Survival and Flourishing Fund Grant

GCRI has been awarded a $60,000 grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF), a new donor-advised fund held at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. SFF’s goal is “to bring financial support to organizations working to improve humanity’s long-term prospects for survival and flourishing”. GCRI is grateful for SFF’s support of our work.

Risk and Decision Analysis

GCRI Executive Director Seth Baum has an article on “The Challenge of Analyzing Global Catastrophic Risks” in the July issue of Decision Analysis Today. The article describes three cases in which quantifying global catastrophic risks is important in evaluating tradeoffs or allocating scarce resources: nuclear disarmament, nuclear power, and the launch of advanced AI. Baum was invited to write the paper by the Decision Analysis Society, which is one of the leading academic and professional societies for risk and decision analysis.

End Times Book Review

GCRI Executive Director Seth Baum reviewed Bryan Walsh’s new book End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World for Science. Baum calls End Times is “a highly readable account of the field of global catastrophic risk as it is currently constituted”. He writes that the book raises two key questions that deserve more attention: 1) what makes people take risks seriously? and 2) what can be done if people are not motivated to pay attention to warnings about risk? Baum and GCRI Director of Communications Robert de Neufville were interviewed for and are mentioned in End Times.

Speaking Engagements

GCRI Executive Director Seth Baum is giving a talk on global catastrophic risks and answering questions at a public event sponsored by Effective Altruism Pennsylvania and Penn Effective Altruism at the University of Pennsylvania on Sunday, October 27.