Hi and thanks for your thoughtful reply and especially your hint at potentially being willing to help out.
To your first question on existing guides I am criticizing, I would a bit hand wavily say “all the usual ones”. I have gone through quite a few preparedness lists online from the preparedness community not affiliated with national governments (“preppers”) and have never seen any hint of why they suggest preparing the way they suggest. I have also looked at preparedness advice by the Scandinavian governments, and I think the some US ones as well and again, have not found any evidence of why they suggest what they suggest. So my first criticism is that it is unclear what is being prepared for. I have a suspicion based on some BOTECs that if one starts with lying out the threat landscape and try to translate the various threat categories into personal risk (chance of a “civilian” dying from various causes), it would lead to a different set of recommendations than those offered by either preppers or governments.
I like your segmentation. At first I was thinking the do not know/care but happen to prepare was highly unlikely. But then after reading about historical disasters one group stood out: Rich people, perhaps with an entrepreneurial and action-oriented attitude, seem to often do well. To be honest I have not given this much thought but perhaps I should. Instead, I have thought “this should probably exist so I want to see if others want me to work on it before putting in potentially a lot of work”. I thought I would check here with the rationalist community first, as I thought it might appeal to a subsection of rationalists (does not look like that from the reception of this post), so perhaps I will rewrite this to appeal to preppers—perhaps I should instead target existing preppers with a propensity for logical arguments (not sure if it is logical to prepare—it might be more cost effective in terms of life expectancy to go for a run and/or use money on vegetables!).
Having thought about this only briefly I see another segmentation for potential users of such a guide:
A rationalist mind-set
A prepper mind-set
I think the ideal here would be the quadrant that has both, while either convincing non-prepper rationalists, or irrational preppers to become interested in the guide is probably an uphill battle. I have worked for a few months on biosecurity and some people in this “industry” are genuinely worried about themselves and their loved ones to the point where they would be willing to at least make some small investments (whether skills or products) in preparing for a catastrophic pandemic. I was thinking, perhaps naively, that this might happen with certain people in AI too (although AI is probably much harder to prepare for). So I guess their top complaint is that there is really nothing out there to help them prepare for what they think might be one of the most likely way they or their loved ones could die. I am personally also following government advice, and I am a bit surprised that stockpiling does not include even basic pandemic PPE—many governments themselves are stockpiling PPE, so why not encourage citizens to do the same? Some governments even reduced their stockpiles of PPE but purely due to cost saving and not due to perceived lower risks (instead they should have tried to shift the responsibility to the citizens, encouraging them to stockpile this privately).
Really good point on a flow-chart instead of a recipe: If I start compiling a guide I am likely to take up your advice on this!
Again thanks a lot for comments and especially your kind offer to potentially help out! I think I will next try to gauge interest from preppers instead or rationalists by e.g. making a guest blog post on some prepper blog—the response here on LW seems like there might not be much interest in personal preparedness (or I have done a botch job of my first LW post—many LW posts on prepping are quite popular!).
So my first criticism is that it is unclear what is being prepared for.
Having been prepper-adjacent for longer than I’ve been knowingly rationalist-adjacent, I notice that I am surprised you’ve had this experience.
I used to spend way too much time in /r/preppers, so I’m inclined to take their wiki as characteristic of the community. Second line of the first post lined by the intro wiki page (https://www.reddit.com/r/preppers/wiki/why/), “Simply put emergencies happen that’s why.”, sums it up.
Outside of rationalist circles, changing someone’s mind about whether they ought to prepare is not generally a positive experience. Enough bad times resulting from such attempts can lead one to believe that attempting to change peoples’ minds on the fundamentals is pointless, so effort is better spent writing guides for people who have already identified a scenario that they find compelling.
I agree with your premise that it’s a good thing to help people figure out what they want to prep for, but I also see how the problem hasn’t been addressed yet because it runs into a lot of annoying social stuff.
