I run Sentinel, a team that seeks to anticipate and respond to large-scale risks. You can read our weekly minutes here. I like to spend my time acquiring deeper models of the world, and generally becoming more formidable. I'm also a fairly good forecaster: I started out on predicting on Good Judgment Open and CSET-Foretell, but now do most of my forecasting through Samotsvety, of which Scott Alexander writes:
Enter Samotsvety Forecasts. This is a team of some of the best superforecasters in the world. They won the CSET-Foretell forecasting competition by an absolutely obscene margin, “around twice as good as the next-best team in terms of the relative Brier score”. If the point of forecasting tournaments is to figure out who you can trust, the science has spoken, and the answer is “these guys”.
I used to post prolifically on the EA Forum, but nowadays, I post my research and thoughts at nunosempere.com / nunosempere.com/blog rather than on this forum, because:
But a good fraction of my past research is still available here on the EA Forum. I'm particularly fond of my series on Estimating Value.
My career has been as follows:
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It's a great question. I looked into it a few weeks ago:
In the current political praxis of the United States, there are various workarounds that the government can pursue in order to take illegal or unconstitutional actions. Examples of such actions that previous administrations have taken include keeping prisoners in Guantanamo Bay in order to delay habeas corpus petitions, conditioning highway funding to force state compliance, and torturing the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution to regulate local matters. The point is that the US has some constitutional guarantees, but the mechanisms to protect the citizens from the government are imperfect and typically involve slow remedies. And requiring federal employees to defer to the President’s interpretation of the law—presumably when they believe that the administration is doing something illegal—weakens those checks and balances.
via Sentinel minutes.
Sorry to hear man. I tried to reach out to someone at OP a few months ago when I heard about your funding difficulties but I got ignored :(. Anyways, donated $100 and made a twitter thread here
We have strong reasons to think we know what the likely sources of existential risk are - as @Sean_o_h's new paper lays out very clearly.
Looked at the paper. The abstract says:
In all cases, an outcome as extreme as human extinction would require events or developments that either have been of very low probability historically or are entirely unprecedented. This introduces deep uncertainty and methodological challenges to the study of the topic. This review provides an overview of potential human extinction causes considered plausible in the current academic literature...
So I think you are overstating it a bit, i.e., it's hard to support statements about existential risks coming from classified risks vs unknown unknowns/black swans. But if I'm getting the wrong impression I'm happy to read the paper in depth.