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Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
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Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
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I find it disappointing they reference nuclear winter without qualifying that it is quite unlikely given today's arsenals. I would reccomend against sharing it in it's current state.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pMsnCieusmYqGW26W/how-bad-would-nuclear-winter-caused-by-a-us-russia-nuclear
But that analysis by Luisa Rodriguez still predicts a fairly bad nuclear autumn that could kill roughly 30 to 90% of humanity.
Agreed - I do not mean to imply nuclear holocaust would not be horrible.
I do not think the FLI should cherry pick extraordinarily high numbers to make that case though, and them doing so/us sharing them doing so eats away at our epistemic commons.
I'd really rather not show that video to a well informed friend as they'd go "Wait, but I know that's wrong" and then discount other things I say about X-Risk.
Fair point. I guess the key problem is the lamentable lack of research on nuclear winter compared to other possible forms of climate change.
Google Scholar for example shows only 14,900 entries for "nuclear winter", versus 2.6 million for 'global warming', and 3 million for 'climate change'.
So, we've got roughly 375 times as much research on global warming as on nuclear winter.