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.
Interesting, are you concerned that in a full-scale nuclear war that most places in the northern hemisphere would be unsafe due to military targets outside the cities and fallout?
What do you think about this Q&A on Quora about where it would be safest in the event of a nuclear war? Most of the suggested safe locations are in the southern hemisphere like New Zealand.
Most of the Quora discussion seems reasonable for the safest locations. But it is a pretty big sacrifice to change countries just because of the threat of nuclear war. So I am looking at lower cost options. Also, being outside the target countries even in the northern hemisphere would generally not be too bad because the radiation largely rains out within a few days. And even within the target countries if you are not hit by the blast/fire, you're most likely to survive. I believe the radiation exposure would be lower than Chernobyl, which took about one year of life off the people nearby.