems like currently the key conversations would be happening at a more technical level, in DoD, DHS, or FEMA. A focus on interventions would be helpful there. I couldn’t get the whole paper, but from what you wrote above it sounds like you have some interesting ideas about ranking risks based on a combination of probability and possible interventions. If that could be formalized, I think it would make the whole idea a lot stronger. Like you say, people are reasonably skeptical about probabilities (even if they’re just an order of magnitude) but if you can show that the severity of the risk isn’t very sensitive to probability, maybe it would help to overcome that obstacle.
You could download the prepribt here: https://philpapers.org/rec/TURGCA
It has a section of who could use the scale: that is communication to public, to policy-makers and between reserchers of different risks. The still don’t have global platphorm for communication about global catastrophic and existential risks, but I think that something like a “Global risk prevention” commettee inside UN will be evntually created, which will work on global coordination of risk prevention. The commettee will use the scale and other instruments the same way other organisations use their 5 − 10 levels scales, including DEFCON, hurricane scale, asteroids scale, VEI (volcanic scale) etc.