I think as you start on a guide, that process itself may help clarify just how personal every individual’s risk profile is, and the magnitude of deviation between how different individuals can approach the “same” problem.
or I have done a botch job of my first LW post
LW’s expressed priorities have shifted immensely since the whole AI thing really took off, and many/most of those popular posts are from before it. Also, you’re jumping in with a large and cognitively demanding post, whereas many of the most popular prepper posts on here are much smaller. Don’t take it personally, nor give up on the hope of turning a manual into a popular series on here as it digests down into smaller and more approachable components.
Got a list of tasks you’re hoping to tackle on this, or shall I read the original post in more depth and infer it? If I meet task-sized pieces of the question, I’m likely to throw blocks of text at you for awhile, because writing is a lot of fun in relatively low-stakes or high-safety-net contexts like this (as in, I’m not scared that a mistake in something I throw at you would harm others, because I’m imagining a lot of layers of editorial and fact-check review before it gets out into the world).
Thanks again for a super thoughtful response and for the offer to help. How would you prefer to collaborate going forward? I am happy to do so here in LW comments in case perhaps others find it helpful but would also be happy to do so on Reddit ,offline, etc. until we think we have something worth publishing—good point on half baked prepper ideas potentially being net negative.
people who have already identified a scenario that they find compelling
That’s a super good point, my and my network’s expertise lies more in bio risks (and to the degree these overlap with AI scenarios). Perhaps it is better to start with bio—it also seems easier to tackle as many people seem to think AI is kind of binary (as in either everyone dies or most people survive) and also much harder to prepare for. Then, if that somehow becomes successful, we can later on consider venturing out with advice for prepping for other scenarios (e.g. if AI destroys most democracies and people could need plans for escaping to the last liberal democracies standing or building a new one).
LW is maximally convenient for me, although I’m not against other options if you or others have strong preferences. The recently released Dialogues feature may do well for this sort of thing, too.
Comment threading is a good fit for the fractal nature of exploring ideas, and we could do that with comment threading on this post or on a shortform.
Bio risks are a nicely concrete case for a subtlety of the prepper mindset that I expect I may explain poorly/incompletely on my first few tries: Surviving and thriving when part of what we take for granted goes away looks very similar regardless of why the thing went away.
The rule of 3s is a good touchstone here, concretely to bio risk:
Need air. Bio risk may render some/all air unsafe to breathe directly. Having the means to detect whether air is safe to breathe, and remove some/all contaminants from air you’re about to breathe when appropriate, is good for preparedness/survival.
Need shelter. Bio risk fallout/consequences may have economic impacts that affect one’s ability to keep one’s accustomed housing/shelter. Good financial preparedness and a backup plan for shelter will address these consequences of bio risk.
Need water. Bio risk may contribute to newly acquired water being unsafe to drink without bad health outcomes. Prepare through a combination of storing some safe water, and having the means to turn unsafe water into safe water (various combinations of disinfection, filtration, and distillation may be appropriate depending on the situation)
Need food. Bio risk may contribute to newly acquired food being unsafe to consume, or to no food available due to supply chain impact. Prepare by storing some food and optionally having a long-term plan to produce some/all of your own food in a long-term crisis.
Now, each of these practical interventions is also really good for addressing other risks:
Prepping to breathe clean air in a bad atmosphere increases your chances if a volcano makes a bunch of ash, an earthquake makes a bunch of dust, a nuclear event puts particles into the air that you don’t want to be breathing, there’s a particularly bad flu year and you still want to go to the grocery store without breathing what everyone is coughing, etc.
Prepping for continuity/eventualities/options of shelter also increases your chances of [quality * quantity] of life if natural disaster destroys your home, economic disaster destroys your ability to keep your home, maybe even if personal disaster destroys your home if you include redundancy to storage locations. Prepping for shelter redundancy is also great in thermal emergencies—in extreme cold, living in a tent in a house is warmer/better than living in just the house or just the tent.
Prepping for clean water is good if you’re on municipal water and get a boil water advisory, or natural disaster impacts water supply, or if the water company makes a mistake and shuts yours off, or if your well pump breaks, etc.
