Ord's one in six is not a forecast of our fate, it is a forecast that already includes us trying. He says plainly that had he assumed business as usual his estimates would have been substantially higher, and that he made allowances for humanity responding to escalating risk with substantial effort. His own suggestion is that the honest headline is not the one in six he expects to remain but two in six, the difference between a lacklustre effort and a heroic one. So the quantity human effort moves this century is roughly one sixth of everything, and the most quoted number in the field is routinely read as a prediction when it is a conditional.

Evidence 1 passage

• groundsUntitled source

  made allowances for the fact that we will likely respond to the escalating risks with substantial efforts to reduce them. The numbers therefore represent my actual best guess of the chance the threats materialize, taking our responses into account. If we outperform my expectations, we could bring the remaining risk down below these estimates. Perhaps one could say that we were heading towards a Russian roulette with two bullets in the gun, but that I think we will remove one of these before it's time to pull the trigger. And there might just be time to remove the last one too, if we really try. So perhaps the headline number should not be the amount of risk I expect to remain, about 1 in 6, but 2 in 6. The difference in existential risk betwe

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