All of SJ Beard's Comments + Replies

I think that referring to the successes you mention as 'peak Quakerism' actually misses the point rather. At the time of its establishment Quakerism was a very outward looking sect seeking for radical renewal of the world in the aftermath of the English Civil War. At one point perhaps 25% of the population of England were convinced of the truth of the tenets of Quakerism. However, this period was short lived and the movement faltered in size and importance and became highly insular shortly afterwards.

This insularity is not at all unrelated to the successes... (read more)

Of course it will be smaller, however that does mean that tackelling climate change will not make a sizeable contribution towards reducing the risk of nuclear winter. The question for me is whether nuclear winters that relate to climate change are more or less tractable than nuclear winter as a whole. My view would be that trying to reduce the risk of nuclear winter by tackelling climate change and its consequences may be a more tractable problem then doing so by trying to get nuclear weapons states to disarm or otherwise making nuclear war less likely in ... (read more)

I think we might disagree about what constitutes a near miss or precipitating event. I certainly think that we should worry about such events even if their probability of leading to a nuclear exchange are pretty low (0.001 lets say) and that it would not be merely a matter of luck to have had 60 such events and no nuclear conflict, it is just that given the damage such a conflict would do they still reprasent an unaceptable threat.

The precise role played by climate change in increasing our vulnerability to such threats depends on the nature of the event. I

We are indeed writing something on this (sorry it is taking so long!). I would dispute your characterization of the principle contributor of climate change to nuclear war though. Working on Barrett and Baum’s recent model of how nuclear war’s might occure I would argue that the greatest threat from climate change is that it creates conditions under which a prec[ititating event such as a regional war might escalate into a nuclear conflict are more likely - i.e. it increases our vulnerability to such threats. This is probably more significant than its direct

I hope that this is now fixed at last, although I stress that this is very much a work in progress

Ha, your right! Millet and Snyder Beattie use two seperate methods to make two similar claims, however whilst I have listed both methods here I have accidently linked them to the same claim. I’ll correct this tomorrow.

Below I paste a really brief summary of some papers you might find interesting. This is taken from a draft literature review I have been working on with others, into methods for quantifying existential risk, hence its particular format. I hope you find it useful and would be grateful to heard if anyone knows of any good papers we have missed.

My personal takeaway from this exercise with regard to the risk from pandemics is that many GCR scholars may be overstating the risks from a major pandemic at the 'spanish flu' level (and one thing I should h... (read more)

I am a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. Given the short time frame here I thought it worth saying that if anyone is interested in applying for this and would like to work on a project that may be assised by partnershing with a more established X-risk org then I would be happy to hear from you and will make sure to turn around any e-mails in as little time as possible. You can reach me at sjb316@cam.ac.uk.

This paper very much builds upon a more detailed working paper published by the authors in 2016 (https://www.nber.org/papers/w22137.pdf). That seemed to receive a reasonable amount of discussion at the time whilst I was working at FHI and it has certainly been one of my go to resources for pandemic influenza since, but there are definately some problems with it.

The first thing that you need to know is that when the authors talk about ‘extreme events’ this may not quite mean what you think. They basically divide all possible influenza pandemics into two cla

Can I ask why you actually want to catagorize ethics like this at all? I know that it is traditional and it can be very helpful when teaching ethics to set things out like this as if you don’t then students often miss the profound difference between different ethical theories. However a lot of exciting work has never fallen into these catagories, which in any case are basically post hoc classifications of the work of Aristotle, Plato and Mill. Hume’s work for instance is pretty clearly ‘none of the above’ and a lot of good creative work has been done over ... (read more)

Hey Rhys

Thanks for prompting me on this. I was hoping to find time for a fuller reply to your but this will have to do, you only asked for the texture after all. My concerns are somewhat nebulous so please don't take this as any cast iron reason not to seek out estimates for the probability of different existential risks. However, I think they are important.

The first relates to the degree of uncertainty that surrounds any estimate of this kind and how it should be handled. There are actually several sources of this.

The first of these relates to the thresho... (read more)

We are indeed keen to get comments and feedback. Also note that the final 1/3rd or so of the paper is an extensive catalogue of assessments of the probability of different risks in which we try to incorporate all the sources we could find (though we are very happy if others know of more of these).

I will say however that the overwhelming sense I got in doing this study is that it is sometimes best not to put this kind of number on risks.

The public beurocracy that I am most familiar with is that in the UK. Here, the government’s approach to risk, including Catastrophic risk, takes place within the Cabinet Office, and in particular their civil contingency secretariat. From what little I know of the US beurocracy I think it is the same in that risk management is the responsibility, at least in part, of the white house.

Risks fall under the authority of different government departments as you put it, in two different ways. Firstly, for the purpose of the Annual National Risk Assessment departm... (read more)