All of Denkenberger's Comments + Replies

Very helpful post!

Cheap energy. Cheap, powerful manufacturing might enable the fabrication of cheap solar cells and cheap batteries that help to overcome intermittency in solar power, leading to very cheap solar power (although, naively, I’m unsure how large an effect this would be given that advanced nanotechnology wouldn’t on the face of it reduce land and labour costs).

If the typical solar cell thickness is 400 µm and a density of 2.3 kg/L and efficiency of 20%, with 1000 W/m2 and $1000/kg, this would be ~$5/W, which is significantly more expensive than... (read more)

Strong upvote. I would guess that another commonality between EAs and conservatives is not tending to resent the rich and their philanthropy, as many on the left do.

I agree that there should be more focus on resilience (thanks for mentioning ALLFED), and I also agree that we need to consider scenarios where leaders do not respond rationally. You may be aware of Toby Ord's discussion of existential risk factors in the Precipice, where he roughly estimates a great power war might increase the total existential risk by 10% (page 176). You say:

What is the multiplying impact factor of climate change on x-risks – compared to a world without climate change?

If forced to guess, considering the effects of climate change, I beli

This is helpful, but there is a key difference between the EA job market and the general one: there are a limited number of positions in EA. I think a valuable metric that perhaps could be explored on the next EA survey is the level of EA “unemployment.” This could mean the number of EAs who would prefer to have a job at an EA aligned organization, but have not gotten one. I suspect this will be far higher than the general level of unemployment. As an example, say there are 50 EAs with a particular skill, and five EA jobs requiring that skill. Then if they... (read more)

I would be interested in what people think qualifies as "great personal sacrifice." Some would say it would mean things like becoming a priest, volunteering for the military during a war, going to prison for something you believe in, etc. The things that many EAs do, such as giving 10% or 50%, being vegetarian or vegan, choosing a lower pay career, relocating to a less preferred city or country, choosing a somewhat less satisfying/prestigious career, or working or volunteering a total of 60 or 70 hours a week (while maintaining good sleep, nutrition, exerc... (read more)

Added: temperature change: FHI cited paper, general impact: A Model for the Impacts of Nuclear War (also cited by FHI) (GCR Institute authors) (also cites Robock) - does not quantify

It looks like you mean FLI, not FHI.

Many people prominent in EA still donate very large percentages, Julia Wise (featured in Strangers Drowning)/Jeff Kaufman 50%, Will MacAskill at least 50%, probably the same for Peter Singer and Toby Ord.

I realize the discussion here is broader than this specific case, but for this specific case, couldn't people have just taken the extra food home so it would not go to waste?

Thanks - good pun!

Each year, there are 30 trillion wild-caught shrimp alone! (Rethink Priorities,^)

I'm not seeing the 30 trillion number in that reference - is there a direct link to the analysis? 4000 shrimp caught per person per year seems high.

To the extent that a short-termist framing views going from 80% to 81% population loss as equally as bad as 99% to 100%, it seems plausible to care less about e.g. refuges to evade pandemics. Other approaches like ALLFED and civilisational resilience work might look less effective on the short-termist framing also. Even if you also place some intrinsic weight on preventing extinction, this might not be enough to make these approaches look cost-effective.

ALLFED-type work is likely highly cost effective from the short-term perspective; see global and country... (read more)

Yes, ALLFED will be there. We have the hydrogen single cell protein, glycerin, and vinegar worked out. This should give us enough time to make a balanced, palatable, vegan diet.

The more weight we place on this goal, probably the less we’d focus on very unlikely but very extreme scenarios (since badness scales roughly linearly in fatality numbers for neartermists, whereas for longtermists I think there’s a larger gap in badness between smaller- and medium-scale and extremely-large-scale nuclear scenarios).

This seems right. Here are my attempts at neartermist analysis for nuclear risks (global and US focused).

