You are also right to bring up the value that people have for criteria other than their lives, including the survival of earth life. Whether or not people should have such a value, it’s clear that some certainly do and that should be included in any proper assessment. How that value ends up being assessed is an open question. Some have raised the question of if it’s appropriate to have people act as a proxy for nature, and if instead nature would be better represented by its own agents. I myself remain very suspicious about this notion’s plausibility, but it is worth entertaining.

Unfortunately, I feel as though it is very difficult to discuss risk matters in ordinary text in any cohesive way, as any of these factors could lead in many different tangents. This is one reason why I am proceeding from the subjects of methodology, information science, and cognitive limits: it would be a shame to have a foundation of such diverse talents without the information architecture to support their work effectively.

I tend to be very sympathetic to the challenges risk management faces. The cost of investigating and managing the information about a particular risk likely will tend to truncate it prematurely. I have hopes that providing the kind of information architecture that will let the results of one risk investigation transfer to the next can help extend this scope.

I also think that insurance regulation plays a more interesting role than it might initially seem: for which risks do we say “you have the right to do that, but you bear the consequences” versus “this is an ordinary risk in the course of what we are doing together, so we’ll help you in the case of harm”. Catastrophic risks in particular seem to pit mitigation alternatives with uncertain rewards and heavy short-term individual costs under specific regulatory frameworks against scientifically-uncertain irreversible long-term public costs that span borders. Figuring out when to hedge on the benefits while sharing the risk is tricky.

But, overall, you’re certainly right, there are often probably overlapping advantages of mitigation measures that are untapped due to current limitations in information tools and discovery processes.

Kelly: Your suggestion is a good one, as I enjoy the use of Monte Carlo approaches, but in a different way than you might suspect. It is entirely right that many great approximations to NP-complete problems are available, including randomized approaches such as Monte Carlo. However, I suspect that the hard part is in getting to this risk comparison stage and knowing when you’ve gotten there. Severe challenges lurk in discovering the right information and integrating cross-domain preferences and expertise into a comparable specification.

In this way, machine learning might provide a better metaphor than other algorithms: in addition to “Given this input, by what process do I find the right conclusion”, one can also ask “Given the input I have so far, how good are my conclusions? What more information do I need, and where do I look for it first so that I can learn the most?” However, this is where Monte Carlo can serve us again. Given developments in non-parametric Bayesian inference, we can use Monte Carlo to help ask “Given the information we’ve seen so far, what underlying random processes most likely produced it, and how much further do we have to look before discovering something important that we didn’t already know?” I think that there is great potential for design tools that incorporate this kind of discovery support.

I personally suspect that the amygdala is foundationally important; from what I’ve read, individuals who have damaged emotional systems are not hyper-rational but are completely indecisive, unable to make choices of any kind. However, I do think we are wise to frame risk issues such as to avoid unhelpful associations, and to look where framing may be doing us harm.

In an overwhelming disaster would humans feel some responsibility to see that some earth life survives?

A more together life system might consider earthlife one creature or two if underwater life is another with very scattered brain bits.

The following post by me is in part about risk,
http://www.phillyimc.org/en/bee-colony-collapse-and-dealing-disaster

When you say that the problem of actuarial estimation is NP complete, and therefore our hands are to be wrung mightily, there is better news on the horizon. Many NP complete problems have been beaten upon using Monte Carlo methodologies. While these will not give you precise answers, they often give you an idea of what better answers might be. If you are seriously interested in estimation of risk therefore, my suggestion is to chase the monte carlo simulation game and perhaps you can come up with some pretty good solutions, if not perfect ones.

In the meantime, the folks in Washington will continue to chase the collective amygdala… to our less than optimal outcome…

-Kelly

An additional perspective which you’ve drawn into this concept is the tendency to ignore that ‘drift in prevailing conditions’. Although the meme of the boiling frog still does the rounds, it’s fairly inaccurate for most frogs — they DO get out of the water. Unlike humans who’ve developed a reliance on indicators other than those coming from their biology.

In Risk Management, typically risks are seen in isolation what some call silos or stove pipes that from a computational approach, are not normally considered in combinations.

At the same time, Risk Management tends to ignore the impact of positive actions that by default are mitigating some of the risk potential — the question filter is usually ‘if we don’t do X what are the risks’ as opposed to ‘are there any actions we are already taking that might mitigate some or all of the risk we are assessing?’

And in many commercial settings this leads to a naive approach — if we don’t insure the risk, what will it cost us to recover? In the end the fiscal costs (of policy or action insurance) seems to be the determinant where is the policy cost is high and the recovery cost not so much higher, no insurance is taken out.

As for life conditions — on this website much of the conversation tends to be about ‘what will the conditions be in the case of X event’ as opposed to ‘what will the recovery conditions be in the case of X event’.