Perhaps a better title would be “Known and Unknown Risks”, since there is nothing inherently different between “stable” and “unstable” risks.
For example, suppose there is a killer asteroid impact in 2015, yet the asteroid in question is not detected until 2014. Then the likelihood of the extinction rises dramatically at the moment of confirmed detection. If subsequently an emergency-build nuclear-powered asteroid deflector knocks the asteroid off the collision course, the relevant x-risk drops back to the baseline or lower.
Similarly, the likelihood of a nuclear annihilation at any given point can be traced to certain events occurring (or becoming known to the risk estimator), like discovery of nuclear fission, nuclear arms race, invention of ICBMs, shooting down the U-2 spy plane, etc.
There’s some utility to distinguishing the level of impact individual human actions have, though, and stability/instability seems a good proxy. Either asteroid detection or deflection is a massive undertaking requiring investments on the scale of tens or hundreds of billion of USD (or equivalent), for example, and the smaller decisions or indecisions of an individual politician or NASA administrator are very remotely related to the active event. The popular history(1) of MAD shows several circumstances where the entire system balanced on minutia of policy, technical errors, or the decisions of a single military officer on more than one occasion.
(1) This is a statement about my knowledge, rather than the accuracy of the history, in this case. It’s not a topic I’ve studied in detail.
Perhaps a better title would be “Known and Unknown Risks”, since there is nothing inherently different between “stable” and “unstable” risks.
I consider the difference to be extremely important to future decisionmaking, so I’m confused as to why you think this is the case. Can you explain further?
My point is that every disaster likelihood estimate goes through the periods of small and large fluctuations, the only difference between “stable” and “unstable” risks is which phase you are currently in. It would not be a good model to decide that one type of risk is inherently “stable” and another is “unstable”.
Perhaps a better title would be “Known and Unknown Risks”, since there is nothing inherently different between “stable” and “unstable” risks.
For example, suppose there is a killer asteroid impact in 2015, yet the asteroid in question is not detected until 2014. Then the likelihood of the extinction rises dramatically at the moment of confirmed detection. If subsequently an emergency-build nuclear-powered asteroid deflector knocks the asteroid off the collision course, the relevant x-risk drops back to the baseline or lower.
Similarly, the likelihood of a nuclear annihilation at any given point can be traced to certain events occurring (or becoming known to the risk estimator), like discovery of nuclear fission, nuclear arms race, invention of ICBMs, shooting down the U-2 spy plane, etc.
There’s some utility to distinguishing the level of impact individual human actions have, though, and stability/instability seems a good proxy. Either asteroid detection or deflection is a massive undertaking requiring investments on the scale of tens or hundreds of billion of USD (or equivalent), for example, and the smaller decisions or indecisions of an individual politician or NASA administrator are very remotely related to the active event. The popular history(1) of MAD shows several circumstances where the entire system balanced on minutia of policy, technical errors, or the decisions of a single military officer on more than one occasion.
(1) This is a statement about my knowledge, rather than the accuracy of the history, in this case. It’s not a topic I’ve studied in detail.
I consider the difference to be extremely important to future decisionmaking, so I’m confused as to why you think this is the case. Can you explain further?
My point is that every disaster likelihood estimate goes through the periods of small and large fluctuations, the only difference between “stable” and “unstable” risks is which phase you are currently in. It would not be a good model to decide that one type of risk is inherently “stable” and another is “unstable”.
I think you need to zoom out by a level of abstraction here. Does the argument make sense to you then?