I just listened to the 80k podcast episode where interviewed Carl Shulman, and I recommend it!
I think the summary in the screenshot below is pretty good, and Carl adds a ton of depth and detail about how he thinks about this stuff.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/80-
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I think one of my favorite parts (the original is going to be better than my summary) was Carl talking about how overwhelming the data really needs to be for stuff to be “settled science”, and how something more like the obvious best guess based on decent data is super different.
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You all think that 1 in 6 odds of human extinction in the next century is an even remotely close to accurate assumption?
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I dunno if "the US government is sometimes willing to spend money in this way" is a particularly great justification for anything
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My least favourite part was the dodgy math quoted above actually
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