Thanks Sanjay!
I agree that both of your bullet points would be good. I also think that the second one is extremely non-trivial - more like something it would be good to have a research team working on than something I could write a section on in a blog post.
There's a sense in which there are already research team equivalents working on it, insofar as lots of forecasting efforts relate to p(crunch time soon). But from my vantage point it doesn't seem like this community has clarity/consensus around what the best indicators of crunch time soon are, or that there are careful analyses of why we should expect those to be good indicators, and that makes me expect that more work is needed.
Thanks; I hadn't checked the Wikipedia current events page much previously, but I really like it.
Do you have any thoughts on how specifically the Wikipedia stuff is biased? I'm imagining that there isn't a general tendency, and it's more that specific entries are biased in specific ways that it's hard to spot if you don't have background knowledge on the area.
Thanks so much for this! If this is pedantry, I am very pro pedantry :)
I think this makes my 'Humans launch 5 objects into space' section sufficiently dubious that I've removed it, but pasting here in the context of your comment:
It’s only in the last 8 years that the number of objects launched into space each day has exceeded 1.
there seems to be a large variance in how comfortable people are with numbers, but I think this is surmountable
Wanting to flag that my background is entirely qualitative, and I spent many years thinking this meant that I couldn't do things with numbers. I now think this is false, they aren't magic, and you don't need to have deep aptitude for maths/technical training/a background in stats to be able to fiddle around with basic numbers in a way that helps you think about things.
Thanks for the link to Saulius' post; it's great and I recommend people check it out.
On the trillion wild birds: yeah you're right, it's too high - should be 100 billion instead. Thanks for the spot; have changed.
The number is on p. 89 in the supplementary materials - but importantly it's just aorder of magnitude, rather than a specific estimate. So it's consistent with Tomasik's range.
Thanks for this; I wasn't tracking it and it does seem potentially relevant.