# Black Elephants (CCCR2018) - CSER > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [207]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: document (Web page), 2019-04-17 (publication data), https://www.cser.ac.uk/work/black-elephants-cccr2018/. Text: document text - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Black elephant risk thinking taken up by others. - Career works it belongs to: - Taming Black Elephants (2017): Singapore's former civil service head took up the black elephant idea in a lecture series and book. - The Living City (2009): A Buttered Side Down talk to the engineering firm Arup, with Mike Bennett: how cities learned to beat... (suggested by machine) - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (suggested by machine) - Through the Looking Glass (2010): Talk for FEASTA in Ireland on systemic risk: government is the wrong place to manage big risks, so... (suggested by machine) - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine) - Blind in the Panopticon: The decreasing marginal utility of access to information as an aspect of cyber policy (2012): Cyber policy essay: past a point, more surveillance data has negative value, because a state can collect... (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - black elephant: The black elephant term, from its naming to a Singapore lecture series. - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine) - cyber and defense: Security work for defense clients, built on one idea: set rivals to check each other. Resilience and Opportunity in... (through a work suggested by machine) - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine) - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine) - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans. (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: Black elephants, complexity & Singapore (100%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Peter Ho (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2015) - Importance: core-text score 0.07 (1.00 is the top), number 652 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [208] [Taming Black Elephants (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/208.md): same career work: Taming Black Elephants - [157] [The Black Elephant Challenge for Governments | IPS Commons (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/157.md): same career work: Taming Black Elephants - On the same works, just before: [616] Anja Blaj - Internet of Agreements - Space (2018); [707] [Vinay Gupta & Marleen Stikker discuss the future of... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/707.md); [676] [Vinay Gupta on Blockchain, Biotech and Consciousness - E43 (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/676.md) - On the same works, just after: [692] [Vinay Gupta:From Global Resilience to Practical... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/692.md); [257] [Vinay Gupta - Oslo Blockchain Day - Merging the Physical... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/257.md); [747] [Startup Societies Podcast - Episode 34 - Vinay Gupta (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/747.md) ## Reading it Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it. Cite as: Black Elephants (CCCR2018) - CSER, document, 2019-04-17, https://www.cser.ac.uk/work/black-elephants-cccr2018/; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [207], https://guptaoption.com/texts/207.md. ## Passages [passage 1](https://www.cser.ac.uk/work/black-elephants-cccr2018/) Peter Ho is the Senior Advisor to the Centre for Strategic Futures, a Senior Fellow in the Civil Service College, and a Visiting Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He was previously Head of the Singaporean Civil Service. Mr Ho argued that we face many big dangers, with many of them hiding in plain view. But few are aware of the risks that they pose, and even fewer will take action to mitigate them. The reasons why are centred on our cognitive biases or blind spots. Risk is ultimately a social construct. As a social construct, understanding what that risk is, agreeing on the degree of risk, and then communicating that risk to the organisation and its people is essential. This talk was given at 2018’s Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk ( CCCR2018 ), the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk’s major international conference, supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. It focused on four challenges faced by research communities focused on existential and global catastrophic risk research: Challenges of Evaluation and Impact; Challenges of Evidence; Challenges of Scope and Focus; and Challenges in Communication. Display content from YouTube Click here to display content from YouTube. Learn more in YouTube’s privacy policy (opens in a new tab) . Always display content from YouTube --- End of [207] Black Elephants (CCCR2018) - CSER. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [692](https://guptaoption.com/texts/692.md) Vinay Gupta:From Global Resilience to Practical... (2019); the most closely related, [208](https://guptaoption.com/texts/208.md) Taming Black Elephants (2016); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.