EA - Philanthropy to the Right of Boom [Founders Pledge] by christian.r

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: Philanthropy to the Right of Boom [Founders Pledge], published by christian.r on February 14, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Background and Acknowledgements:This write-up represents part of an ongoing Founders Pledge research project to understand the landscape of nuclear risk and philanthropic support of nuclear risk reduction measures. It is in some respects a work in progress and can be viewed as a Google Document here and on Founders Pledge's website here.With thanks to James Acton, Conor Barnes, Tom Barnes, Patty-Jane Geller, Matthew Gentzel, Matt Lerner, Jeffrey Lewis, Ankit Panda, Andrew Reddie, and Carl Robichaud for reviewing this document and for their thoughtful comments and suggestions.“The Nuclear Equivalent of Mosquito Nets”In philanthropy, the term “impact multipliers” refers to features of the world that make one funding opportunity relatively more effective than another. Stacking these multipliers makes effectiveness a “conjunction of multipliers;” understanding this conjunction can in turn help guide philanthropists seeking to maximize impact under high uncertainty.Not all impact multipliers are created equal, however. To systematically engage in effective giving, philanthropists must understand the largest impact multipliers — “critical multipliers” — those features that most dramatically cleave more effective interventions from less effective interventions. In global health and development, for example, one critical multiplier is simply to focus on the world’s poorest people. Because of large inequalities in wealth and the decreasing marginal utility of money, helping people living in extreme poverty rather than people in the Global North is a critical multiplier that winnows the field of possible interventions more than many other possible multipliers.Additional considerations — the prevalence of mosquito-borne illnesses, the low cost and scalability of bednet distribution, and more — ultimately point philanthropists in global health and development to one of the most effective interventions to reduce suffering in the near term: funding the distribution of insecticide-treated bednets.This write-up represents an attempt to identify a defensible critical multiplier in nuclear philanthropy, and potentially to move one step closer to finding “the nuclear equivalent of mosquito nets.”Impact Multipliers in Nuclear PhilanthropyThere are many potential impact multipliers in nuclear philanthropy. For example, focusing on states with large nuclear arsenals may be more impactful than focusing on nuclear terrorism. Nuclear terrorism would be horrific and a single attack in a city (e.g. with a dirty bomb) could kill thousands of people, injure many more, and cause long-lasting damage to the physical and mental health of millions. All-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia, however, would be many times worse. Hundreds of millions of people would likely die from the direct effects of a war. If we believe nuclear winter modeling, moreover, there may be many more deaths from climate effects and famine. In the worst case, civilization could collapse. Simplifying these effects, suppose for the sake of argument that a nuclear terrorist attack could kill 100,000 people, and an all-out nuclear war could kill 1 billion people.All else equal, in this scenario it would be 10,000 times more effective to focus on preventing all-out war than it is to focus on nuclear terrorism.Generalizing this pattern, philanthropists ought to prioritize the largest nuclear wars (again, all else equal) when thinking about additional resources at the margin. This can be operationalized with real numbers — nuclear arsenal size, military spending, and other measures can serve as proxy variables for the severity of nuclear war, yielding rough multipliers. This w...