What's this about?
Anders Sandberg recommended a paper as essential reading for anyone interested in civilisation-scale preparedness. Mollick pulled out the line that made it circulate: "Australia shows resilience across the widest range of GCR scenarios in the literature we reviewed" — filed under "Mad Max was right, I guess."
What exactly is a "GCR"?
Global catastrophic risk — events severe enough to threaten civilisation's functioning rather than just cause large-scale harm. The research asks a specific question: given some disruption, which places retain the ability to feed themselves, keep infrastructure running and rebuild? Islands with large agricultural surpluses and few land borders score well, which is how Australia ends up on top.
What's the community saying?
189 and 117 likes
- The Mad Max joke is most of the visible reaction, and is why the finding travelled at all.
- The substantive interest is in methodology — what counts as resilience, and how you compare scenarios that share almost no assumptions.
- It reads as an odd tonal fit for a day dominated by agent-security news, which several people noted with some dark humour.