Zvi has now put a postscript in the ALLFED section above. We have updated the inadvertent nuclear war fault tree model result based on no nuclear war since the data stopped coming in, and also reduced the annual probability of nuclear war further going forward. And then, so as to not over claim on cost effectiveness, we did not include a correction for non-inadvertent US/Russia nuclear war nor conflict with China. Resilient foods are still highly competitive with AGI safety according to the revised model.

You may be interested in this. I considered some pretty speculative things to prevent or mollify a supervolcanic eruption, but the volume of the stratosphere is so enormous that I think cleaning it would be very challenging.

Thanks for the post.

It seems like it could be a good idea to move part of Allfed to a location more suitable for restarting modern civilisation than Alaska.

Only two members of ALLFED are in Alaska-the rest are other places in the US, UK, Canada, Spain, Germany, Australia, India, and more countries if you count board members and volunteers. But it is still NATO city majority, so we are looking at methods of reducing risk to the team.

Is there compensation for the regrantors?

This paper on the concern of nuclear explosives for asteroid deflection increasing the risk of nuclear war is relevant.

Is it mainly for the for-profit case? For instance, in academia, there is not very much room for salary negotiation, but instead the focus is on the startup package (reduced teaching, lab budget, funding for students, etc).

Also relevant:

https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/paul-christiano-ai-alignment-solutions/ talks about intelligence re-evolving.

Global Catastrophic and Existential Risks Communication Scale different scales of X risk

Surviving global risks through the preservation of humanity's data on the Moon

I agree that filtering is important - the easy thing to do is target the honors colleges (or whatever they call them) within the universities.

Please see my reply to devanshpandey. Also, I edited that I was interested in seeing the math on standard deviations between universities.

Of course we need to prioritize. The Nobel example we have data for, but I think that is too high a bar. My point is that there are probably a similar number of potential EAs at the big relatively high ranking state schools like University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign or University of Texas at Austin as there are at Princeton. The state school students may have lower wealth and political connections, but I think the capability is there (and perhaps less entitlement). (Disclosure: I went to Penn State, Princeton, and University of Colorado at Boulder.)

There are also alternative proteins and resilient foods (ALLFED) for physical engineers.

I am skeptical and would like to see the math on standard deviations. For the US, according to this, about one third of Nobel prizes were awarded to people who did their undergraduate at a non top 100 global university (and I'm pretty sure it would be the majority outside the global top 20 that are in the US). And you don't have to win a Nobel Prize in order to become an EA! So I think there is lots of potential talent for EA outside the global top 100, at least at the undergraduate level. A key factor here is size - many of the most elite schools are not ... (read more)

Thanks!

https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jeborg/v85y2013icp1-10.htmlhttps://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jeborg/v85y2013icp1-10.html is 404ing for me.

The substantive complaint was that they [ALLFED] did an invalid calculation when calculating the annual probability of nuclear war. They did a survey to establish a range of probabilities, then they averaged them. One could argue about what kinds of ‘average them’ moves work for the first year, but over time the lack of a nuclear war is Bayesian evidence in favor of lower probabilities and against higher probabilities. It’s incorrect to not adjust for this, and the complaint was not merely the error, but that the error was pointed out and not corrected.

Tl;... (read more)

P2O5 is 44% phosphorus by mass. Wiki:

Unprocessed phosphate rock has a concentration of 1.7-8.7% phosphorus by mass (4-20% phosphorus pentoxide).

In 2021, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimated that economically extractable phosphate rock reserves worldwide are 71 billion tons, while world mining production in 2020 was 223 million tons.^[5] Assuming zero growth, the reserves would thus last for 260 years. 

So I think reserves are in phosphate rock, so you need to have production/consumption in terms of phosphate rock, not in terms of P2O5. T... (read more)

I agree overall, but Wikipedia says the USGS says that 223 million tons of phosphate rock are mined per year, so 260 years of reserves.

Relevant:

Where Are the Pro-Life Utilitarians?

There are already upward convection currents of warm moist air over the ocean, at least during the day (these turn off at night over land, but I'm not sure about over the ocean). These would go up to the top of the atmospheric boundary layer (~1 km up). So are you saying these waterspouts would somehow penetrate the top of the atmospheric boundary layer or work at night?

