Thanks!
Not sure what you mean here, can you explain?
This was originally posted on Nathaniel's and Nuno's substacks (Pending Survival and Forecasting Newsletter, respectively). Subscribe here and here!
Discussion is also occurring on the EA Forum here (couldn't link the posts properly for technical reasons).
When the Effective Altruism, Bay Area rationality, judgemental forecasting, and prediction markets communities think about risk, they typically do so along rather idiosyncratic and limited lines. These overlook relevant insights and practices from related expert communities, including the fields of disaster risk reduction, safety science, risk analysis, science and technology studies—like the sociology of risk—and futures studies.
To remedy this state of affairs, this document—written by Nathaniel Cooke and edited by Nuño Sempere—(1) explains how disaster risks are conceptualised by risk scholars, (2) outlines... (read 8054 more words →)
Thanks!
I think the broader lesson to be drawn from this is that the EA/LessWrong/x-risk nexus really needs to make an effort to seek out and listen to people who have been working on related things for decades; they have some really useful things to say!
There seems to be a pervasive tendency here to try to reinvent the wheel from first principles, or else exclusively rely on a handful of approaches that fit the community's highly quantitative/theoretical/high-modernist sensibilities---decision theory, game theory, prediction markets, judgemental forecasting, toy modelling, etc.---at the expense of all others.
Both of these approaches are rarely productive in my view.
(I am aware that this is not a new argument, but it... (read more)