Victor Yakovenko, University of Maryland By analogy with the probability distribution of energy in statistical physics, I argue that the probability distribution of money in a closed economic system sh, Reviews of Modern Physics 81, 1703 (2009), New Journal of Physics 12, 075032 (2010).  This work is currently supported by the Institute for New Economic Thinking,

Overheating. Understanding accelerated change. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. ABSTRACTThe contemporary world is … too full? Too intense? All of the above, and more. Ours is a world of high-speed modernity where exponential growth can be found in domains as different as the number of cellphones in Africa and the number of international tourist arrivals. The fossil fuel revolution two centuries ago led to the contemporary ‘overheated’ world of exponential growth. The main dilemma of this overheated world is the insight that what was the salvation for humanity for two hundred years, namely fossil fuels, has rapidly become our damnation owing to climate change. This lecture outlines the parameters of ‘overheating’ and describes the main global challenges for our century.

Existential risks are those risks that threaten the entire future of humanity - not just the present generation, but all future generations. Despite their importance, issues surrounding human extincti

Working paper series 2021:1-10 Joe Roussos & Paul Bowman (eds) This volume comprises the third collection of working papers by researchers within the program Climate ethics and future generations.Th

in: Weighing and Reasoning. Themes from the Philosophy of John Broome, Eds.Iwao Hirose and Andrew Reisner, Oxford University Press. The person affecting restriction states that one outcome can only be

Bayesian and non-Bayesian epistemic attitudes and existential risk

In this talk Olle Häggström will sketch and contrast two different epistemic attitudes that roughly correspond to Bayesianism and Popperian falsificationism. He will argue that they both have virtues

Maria Ojala is Associate Professor (docent) in psychology at Örebro University. Her research interest mainly concerns how young people think, feel, act, cope, learn and communicate about climate chang

Olle Häggströmis professor of mathematical statistics at Chalmers University of Technology, researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies and a board member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University ABSTRACTHow likely is humanity to be severely damaged by a global disaster, or go extinct? How bad would it be? This talk will review wo

Philosophical Studies Abstract In her ground-breaking and highly influential book Transformative Experience, L.A. Paul makes two claims: (1) one cannot evaluate and compare certain experiential outcomes  evaluate and compare certain intuitively horrible outcomes (e.g. being eaten alive by sharks) as bad and worse than certain other outcomes even if one cannot grasp what these intuitively horrible outcomes are like. We argue that the conjunction of these two claims leads to an implausible discontinuity in the evaluability of outcomes. One implication of positing such a discontinuity is that evaluative comparisons of outcomes will not be proportionally sensitive to variation in the underlying features of these outcomes. This puts pressure on Paul to abandon either (1) or (2). But (1) is central to her view and (2) is very hard to deny. We call this the Shark Problem.