ALLFED has nearly completed our prioritization, and given the amount of commercialization that has already been done on resilient foods, we think we are ready to partner with other companies to do piloting of the most promising solutions in a way that is valuable for global catastrophes (e.g. very fast construction). Repurposing a paper mill for sugar (and protein if the feedstock is agricultural residues) is a good large project. But there is also fast construction of pilot scale of natural gas (methane) single cell protein and the fast construction of pi... (read more)

Ok, so we agree that having $1 billion is better despite diminishing returns. So I still don't understand this statement:

When EA was more funding constrained, a $1M grant with 10X ROI looked better than a $1B grant with 5x ROI

Are you saying that in 2011, we would have preferred $1M over $1B? Or does "look better" just refer to the benefit to cost ratio?

So it's like a benefit to cost ratio. So I can see with diminishing returns to more money, the benefit to cost ratio could be half. So with $1 million in the early days of EA, we could have $10 million of impact. But now that we have $1 billion, we can have $5 billion of impact. It seems like the latter scenario is still much better. Am I missing something?

The point I’m trying to get across is that earning to give to top EA causes is still perhaps (to use made-up numbers) in the 98th percentile of impactful things you might do; while these things might be, say, 99.5-99.9th percentile.

I think this is a very useful way of putting it. I would be interested in anyone trying to actually quantify this (even to just get the right order of magnitude from the top). I suspect you have already done something in this direction when you decide what jobs to list on your job board.

There's some tradeoff curve between cost-effectiveness and scale. When EA was more funding constrained, a $1M grant with 10X ROI looked better than a $1B grant with 5x ROI, but now the reverse is true.

Could you explain what you mean by 10X ROI?

Very interesting! Could you say how open you think they are to planning for global catastrophic risks?

If you want to donate to ALLFED, please donate to Players Philanthropy Fund (our fiscal sponsor). I will update here with specific instructions as the donation step is not urgent.

This could be true for other charities under sponsorship.

I think overall adaptation is more neglected than mitigation. There is quite a bit of work on drought and heat tolerant crops. However, there is very little work on scenarios of abrupt climate change, such as the shutdown of the thermohaline circulation that could cause abrupt cooling in Europe (and has in the past). There is also very little work on backup plans for extreme weather on multiple continents causing a multiple breadbasket failure. And there is very little work on adaption to extreme climate change that occurs slowly (over a century). ALLFED is trying to fill these gaps.

I will donate to a charity of anyone's choice if you donate to ALLFED. This is where I have donated so far. Please message me through the forum.

Very interesting! I am curious as to whether there are any estimates of how much these losses could be reduced quickly, e.g. within a year for a catastrophe.

I’m glad you included cost effectiveness estimates.

representing a return on investment of 1:11, compared to 1:32 for generic agricultural research investments.

These appear to be cost to benefit ratios, rather than ROI, which is percent return per year. With cost to benefit ratios, listing the discount rate would be helpful.

One of the authors here - yes there is risk trying to prevent an eruption. Lower risk and providing protection against many other catastrophes than volcanic is preparing to scale up resilient foods quickly. It is also more cost effective.

this seems to have involved waves of escalating and de-escalating average concern with very high variance in individual concern and action in which purportedly some people have continued to favor more incaution to their graves, and others have seemingly died of caution.

How have people died of caution?

??? other tech alternatives

Protein from seaweed (which GFI is now interested in), methane consuming single cell protein, hydrogen consuming single cell protein, leaf protein concentrate, and maybe even electrically powered single cell protein, though it looks like they are better at producing vinegar than protein.

From the same reference, twelve out of 16 times that there has been a switch in which is the most militarily powerful country in the world, there has been war (though one should not take that literally for the current situation). China will likely become the most powerful (economically at least) in the next few decades, unless the US allows a lot more immigration.

They have started work, but I'm not aware of any publications yet.