The effective altruism movement needs to be disaster resistant. That requires information we can use to put probabilities on potential problems that have severe consequences. Even a small chance of a large disruption to organisations that are saving so many lives is worth some of my hours. Therefore, I've been gathering information on the probability of war in America and the UK to see whether that probability is small or not. I've been asking around and haven't found anyone else in EA who has collected the available data on this so far.
If you or anyone you know has related information or projects, let's not duplicate each other's work. Let's collaborate!
To check out the project or exchange contact info, please send me a PM.
Edit Two: I now suspect that the audience on this website expects the content to be more like a publication than a message board. I think they want posts to resemble something between a finished blog article and a study. I think I was confused because I'm used to the word "forum" describing an Internet discussion forum, which is much more casual. If I still don't quite seem to get it, I'd appreciate an explanation. I need to find out whether anyone else has done similar projects and locate collaborators who may have information sources I'm not aware of. If you think there's a way to present something that's in progress for the purpose of finding existing projects and collaborators, I'd like to know how to present it. Thanks.
Edit One: I removed anything from this post that could give people the idea that I should be supplying data as it's way too early to share my work at this stage. I'm looking for anyone who has already made progress on this or similar projects to be sure I don't duplicate the work. I've been taking time away from doing more freelance work to research this because this project is not yet funded. I don't want to waste a bunch of time duplicating work that might already be out there.
I like this one. If you plan to do good in an uncertain future, it makes sense to take advantage of altruism's risk neutrality and put a lot of effort into scenarios that are reasonably likely but also favour your own impact.
In the event of a major disruption or catastrophe such as a war or negative political event in the EA heartland, this would mean that global health work would suddenly become pretty useless - no-one would have the will or means to help distant (in space) people. But we would suddenly have much more leverage to help people who are distant in time, by trying to positively affect any recovery of civilisation. That could be by making it happen sooner, or by giving it some form of aid that is cheap for us. Robust preservation of information is a good idea. If there were a major disaster that destroyed the internet and most servers, and then a long period of civilisational downtime, it might make sense to try and save and distribute key information, for example Wikipedia, the, certain key books, sites, courses, etc.
There might also be attempts to distort history in a very thorough way. Perhaps steps can be taken against this.