Ah okay get it. Have you considered asking those on Metaculus? Maybe you could get a rough ballpark there. But I am not aware of anything like this in peer reviewed research. 

Hey Vasco. Haven't seen anything like this. But are talking about a probability estimates across all GCRs at once? My guess would be that the uncertainties would be so large, that it would not really tell you anything. 

Now that this paper is finally published, it feels a bit like a requiem to the field. Every non-AI GCR researcher I talked to in the last year or so is quite concerned about the future of the field. A large chunk of all GCR funding now goes to AI, leaving existing GCR orgs without any money. For example, ALLFED is having to cut a large part of their programs (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/K7hPmcaf2xEZ6F4kR/allfed-emergency-appeal-help-us-raise-usd800-000-to-avoid-1), even though pretty much everyone seems to agree that ALLFED is doing good work and should continue to exist. 

I think funders like Open Phil or the Survival and Flourishing Fund should strongly consider putting more money into non-AI GCR research again. I get that many people think that AI risk is very imminent, but I don't think that this justifies to leave the rest of GCR research dying on the vine. It would be quite a bad outcome if in five years AI risk did not materialize, but most of the non-AI GCR orgs have ceased to exist, as all of the funding dried up. 

Thanks for the explanation. 

Yeah I tried Connected Papers, as well das Research Rabbit, but somehow they never turn out to be super helpful. Do you have a specific strategy when you use them?

Could you elaborate what you mean with 2) ? What reference manager are you using?

What was the criticism of the university? I would have been pretty happy if my bachelor students would have been able to cobble something like this together. 

Yes I think posting it on a preprint server would be worth your time. As long as this stays an EA Forum post or a thesis hidden in a university archive no one can take a look at it. If you put it on a preprint server other people can find and reference it, if they find it helpful. Worst case that can happen is that nobody will built on it, but also the cost of putting it on a preprint server are essentially zero and if it stays an EA Forum post that chances that somebody uses this are much lower. 

Pretty interesting stuff. If these are your "rough drafts" then your polished papers must be wild. 

Have you considered putting this on a preprint server (e.g. https://eartharxiv.org/), so others can properly cite it? 

Also, you might want to use another projection for your maps. I found that Winkel Triple works better if you want to display such global indices. 

Hadn't thought of that, but yeah that does indeed sound like another large problem. I hope that everything turns out well for your project in the end!

Thank you!

For Figure 3 you have to keep in mind that this is biomass. This does not necessarily mean it could be eaten, as it also includes things like crop residues, which probably make up a good chunk of that arrow. 

The paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X16302384?via%3Dihub) also includes some other interesting plots, but unfortunately not the ones you would like to see. 

Given the results from Wand and Hoyer, I would expect it to just take time. It seems a pretty consistent pattern that many civilizations increase in complexity over time once they have adapted agriculture. Their scale-up takes around 2500 years and then plateaus. Also many of those complexity developments happened completely independently, e.g. China, the Incas and Egypt.