I wish people reported their P(catastrophe) : P(doom)[1] ratio in addition to timelines. Whenever I hear that people’s p(doom) is at e.g. 5%, I immediately wonder, what about their p(catastrophe)? Is it 10%, or 20%, or 50%?
There’s a few reasons why I am curious about this ratio.
One simple reason is it serves as a consistency check. I think a lot of the times doom is used to mean ‘something really bad’, but actually catastrophe already qualifies as ‘something really bad’. So it’s good to reflect on whether you’d endorse what your p(doom) would imply about p(catastrophe).
A second reason is that I think the p(catastrophe) : p(doom) ratio reveals interesting information about people’s threat models, once people actually take them to denote different things. If the ratio is low, then plausibly their threat model is more dominated by immediate takeover risks. I for one think the ratio is really high. I think catastrophe at our current pace is very plausible, but e.g. extinction is far, far more implausible. To put some number to things, I think p(doom) is at <0.2%[2] and p(catastrophe) is at >20%[3] i.e. P(catastrophe) : P(doom) is at about 100:1, or equivalently given my definition p(doom | catastrophe) < 1%.
For the sake of precision here, we can say catastrophe means >10% of the global population dies in excess of baseline mortality rates in a sequence of events before 2100, and say doom means extinction before 2100. I don’t think the definition is critical here (it’s there to make rigorous the difference between ‘really really bad’ and ‘bad’), and I think you should report this ratio even when you disagree with the definition.
I wish people reported their P(catastrophe) : P(doom)[1] ratio in addition to timelines. Whenever I hear that people’s p(doom) is at e.g. 5%, I immediately wonder, what about their p(catastrophe)? Is it 10%, or 20%, or 50%?
There’s a few reasons why I am curious about this ratio.
One simple reason is it serves as a consistency check. I think a lot of the times doom is used to mean ‘something really bad’, but actually catastrophe already qualifies as ‘something really bad’. So it’s good to reflect on whether you’d endorse what your p(doom) would imply about p(catastrophe).
A second reason is that I think the p(catastrophe) : p(doom) ratio reveals interesting information about people’s threat models, once people actually take them to denote different things. If the ratio is low, then plausibly their threat model is more dominated by immediate takeover risks. I for one think the ratio is really high. I think catastrophe at our current pace is very plausible, but e.g. extinction is far, far more implausible. To put some number to things, I think p(doom) is at <0.2%[2] and p(catastrophe) is at >20%[3] i.e. P(catastrophe) : P(doom) is at about 100:1, or equivalently given my definition p(doom | catastrophe) < 1%.
For the sake of precision here, we can say catastrophe means >10% of the global population dies in excess of baseline mortality rates in a sequence of events before 2100, and say doom means extinction before 2100. I don’t think the definition is critical here (it’s there to make rigorous the difference between ‘really really bad’ and ‘bad’), and I think you should report this ratio even when you disagree with the definition.
FWIW, I think this is terrible given that our base rates are a few OOMs lower.
Could be way higher, but >20% is the number I’m comfortable committing to.