This post outlines a framework of five characteristics that seem most relevant for longtermists to consider when evaluating the impact of a “global agent” (as defined below) like a world government or a strong global governance institution.

Many people worry about how much we can trust aggregate forecasts (e.g., the Metaculus community median) that are based on the predictions of only a small number of individuals. This consideration also came up in my recent post analysing predictions of future grants by Open Philanthropy, where having few predictors left me unsure of how much we could really trust the aggregate predictions. How justified is this worry? In other words, to what extent is the number of individual predictors on a question correlated with the accuracy of the aggregate forecast on that question? And to what extent does increasing the number of predictors on a question itself cause the aggregate forecast on that question to be more accurate?

6 weeks ago I shared a Metaculus question series I had authored, focused mainly on predicting grants by Open Philanthropy in 2025 and 2030, with some other questions on new large EA-aligned donors also included. This post contains a summary of the predictions on these questions so far.

This post discusses what the cause area of “Improving institutional decision-making” (IIDM) currently encompasses, and presents some frameworks for thinking about IIDM’s pathways to impact and what (I think) IIDM should entail.

This post attempts to (1) tease apart different features of liberal democracy and (2) analyse how increasing or decreasing a society’s level of each feature would affect various potential intermediate goals for longtermists. By potential intermediate goals, we mean goals we could pursue to potentially increase the expected value of the far future, via four broad categories: existential risk reduction, trajectory changes, speeding up development, or “meta-longtermism.”

Metaculus is a forecasting website which aggregates quantitative predictions of future events. One topic of interest on Metaculus is artificial intelligence. Here I look at what we might be able to learn from how the questions on this subject have gone so far, in particular, how the predictions of the Metaculus community have performed. If they have done poorly, it would be of value to making future predictions and interpreting existing ones to know if there are any patterns to this which might reveal common mistakes in making AI related predictions.

In the context of forecasting, how you ask a question can be a large factor in how much information you get from the forecasts on that question. We will thus explore the problems associated with the way you operationalize a question on a forecasting platform, which we will call the question specification. (Terms also used include resolution criteria or operationalization.) Specifically: what are types of specification problems that reduce or misalign optimization power going towards prediction (in different forecasting settings)? What are some ways to resolve these different problems?

From June 22, Rethink Priorities and Metaculus will run a Nuclear Risk Forecasting Tournament to help inform funding, policy, research, and career decisions aimed at reducing existential risks. The starting prize pool is $2,500. We would be excited for you to help via making forecasts, participating in the Discussion Forum, increasing forecaster rewards by becoming a monthly Supporter, and/or reaching out to relevant people to suggest they participate.

This post lists 10 longtermism-relevant project ideas for people with humanities interests or backgrounds. Most of these ideas are for research projects, but some are for summaries, new outreach content, etc.

Forecasting well is a valuable skill for many purposes and people, including for EA organisations aiming to identify which areas they should focus on and what the outcomes of various initiatives would be. There is a limited public record of people making scored forecasts over time horizons greater than ~1 year. Here I use data from PredictionBook and Metaculus to study performance of predictions over different time horizons. I also looked at performance between users with different levels of forecasting practice.

Ballot initiatives are a form of direct democracy in which citizens can gather signatures to qualify a proposed piece of legislation for the ballot, which is then subject to a binding up-or-down vote by the general electorate. Ballot initiatives are possible in Switzerland, Taiwan, many U.S. states and cities, and elsewhere. Ballot initiatives appear to maintain several advantages over more traditional policy lobbying, including lower barriers to entry and more direct control over the final legislation. However, the ultimate cost-effectiveness of a ballot initiative campaign depends on several factors, many of which are difficult to specify precisely. Although ballot initiatives hold enough promise to warrant additional investigation, it is not yet possible to say to what extent ballot initiative campaigns ought to be pursued by the effective altruism community.

In this post, I investigate whether the TPNW is likely to have an impact on nuclear deproliferation through formal legal channels — for example, by keeping countries that might have considered building nuclear weapons programs from doing so.[1] To do this, I first looked into whether any of the countries that are currently doing things that would be banned by the TPNW might ratify the treaty in the next 20 years (and stop doing those things). Next, I looked into whether the TPNW will keep any countries that ratify the treaty from becoming non-compliant — for example, by trying to get a sense of whether the treaty could counterfactually cause them not to pursue nuclear weapons.

In this essay, we discuss the opportunities that deliberative reforms offer for improving institutional decision-making. We begin by describing deliberation and its links to democratic theory, and then sketch out examples of deliberative designs. Following this, we explore the evidence that deliberation can engender fact-based reasoning, opinion change, and under certain conditions can motivate longterm thinking. So far, most deliberative initiatives have not been invested with a direct role in the decision-making process and so the majority of policy effects we see are indirect. Providing deliberative bodies with a binding and direct role in decision-making could improve this state of affairs. We end by highlighting some limitations and areas of uncertainty before noting who is already working in this area and avenues for further research.

In this post, I estimate the number of fatalities caused directly by nuclear detonations in the US/NATO and Russia. I model these effects in Guesstimate using expert surveys and interviews, forecasts made by Good Judgment Project superforecasters, academic research, and media coverage of international relations, along with academic research into the effects of nuclear war and nuclear weapons policy.

My previous posts address how bad a nuclear war is likely to be, conditional on there being a nuclear war, but they don’t consider the likelihood that we actually see a US-Russia nuclear exchange unfold in the first place. In this post, I get a rough sense of how probable a nuclear war might be by looking at historical evidence, the views of experts, and predictions made by forecasters. I find that, if we aggregate those perspectives, there’s about a 1.1% chance of nuclear war each year, and that the chances of a nuclear war between the US and Russia, in particular, are around 0.38% per year.

Nuclear attacks on cities would likely produce much more smoke than attacks on missile silos, military bases, and other nuclear arsenal targets. This is mainly because cities have much more flammable material to burn than the remote wildlands — mostly cropland and grasslands — that surround, for example, missile silos. This leads me to conclude that a nuclear war between the US and Russia would likely produce closer to 31 teragrams of smoke (90% confidence interval: 14 Tg to 68 Tg of smoke) — suggesting that nuclear winter is not as synonymous with US-Russia nuclear war as many effective altruists seem to assume. The ~31 teragrams of smoke that would be vaulted into the atmosphere would undoubtedly produce severe climate effects, likely leading to food shortfalls and regional famines, and killing between 36% and 96% of the world population.

The degree to which a nuclear war between the US and Russia could escalate depends on how many of their nuclear weapons would survive a first strike. For decades, both the US and Russia have been able to maintain a secure second strike by hiding their nuclear weapons on submarines, armored trucks, and aircraft. If improvements in technology allowed either country to reliably locate and destroy those targets, they would be able to eliminate the others’ secure second strike, thereby limiting the degree to which a nuclear war could escalate.

A nuclear exchange may have the potential to kill millions or billions of people, and possibly lead to human extinction. In this post, I rank plausible nuclear exchange scenarios in terms of their potential to cause harm based on three factors: 1) The size of the involved countries’ nuclear arsenals; 2) The size of the involved countries’ populations; 3) The probability of the given nuclear exchange scenario. Based on my rough prioritization, I expect the following nuclear exchange scenarios have the highest potential for harm: Russia and the US, India and Pakistan, and China and either the United States, India, or Russia.