[ExI] Planetary defense
Anders Sandberg
anders at aleph.se
Fri May 6 00:54:17 UTC 2011
Richard Loosemore wrote:
>
> Which is to say, people who *assess* risk behave irrationally in the
> face of quantifiable versus non-quantifiable risks. When they can put
> numbers on a risk, they love to study the heck out of out it (even if,
> in fact, it is not that important), because playing games with numbers
> and equations makes the risk-scientist have a warm feeling that they
> are doing something.
Good point. Might explain why we are doing so well on NEOs.
> I think that the best thing that could happen right now is for the
> risk scientists to stop and look at themselves for a while. Try to
> understand their OWN biasses first, then, when they've got a grip on
> that, get back to looking at everyone else's.
However, most work on dealing with risks is not done by risk scientists
but by ordinary scientists. They see the risk, think they ought to do
something, and then do something. In the quantifiable fields it looks
much better than in the nonquantifiable fields.
I would love to convey the importance of other xrisks to this community,
but I don't want to clank down too much on what they are doing - after
all, they are doing something to reducing xrisks, and otherwise their
efforts would not be spent on xrisk mitigation at all. It is not as if
people look around, realize they need to stop xrisks, find the most
important one, and start working on it. Maybe they should, but that is
not how it works right now.
--
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
James Martin 21st Century School
Philosophy Faculty
Oxford University
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