The big picture is usually made up of lots of small ones
Forgot to add this into my post yesterday. Found it irritating.
Bostrom expressed dismay at how little research has been done on serious threats to humanity, writing: "There is more scholarly work on the life-habits of the dung fly than on existential risks."
There are lots of reasons for that, one of which is surely the disaster equivalent of being prepared for the previous war rather than the one that actually happens.
But also:
Not just because there may be ongoing, non-catastrophic, ills to humanity the prevention of which is served by studying dung-flies;
And not just out of envisaging a 1950s B-movie scenario of huge mutated dung-flies menacing humanity;
It strikes me as altogether likely that the clue to dealing with a major disaster will be something as unglamorous as the lifecycle of the dung-fly that some negelected scientist has been plugging away in obscurity, enlivened by occasional mockery about the pointlessness of what they are doing.
('Stop mucking around with that mould, Fleming, and get on with something useful.')
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