The global spread of COVID-19 has put tremendous stress on humanity’s social, political, and economic systems. The breakdowns triggered by this sudden stress indicate areas where national and global systems are fragile, and where preventative and preparedness measures may be insufficient. The COVID-19 pandemic thus serves as an opportunity for reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of human civilization and what we can do to help make humanity more resilient. The Future of Life Institute's Emilia Javorsky and Anthony Aguirre join us on this special episode of the FLI Podcast to explore the lessons that might be learned from COVID-19 and the perspective this gives us for global catastrophic and existential risk.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-The importance of taking expected value calculations seriously

-The need for making accurate predictions

-The difficulty of taking probabilities seriously

-Human psychological bias around estimating and acting on risk

-The massive online prediction solicitation and aggregation engine, Metaculus

-The risks and benefits of synthetic biology in the 21st Century

You can find the page for this podcast here: https://futureoflife.org/2020/04/08/lessons-from-covid-19-with-emilia-javorsky-and-anthony-aguirre/

Timestamps: 

0:00 Intro 

2:35 How has COVID-19 demonstrated weakness in human systems and risk preparedness 

4:50 The importance of expected value calculations and considering risks over timescales 

10:50 The importance of being able to make accurate predictions 

14:15 The difficulty of trusting probabilities and acting on low probability high cost risks

21:22 Taking expected value calculations seriously 

24:03 The lack of transparency, explanation, and context around how probabilities are estimated and shared

28:00 Diffusion of responsibility and other human psychological weaknesses in thinking about risk

38:19 What Metaculus is and its relevance to COVID-19 

45:57 What is the accuracy of predictions on Metaculus and what has it said about COVID-19?

50:31 Lessons for existential risk from COVID-19 

58:42 The risk of synthetic bio enabled pandemics in the 21st century 

01:17:35 The extent to which COVID-19 poses challenges to democratic institutions

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