Prepping for safe food is also good if you lose access to regular supply chains for any reason—local/regional disaster where the food is grown, crop failure, economic issues meaning you can’t afford new food, and more
This is basically a low-resolution screencap from a complex film about how the correct preparedness actions to take are very often independent of the risk that a specific disaster caused the action to be relevant.
Caveats, of course, are that some disasters have unique preps that help with them disproportionately. Potassium iodide pills in case of nuclear emergency are the classic example—every 14 doses is basically a “get out of extreme thyroid cancer risk free” card for 1 adult in the specific scenario of radioactive iodine being present in the environment after a disaster. Similarly, there may be some unique preps for certain classes of bio emergency—maybe petri dishes, agar medium, and reagents to do rudimentary analysis and detect whether a surface has been contaminated by one thing rather than another? I don’t know enough about bio risk to give a good example there.
This toy example also highlights the skill component:
Prepping to breathe clean air is only as good as the correctness of your mental model about invisible contamination in air. You also need a flexible model—during wildfire season when the whole atmosphere is smoky, indoors breathing the same air over and over is net safer than outside. But during flu season, indoors with lots of people is net more hazardous than outside.
Stuff you own to provide yourself with improvised shelter is only as good as your ability to use it. If you set up a tent in a location that becomes a big puddle when it rains, and/or fail to stake it properly on a windy night, you’re about to be a lot worse off than you were before.
Water purification is only as good as your ability to use it and the correctness of your mental model about how contamination works. If you “purify” your water in a way that mixes it with contaminated water, the output is still contaminated. Conversely, if you try to distill everything when a few minutes of boiling would have sufficed, you’re going to waste a whole lot of fuel that you probably didn’t have to spare.
Stored food is only as good as your ability to prepare it. Classic vignette of the guy in the bomb shelter with all the canned goods and no can opener, or the old lady who only has an electric can opener and thus can’t get to her food during a power outage. If you go further and store whole wheat, you’d better own a grain mill if you want to turn it into flour.
Hi and thanks for your thoughtful reply and especially your hint at potentially being willing to help out.
To your first question on existing guides I am criticizing, I would a bit hand wavily say “all the usual ones”. I have gone through quite a few preparedness lists online from the preparedness community not affiliated with national governments (“preppers”) and have never seen any hint of why they suggest preparing the way they suggest. I have also looked at preparedness advice by the Scandinavian governments, and I think the some US ones as well and again, have not found any evidence of why they suggest what they suggest. So my first criticism is that it is unclear what is being prepared for. I have a suspicion based on some BOTECs that if one starts with lying out the threat landscape and try to translate the various threat categories into personal risk (chance of a “civilian” dying from various causes), it would lead to a different set of recommendations than those offered by either preppers or governments.
I like your segmentation. At first I was thinking the do not know/care but happen to prepare was highly unlikely. But then after reading about historical disasters one group stood out: Rich people, perhaps with an entrepreneurial and action-oriented attitude, seem to often do well. To be honest I have not given this much thought but perhaps I should. Instead, I have thought “this should probably exist so I want to see if others want me to work on it before putting in potentially a lot of work”. I thought I would check here with the rationalist community first, as I thought it might appeal to a subsection of rationalists (does not look like that from the reception of this post), so perhaps I will rewrite this to appeal to preppers—perhaps I should instead target existing preppers with a propensity for logical arguments (not sure if it is logical to prepare—it might be more cost effective in terms of life expectancy to go for a run and/or use money on vegetables!).
