What is this blog for?
This blog is where I publicly share parts of my journey using forecasting techniques to mitigate global catastrophic risks.
That’s a mouthful, so let me break it down.
Forecasting Techniques
Forecasting techniques go by a bunch of different names and I’m not sure I’m even using the best one. I’ve also seen them called foresight techniques or future studies or futurology. Forecasting seems to be the most generic term used in the communities most closely working on things I care about.
Examples of specific techniques are things like prediction polling (asking people how likely a thing is to happen), prediction markets (people betting with each other on how likely a thing is to happen), or tournaments where people use techniques like the previous two to compete with each other to be more accurate forecasters. There are lots more and I’m sure there are many I don’t know about yet. Part of the reason I’m creating this blog is to share information about them as I learn it myself.
Global Catastrophic Risks
This is a relatively recent term that has lots of different definitions that generally converge on a concept like “something really bad happening to the whole world, but that doesn’t necessarily involve humanity going extinct”. A concrete metric that I’ve found handy is a risk of 10% or more of the human population dying in a relatively short period of time, say 3 years. In percentage terms, this isn’t an unprecedentedly terrible event in human history, but it’s definitely pretty bad and hasn’t happened in the context of our modern civilization. When you start looking at how something like this could happen, it seems like it would take a global event, thus the name.
Since this sort of event would be unprecedented in the context of the complexity of modern civilization, it’s very hard to know what sort of consequences it could have as far as making other risks more likely via something like a civilizational collapse. This category also necessarily includes the concept of existential risk, where 100% of the human population dies. Most of the theorized risks in this category are extreme cases of global catastrophic risks, but because they are so much more extreme and, obviously, completely unprecedented they’re even harder to forecast. I believe the odds of global catastrophic risks are already high enough, and the benefits of mitigating them would largely carry over to existential risk mitigation, that it’s worth taking the gains in the tractability of the problem to focus on the larger set.
The arguments I’ve seen for focusing primarily on existential risk are all based on the assumption that there is a massive future ahead of humanity and extinction would be uniquely bad. My priors on the current level of risk are too high for me to be comfortable assuming this long future for humanity, especially with what I view as a massively treacherous space of unknown unknowns in between global catastrophic risks and existential risks. I do think the possibility of a thriving future makes a 100% death toll more than 10x worse than a 10% death toll, but not astronomically worse.
Theory of Change
“Mitigate” feels like the most important word in the one sentence purpose of this blog. I can study things and write about them all day long, but if they don’t translate into actual reductions in risk I won’t feel like I have done any good.
This greatly constrains what I’m working on and how I’m working on it. Questions that seem very useful to be able to forecast include:
What are the global catastrophic risks?
What is the likelihood that a given catastrophic event occurs?
What would be the consequences of a given event occurring?
What possible interventions would best mitigate a given risk?
If forecasting these questions can mitigate global catastrophic risks, it will be via changing people’s beliefs. Depending on who those people are and what beliefs are changed, forecasting could affect how people or organizations allocate their resources. This might mean someone choosing a different career path, a company kicking off a different project, or a philanthropic organization directing their funds to different grantees.
For someone’s beliefs to be changed in a useful direction by forecasting…
The forecasting technique needs to be more accurate, in expectation, than other available methods.
The individual must have confidence in this accuracy.
The resulting information must be relevant and actionable.
That individual must have the capacity to affect global catastrophic risk mitigation, and a desire to do so.
The work this blog is documenting is trying to address all four of the above points, because I think if any one of them is missing it can’t translate into successful mitigation.
Who is the author?
My name is Damien Laird and I’ve been looking floating around communities thinking about global catastrophic risk since 2020. I spent most of that time just trying to learn more about the problem space. I digested a lot of information, chatted with like minded people, and volunteered my time where I thought it might be useful.
I think of myself as a generalist, and I’ve found a core tension between…
I want to work on mitigating global catastrophic risks as a whole set. I think there are significant synergies in mitigations available by doing so, and risks of exacerbating the overall problem by only considering them independently. Also, it only takes one to break civilization, so you definitely want to solve them all!
I need to do work that’s focused enough to be useful. I can research the entire set of risks all I want, but if there are no projects available at that level that actually result in mitigation it won’t matter. Conversely, there are lots of projects available if I decided to just focus on any given risk.
Focusing on forecasting in this domain is my recently chosen solution to this dilemma. Benefits gained should apply immediately to the whole set, I think I’m well suited to the work, and I’m seeing a building wave of organizational momentum on the topic that I hope to be able to work with.
I have been following forecasting as a topic for a long time, primarily through Astral Codex Ten and Don’t Worry About the Vase. More recently, I participated in a forecasting tournament focused on these kinds of risks. I’ll be publishing a full post-mortem here, but it forced me to dig deeper into the topic and exposed me to a budding network of organizations working on this problem. Also, I loved it.
What does this mean for you?
I’m intending this blog to produce a few different kinds of value:
It will force me to articulate and therefore solidify my ideas as I work. I’ve always found this to make my work much better.
It will allow others to benefit from my work, if you happen to be one of the other odd souls interested in this sort of thing.
If there are enough odd souls who find it, this might create a channel for feedback or collaboration on my work.
By documenting my work I’m hoping it can, over time, become a sort of credential that qualifies me for professional opportunities that would let me do much more of this sort of thing. It’s currently just a very fulfilling hobby, and I think I need to document the quality of my work for it to ever be more than that.
Please note that I am never planning on using this blog as a source of income, and paywalling informational content would undermine the points above. Substack is just a convenient place where other people who care about this topic are likely to hang out.
If you’re one of those people, please leave comments on my posts or reach out to me directly! I’m @Damien_Laird on Twitter. Positive, negative, neutral, whatever. If it’s relevant to the work, I promise that I’ll be glad to hear from you and that I’ll engage.
