In light of the war in Ukraine and fears of nuclear escalation, we turned to forecasting to assess whether individuals and organizations should leave major cities.
Good analysis. Did you see the 4% base rate for nuclear escalation stated in Robert de Neufville's substack? He's a thoughtful Superforecaster, too.
Given I live in Frankfurt with my family and have not moved out so far, I would say I probably broadly agree with your analysis rather than Robert's, which would imply another order of magnitude higher odds.
It seems high, but on the other hand he's talking about an unconditional probability, so I imagine that most of the probability is concentrated in e.g., small tactical nukes in Ukraine rather than in scalation to, idk, blowing up Kiev or scalating to NATO.
Correct, but the prevailing winds + kids in my household+ general risk aversion will also affect the overall calculation, and increase the micromorts of my household by an order of magnitude to ~500-1000. Especially given the hedonic value of 2 months of WFH from Ibiza is perhaps higher than 2 months in Frankfurt (but only if we do manage to find daycare!)
I am not a Superforecaster like Robert de Neufville, but I did get something in the ballpark of his ~4%. Admittedly, just trying to answer the question, "What is the chance of a nuclear weapon being used in the next 3 months?"
I think you are answering the more central question: "Given I live in London/SF/etc, how elevated are my chances of dying?" Looks like I'm in the ballpark of Jacob Hilton's guess of 1% for nuclear war.
Thanks for sharing how you all approached this question! I'm a former submariner so this was an interesting question for me to tackle. My simple "app" that's a nuclear risk calculator for the conflict is found here: https://app.hex.tech/399c4a29-5b7f-4f70-8b53-afa8da38dd72/app/def94910-d017-4508-847c-e1189d3b6042/latest I think I have much to learn from how you broke down the question...mine was a more a deterministic path of how nuclear war would occur.
Good analysis. Did you see the 4% base rate for nuclear escalation stated in Robert de Neufville's substack? He's a thoughtful Superforecaster, too.
Given I live in Frankfurt with my family and have not moved out so far, I would say I probably broadly agree with your analysis rather than Robert's, which would imply another order of magnitude higher odds.
Yeah, for reference to other readers: https://tellingthefuture.substack.com/p/could-russia-use-nuclear-weapons/
It seems high, but on the other hand he's talking about an unconditional probability, so I imagine that most of the probability is concentrated in e.g., small tactical nukes in Ukraine rather than in scalation to, idk, blowing up Kiev or scalating to NATO.
Correct, but the prevailing winds + kids in my household+ general risk aversion will also affect the overall calculation, and increase the micromorts of my household by an order of magnitude to ~500-1000. Especially given the hedonic value of 2 months of WFH from Ibiza is perhaps higher than 2 months in Frankfurt (but only if we do manage to find daycare!)
I am not a Superforecaster like Robert de Neufville, but I did get something in the ballpark of his ~4%. Admittedly, just trying to answer the question, "What is the chance of a nuclear weapon being used in the next 3 months?"
I think you are answering the more central question: "Given I live in London/SF/etc, how elevated are my chances of dying?" Looks like I'm in the ballpark of Jacob Hilton's guess of 1% for nuclear war.
Thanks for sharing how you all approached this question! I'm a former submariner so this was an interesting question for me to tackle. My simple "app" that's a nuclear risk calculator for the conflict is found here: https://app.hex.tech/399c4a29-5b7f-4f70-8b53-afa8da38dd72/app/def94910-d017-4508-847c-e1189d3b6042/latest I think I have much to learn from how you broke down the question...mine was a more a deterministic path of how nuclear war would occur.
Hey, thanks for the comment, and for sharing your app!