Do You See Pads Forward to Doing Better Next Time?

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As a politician, i've been thinking a lot about how you get ahead of disinformation. In some ways, you want to inoculate people against the hoaxers before they come. Once a hoax has taken root in people's mind, it's quite hard to dislodge it. So as the overall australian vaccination rade is good, the rate in indigenous communities is bad. And that's just a microcosm with the overall challenge of dealing with disinformation. We've got to get out there before the bad actors do and warn people of the character of the disinformation messeges that are to come.

We’re pretty well-calibrated when it comes to dealing with common, everyday-level setbacks. But our brains aren’t naturally equipped for dealing with unlikely but world-catastrophic disasters. Yet such threats are real, both natural and human-induced. We need to collectively get better at anticipating and preparing for them, at the level of political action. Andrew Leigh is an academic and author who now serves in the Parliament of Australia. We discuss how to move the conversation about existential risks from the ivory tower to implementation in real policies.

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Andrew Leigh received his Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a member of the Australian House of Representatives representing Fenner. He was previously a professor of economics at Australian National University, and has served as Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury and Charities. His recent book is What’s the Worst That Could Happen? Existential Risk and Extreme Politics.

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