Having thought about this only briefly I see another segmentation for potential users of such a guide:
A rationalist mind-set
A prepper mind-set
I think the ideal here would be the quadrant that has both, while either convincing non-prepper rationalists, or irrational preppers to become interested in the guide is probably an uphill battle. I have worked for a few months on biosecurity and some people in this “industry” are genuinely worried about themselves and their loved ones to the point where they would be willing to at least make some small investments (whether skills or products) in preparing for a catastrophic pandemic. I was thinking, perhaps naively, that this might happen with certain people in AI too (although AI is probably much harder to prepare for). So I guess their top complaint is that there is really nothing out there to help them prepare for what they think might be one of the most likely way they or their loved ones could die. I am personally also following government advice, and I am a bit surprised that stockpiling does not include even basic pandemic PPE—many governments themselves are stockpiling PPE, so why not encourage citizens to do the same? Some governments even reduced their stockpiles of PPE but purely due to cost saving and not due to perceived lower risks (instead they should have tried to shift the responsibility to the citizens, encouraging them to stockpile this privately).
Really good point on a flow-chart instead of a recipe: If I start compiling a guide I am likely to take up your advice on this!
Again thanks a lot for comments and especially your kind offer to potentially help out! I think I will next try to gauge interest from preppers instead or rationalists by e.g. making a guest blog post on some prepper blog—the response here on LW seems like there might not be much interest in personal preparedness (or I have done a botch job of my first LW post—many LW posts on prepping are quite popular!).
Having been prepper-adjacent for longer than I’ve been knowingly rationalist-adjacent, I notice that I am surprised you’ve had this experience.
I used to spend way too much time in /r/preppers, so I’m inclined to take their wiki as characteristic of the community. Second line of the first post lined by the intro wiki page (https://www.reddit.com/r/preppers/wiki/why/), “Simply put emergencies happen that’s why.”, sums it up.
Outside of rationalist circles, changing someone’s mind about whether they ought to prepare is not generally a positive experience. Enough bad times resulting from such attempts can lead one to believe that attempting to change peoples’ minds on the fundamentals is pointless, so effort is better spent writing guides for people who have already identified a scenario that they find compelling.
I agree with your premise that it’s a good thing to help people figure out what they want to prep for, but I also see how the problem hasn’t been addressed yet because it runs into a lot of annoying social stuff.
I think as you start on a guide, that process itself may help clarify just how personal every individual’s risk profile is, and the magnitude of deviation between how different individuals can approach the “same” problem.
LW’s expressed priorities have shifted immensely since the whole AI thing really took off, and many/most of those popular posts are from before it. Also, you’re jumping in with a large and cognitively demanding post, whereas many of the most popular prepper posts on here are much smaller. Don’t take it personally, nor give up on the hope of turning a manual into a popular series on here as it digests down into smaller and more approachable components.
Got a list of tasks you’re hoping to tackle on this, or shall I read the original post in more depth and infer it? If I meet task-sized pieces of the question, I’m likely to throw blocks of text at you for awhile, because writing is a lot of fun in relatively low-stakes or high-safety-net contexts like this (as in, I’m not scared that a mistake in something I throw at you would harm others, because I’m imagining a lot of layers of editorial and fact-check review before it gets out into the world).
Thanks again for a super thoughtful response and for the offer to help. How would you prefer to collaborate going forward? I am happy to do so here in LW comments in case perhaps others find it helpful but would also be happy to do so on Reddit ,offline, etc. until we think we have something worth publishing—good point on half baked prepper ideas potentially being net negative.
That’s a super good point, my and my network’s expertise lies more in bio risks (and to the degree these overlap with AI scenarios). Perhaps it is better to start with bio—it also seems easier to tackle as many people seem to think AI is kind of binary (as in either everyone dies or most people survive) and also much harder to prepare for. Then, if that somehow becomes successful, we can later on consider venturing out with advice for prepping for other scenarios (e.g. if AI destroys most democracies and people could need plans for escaping to the last liberal democracies standing or building a new one).
LW is maximally convenient for me, although I’m not against other options if you or others have strong preferences. The recently released Dialogues feature may do well for this sort of thing, too.
Comment threading is a good fit for the fractal nature of exploring ideas, and we could do that with comment threading on this post or on a shortform.
Bio risks are a nicely concrete case for a subtlety of the prepper mindset that I expect I may explain poorly/incompletely on my first few tries: Surviving and thriving when part of what we take for granted goes away looks very similar regardless of why the thing went away.
