I've seen this paper: The effects of communicating uncertainty around statistics, on public trust. I thought its findings may be extensible for communicating uncertainty around not-statistics, so potentially useful for the community.
I just read an interview with Roberto Saviano (author of the book Gomorrah in which he denounced the organised crime in Italy) in which he says that his quest against the mafia has destroyed his life, not only he needs protection 24/7, he feels very alone. In his new book he explains the problems that the judge Giovanni Falcone run into because of his fight against the mafia, that led to his death. So, Salviano is now in "selling mode" in precisely this topic, but still, it made me think that making the life of whistle blowers and the like (like him or eve...
I write only as user, I don't have any further knowledge but I have never seen it. There are the hair dressers that collaborate with "whip organisations" but as far as I know, they only collect the hair of the people who want to donate it.
In general, I don't think it is very common that people want to cut >20cm of hair in one go, and it makes the hair dresser's work somehow less natural, as they usually don't cut all hair at once (i.e. make a ponytail and cut it). Maybe those collaborating hair dresses would ask a customer who wants to cut their hair in one go if they may donate it?
I forgot to ask you who are those "degrowthers" that you refer to. I never came across them. Could you please give me a couple of names?
GDP contraction (=somebody's income contraction)
This is obvious. And, again, the point is that the relationship between GDP and social outcomes after some point breaks down or becomes irrelevant.
Many things can lead to degrowth, and some could be necesary. What I point out is that degrowth is allwayws a negative side consequence. You do not plan for it, you suffer it (the less, the better).
It seems strange to argue in favour of not planning for a negative consequence of something that may be necessary.
Has anyone, to your knowledge, assessed the chances that an energy descent ("Most Underrated EA Forum Post in 2022") poses a significant global catastrophic risk? If not, who should look into that? If yes, what were the outcomes and how do/should they change EA's priorities?
One thing I forgot to mention: a substantial carbon tax that accounts for its externalities would be a policy like the ones you describe and would most likely lead to, at least temporary, degrowth.
It looks that income matters in the US, but then it does not matter across countries…
Well, this is the whole point. Some ways to organise countries achieve better social outcomes without the need of better GDP. You don't have Bulgaria and Denmark in each US city in this sense, which is the sense that counts in this conversation.
But you cannot separate material and non material prosperity.
This is not what degrowthers claim and it is not what I claimed: "*Past a certain point*, the relationship between GDP and social outcomes breaks down *or becomes irreleva...
Thanks. I'll try to take a look at the paper (at some point). The issue of comparing bads (effects of ecological collapse vs effects of full degrowth) still stands, though.
I do remember that we tweeted about this (and it made me blush that you too remember). I just want to read something longer than just a tweet. At the time I couldn't find any paper.
Sorry, the claim "UK basically do not have enough land to produce the energy they'd need"... misses "with solar".
According ESO, in 2022 the UK renewals mix was Wind - 26.8%, Biomass - 5.2%, Solar - 4.4%, Hydro - 1.8%, less than 40%. And wind is roughly half-half regarding on- and off-shore. Many countries are not big islands, or are more or less close to the equator, or have a lot of land. Really hard to scale.
EROI: low but acceptable EROI + storage + need to overinstall = pretty bad effective EROI. And EROI is not all that counts, of course.
While ta...
I really have not come across academic "degrowthers" that claim that we need to have fewer people or less prosperity (Kallis, Hickel, Raworth, Jackson, Van den bergh). In any case, in the post I deliberately spoke about to "degrowth the economy in rich countries", not about degrowth in general or (any group of) degrowthers to try avoid these kinds of misunderstandings.
From the post: "economic degrowth in rich countries". From your quote: "global negative growth".
But in any case this is irrelevant if the ecological collapse that some argue about has worse global effects.
I don't find "Spain's life expectancy is 5 years longer than that of USA's" to be subjective. Do you?
You are Spanish. Spain's GDP per capita is much lower than that in the USA, yet Spain's life expectancy is 5 years longer than that of USA's and Spain outperforms USA in many other social indicators. There's much more than GDP in prosperity. Past a certain point, the relationship between GDP and social outcomes breaks down *or becomes irrelevant*, at least for many indicators.
Do you have some references for this? Is the claim more that EA hasn't seen the degrowth arguments at all, or that it has and has dismissed them unjustifiably (in your opinion)?
