EA - An entire category of risks are undervalued by EA [Summary of previous forum post] by Richard Ren

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: An entire category of risks are undervalued by EA [Summary of previous forum post], published by Richard Ren on September 5, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Word count above is inaccurate; 5 minute read (1353 words) excluding footnotes. This post is a brief summary of a longer forum post I wrote on systemic cascading risks & their relevance to the long-term future (an EA criticism competition submission). I make three strong claims: (1) The cascading sociopolitical & economic effects of climate change, pandemics, and conflicts are undervalued in the mainstream longtermist community. These systemic cascading risks can be extremely important to the long-term future through shaping the development of powerful technologies in the next 10-30 years. (2) Institutional resilience is the generalization of the solution to systemic cascading risks. A resilient food, water, energy, and infrastructure nexus are key to ensuring system stability around the necessities to live during a crisis, helping to tractably hedge against all systemic cascading risks at once. (3) The systemic cascading lens fills the missing gap between current events & longtermism, solving a key question in EA epistemics. 0. What is a systemic cascading risk? Envisioning our societal structures as a graph with nodes and links, a given systemic cascading risk shocks a subset of societal "nodes" and causes n-th order effects that cascade across systems & magnify in volatile, harmful ways – exploiting underlying systemic flaws and interdependencies. I subsequently discuss COVID, the Russia-Ukraine war, and climate change as examples of pandemic, conflict, and environmental systemic cascading risks respectively. Pandemic and Conflict Risk: COVID & Russia-Ukraine War COVID-19, alongside the Russian invasion of Ukraine, served as a catalyst for food inflation and undermined perceived institutional legitimacy: COVID's economic stresses, for example, catalyzed violent unrest and riots internationally. Fiscal stimulus-based recovery drove global debt levels to 320% of global GDP, putting many countries at risk of default. The Russia-Ukraine War disrupted a third of global wheat & barley exports, 75% of sunflower oil exports, and drove up gas and fertilizer prices, resulting in global maize and wheat price spikes of 42% and 60% (from January 2021 to June 2022). International export bans and a violent Sri Lankan debt default have worsened the crisis. High food inflation levels are expected to last until 2024, further testing fragile states reliant on food imports and triggering social distress. Historically, the absence of adequate food, water, and energy drives political instability – e.g. 1977 & 1984 Egyptian and Moroccan bread riots, 1989 Jordanese protests, 2011 Arab Spring. Environmental Risk: Climate Change In the next 30 years, anthropogenic climate change is projected to cause ~216 million internal climate migrants due to heat stress/desertification/land loss, ~150 million displaced by sea level rise, ~5 billion people living in moderately water-stressed areas, risks for multi-breadbasket failure and disruption to food supply chains, and related inflationary and poverty effects. These stresses on our societal systems are likely to contribute to a) violent civil conflict & social tensions – an estimated 46 countries containing ~2.7 billion people will face a high risk of violent conflict due to climate change b) political extremism & violation of international norms – e.g. possible far-right and extreme governments being elected in the first world due to climate-based economic and social pressures 1. How are they relevant to the long-term future? Much of EA focuses on tail-end risks – like whether a conflict could cause nuclear war or climate change as a direct existential risk, rather than whether an event...