Book Review: The Precipice

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/

I.

It is a well known fact that the gods hate prophets.

False prophets they punish only with ridicule. It’s the true prophets who have to watch out. The gods find some way to make their words come true in the most ironic way possible, the one where knowing the future just makes things worse. The Oracle of Delphi told Croesus he would destroy a great empire, but when he rode out to battle, the empire he destroyed was his own. Zechariah predicted the Israelites would rebel against God; they did so by killing His prophet Zechariah. Jocasta heard a prediction that she would marry her infant son Oedipus, so she left him to die on a mountainside – ensuring neither of them recognized each other when he came of age.

Unfortunately for him, Oxford philosopher Toby Ord is a true prophet. He spent years writing his magnum opus The Precipice, warning that humankind was unprepared for various global disasters like pandemics and economic collapses. You can guess what happened next. His book came out March 3, 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic and economic collapse. He couldn’t go on tour to promote it, on account of the pandemic. Nobody was buying books anyway, on account of the economic collapse. All the newspapers and journals and so on that would usually cover an exciting new book were busy covering the pandemic and economic collapse instead. The score is still gods one zillion, prophets zero. So Ord’s PR person asked me to help spread the word, and here we are.