The rule of 3s is a good touchstone here, concretely to bio risk:
Need air. Bio risk may render some/all air unsafe to breathe directly. Having the means to detect whether air is safe to breathe, and remove some/all contaminants from air you’re about to breathe when appropriate, is good for preparedness/survival.
Need shelter. Bio risk fallout/consequences may have economic impacts that affect one’s ability to keep one’s accustomed housing/shelter. Good financial preparedness and a backup plan for shelter will address these consequences of bio risk.
Need water. Bio risk may contribute to newly acquired water being unsafe to drink without bad health outcomes. Prepare through a combination of storing some safe water, and having the means to turn unsafe water into safe water (various combinations of disinfection, filtration, and distillation may be appropriate depending on the situation)
Need food. Bio risk may contribute to newly acquired food being unsafe to consume, or to no food available due to supply chain impact. Prepare by storing some food and optionally having a long-term plan to produce some/all of your own food in a long-term crisis.
Now, each of these practical interventions is also really good for addressing other risks:
Prepping to breathe clean air in a bad atmosphere increases your chances if a volcano makes a bunch of ash, an earthquake makes a bunch of dust, a nuclear event puts particles into the air that you don’t want to be breathing, there’s a particularly bad flu year and you still want to go to the grocery store without breathing what everyone is coughing, etc.
Prepping for continuity/eventualities/options of shelter also increases your chances of [quality * quantity] of life if natural disaster destroys your home, economic disaster destroys your ability to keep your home, maybe even if personal disaster destroys your home if you include redundancy to storage locations. Prepping for shelter redundancy is also great in thermal emergencies—in extreme cold, living in a tent in a house is warmer/better than living in just the house or just the tent.
Prepping for clean water is good if you’re on municipal water and get a boil water advisory, or natural disaster impacts water supply, or if the water company makes a mistake and shuts yours off, or if your well pump breaks, etc.
Prepping for safe food is also good if you lose access to regular supply chains for any reason—local/regional disaster where the food is grown, crop failure, economic issues meaning you can’t afford new food, and more
This is basically a low-resolution screencap from a complex film about how the correct preparedness actions to take are very often independent of the risk that a specific disaster caused the action to be relevant.
Caveats, of course, are that some disasters have unique preps that help with them disproportionately. Potassium iodide pills in case of nuclear emergency are the classic example—every 14 doses is basically a “get out of extreme thyroid cancer risk free” card for 1 adult in the specific scenario of radioactive iodine being present in the environment after a disaster. Similarly, there may be some unique preps for certain classes of bio emergency—maybe petri dishes, agar medium, and reagents to do rudimentary analysis and detect whether a surface has been contaminated by one thing rather than another? I don’t know enough about bio risk to give a good example there.
This toy example also highlights the skill component:
Prepping to breathe clean air is only as good as the correctness of your mental model about invisible contamination in air. You also need a flexible model—during wildfire season when the whole atmosphere is smoky, indoors breathing the same air over and over is net safer than outside. But during flu season, indoors with lots of people is net more hazardous than outside.
Stuff you own to provide yourself with improvised shelter is only as good as your ability to use it. If you set up a tent in a location that becomes a big puddle when it rains, and/or fail to stake it properly on a windy night, you’re about to be a lot worse off than you were before.
Water purification is only as good as your ability to use it and the correctness of your mental model about how contamination works. If you “purify” your water in a way that mixes it with contaminated water, the output is still contaminated. Conversely, if you try to distill everything when a few minutes of boiling would have sufficed, you’re going to waste a whole lot of fuel that you probably didn’t have to spare.
Stored food is only as good as your ability to prepare it. Classic vignette of the guy in the bomb shelter with all the canned goods and no can opener, or the old lady who only has an electric can opener and thus can’t get to her food during a power outage. If you go further and store whole wheat, you’d better own a grain mill if you want to turn it into flour.