Hello Fellow Forecasters,

My name is Michael Aird and I am a Community Shaper for the Nuclear Risk Forecasting Tournament, which means that I'll have moderator powers on the forecasting questions within it, and I'll be here to hopefully point forecasters in the direction of helpful resources as the tournament unfolds.

I’m a Staff Researcher at [Rethink Priorities](https://www.rethinkpriorities.org/), a think tank associated with the effective altruism community, and a Research Scholar at the [Future of Humanity Institute](https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/) at Oxford University. In both roles, I try to do whatever will best improve the long-term future for sentient life in our universe. This typically means trying to (a) improve our understanding of the probabilities of various different existential catastrophes, how tractable reducing those probabilities is, and what the best interventions for doing that are, and (b) help decision-makers act on that information.

Which leads us to this tournament! For decades, many people have worried nuclear conflict would break out and, if so, cause the collapse of civilization or even the end of life on Earth. But how likely is a nuclear conflict? How many warheads would be used, against what targets, by what countries? How large would the climate effects and resulting famine be? 

And what can we do about all this? What new policies, treaties, changes in arsenals, and so forth do we want? How achievable are those changes, and what are the best actions for achieving them? Should we be telling people who care about the long-term future to change their donation decisions, career decisions, voting decisions, and so on in light of that? Or should these people focus their limited resources more on [threats that may be even larger or more easily reducible](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/2568/ragnar%25C3%25B6k-seriesresults-so-far/)? 

Unfortunately, I don’t know! But that’s what my current research and this tournament both aim to provide more clarity on. And I’m excited about what will be made possible by running that research and this tournament side-by-side. For example, forecasts, comments, and essays produced for this tournament will likely (a) inform research topic choices of me or people I work with and (b) inform or be directly included in our research outputs and shared with decision-makers. And I’ll likely share my outputs, maybe my drafts, and other resources with the forecasting community, and also just jump into discussions and see what I and the community can learn from each other. 

My role here on Metaculus as a Community Shaper also includes providing clarifications and information sources when Nuclear Risk Forecasting Tournament participants have questions, assisting with the creation of new questions for the next tournament round, and generally being a resource in whatever ways I can. I’ll help ensure that the questions are clearly communicated to everyone fairly, and that questions are interpreted, edited, and resolved in a way which maintains the spirit of the question. 

I’m happy to speak with anyone about any of the questions in this tournament or about nuclear risk or existential risk in general. My username is MichaelA and I can be reached at michaeljamesaird@gmail.com. 

I’m excited to be a part of this effort to guide decisions on these critical issues and to help humanity navigate towards a flourishing future.

Happy forecasting!

Michael