The height of each steps in the escalation ladder of global catastrophe has been reduced to a single tweet.
In chapter 16 on "How Much Should Governments Pay to Prevent Catastrophes?" @CarlShulman and @Elliott Thornley (EJT) discussed the cost-benefit analysis on how a democratic society like ours and many other nations in the world (even as flawed as many still are) should consider the benefit in preventing long-term catastrophic risks as it will impact the lives of billions.
They compiled figures of estimation on the likelihood of a full-scale nuclear war breaking out from multiple sources, such as: 5% by Toby Ord, 11% by Metaculus or equivalent to 0.24% per year before the year 2070, and 0.38% every year from the aggregation of experts from Luisa Rodriguez's study in 2019.
However, I would argue that now more than ever it's not about the cost-benefit analysis of how much preventing global catastrophe would cost, it's something more personal, it's about the pride and arrogance of these world leaders to take back what they said that will determine our collective future.
Especially with the advent of social media, leaders impose onto themselves the pressure to comment on global events or social upheaval in a matter of a millisecond. Back then leaders always give themselves a good amount of distant in making comments on certain events to give plausible deniability in case they want to pivot to a different direction.
In the past leaders used to have their attack dogs test the water about national and foreign policies (especially on foreign wars; an example was the invasion of Syria during Obama's administration). Where threats used to be doled out in the backroom of multilateral conferences, summits, and thrown around by attack dogs of the administration in power -- which often goes unnoticed in the general public making it easy to take back.
Nowadays, with the more erratic behavior of some world leaders especially on X (formerly Twitter) -- whether that'd be promoting cryptocurrency scams, coming up with far-reaching policies that impact millions of lives (if not billions in the case of US foreign and trade policies) on a dime without a national debate first, or simply threatening other countries with invasion -- the height of each steps in the escalation ladder of global catastrophe has been reduced to a single tweet.
The problem with this approach -- is how hard it is to take back threats that have been handed out in the open for everyone to see.