I don't have references but, for example searching for the term Degrowth in the forum only returns 22 results. The claim is a bit of both, but more that EA has dismissed them unjustifiably. And I partly understand it because the term degrowth is very misleading.
That the world is getting better in some senses and worse in some others I think it is nothing anyone in either side disput...
The issue is not only climate change, here. We are in dangerous territory for most of the planetary boundaries.
AI presents large existential risk in my mind
One of the points is that EAs do not seem to engage with large close-to-existential risks in the minds of degrowthers and the like. It is true that they do not have fleshed out to what extent their fears are existential, but this is because they are large enough for worrying them. See "Is this risk actually existential?" may be less important than we think.
I like your second point. But still, even if it...
One can say the same about intelligence:
a) Intelligence growth is intrinsically "good" (it expands human possibility space-> improve individual welfare for each person with more possibilities->increase total welfare for the society)
b) If intelligence growth has downsides, the downsides have to be addressed at the minimum cost.
If I understood you well, yes, I disagree. EAs at large basically do not enter the degrowth debate. They act a bit like LeCuns of the degrowth debate, sort to say.
Maybe what I mean is more meta than what you are referring to?
EAs complain that many people just disregard the dangers of AI by saying something in the lines of "AI development is good and stopping it is anyway impossible", or "we will manage the issues", etc. And what I mean is that EAs do/have done the same kind of things with growth.
(which I've discussed on this forum before!)
Could you link to the post, please? I tried to quickly find it but failed... (I found other very good looking posts, though!)
I explicitly said that I do not have the time to write a good post and that I rather post this so that people discuss.
Incidentally, I read the Vox article long ago when it came out but I did not know that the writer is EA. I don't remember much of it now, but maybe the answers from Kallis and Hickel (I'm not a fan of his) suffice to show that the article may not be as good as you think.
I will try to read the forum post soon -maybe I have done it in the past and I just don't remember.
Actually, thanks to this commentary I have found an inteesting post ...
ignoring the fact that energy can be plentiful with solar and other renewable sources.
But can it? and with what consequences? The EROI (Energy Return On energy Investment) of solar and wind are not great (wind better than solar), they are very resource-intensive, they need storage (effectively making their EROI lower and their resource-intensivity larger) and there needs to be over-capacity of production. In addition, they use space, a lot of it if we want to produce most of the energy demand with them -AFAIK, eg. UK basically do not have enough land to pr...
A recent project looking into those sort of things in the context of Europe is the MEDEAS project.
For the French speaking around here, Jean-Marc Jancovici has a lot of material in French in his lessons at the Ecole des Mines. I have only seen a couple of his talks which happened to be in English.
Hagens has an online course, Reality 101, which I found really good. I find his podcast too "sentimental".
the central claim, that we need to have fewer goods, fewer people, and less prosperity, isn't really worth debate.
As far as I understand it this is not what they claim. Particularly "fewer people", I am sure they do not claim this. And prosperity either. Prosperity without growth is a classic book.
There may be some people who claim this, they may use the term degrowth, but they are not the "serious" degrowthers. And I find the term Degrowth really misleading. Some use the terms a-growth, post-growth, growth agnostics. I should probably have been more expli...
Almost the entire question, for resolving either of these issues, is working out whether these premises are really true or not
Exactly. What I try to point to is that EA as movement has not engaged in working out whether degrowth is desirable or not. I don't say anything about the conclusions --in part because I myself am not clear. I actually believe it is extremely difficult to get a clear answer so I would expect a lot of nuance.
Julia Nefsky is giving a research seminar in the Institute for Futures Studies titled "Expected utility, the pond analogy and imperfect duties", which sounds interesting for the community. It will be on September 27 at 10:00-11:45 (CEST) and can be attended for free in person or online (via zoom). You can find the abstract here and register here.
I don't know Julia or her work and I'm not philosopher, so I cannot directly assess the expected quality of the seminar, but I've seen several seminars from the Institute for Futures Studies that where very good (e...
Ok, thanks. Edited to add an approx min length and that whips are expensive. I didn't state any specific length because the minimum depends on the organisation, but yes, a guideline is good. More than that... there is actually nothing. It is super easy to do and it is common sense that many people who don't have hair because of cancer are really not comfortable with this, and specially for children this makes them stand out and be an easy target for jokes and comments. For those that struggle with money, this is very valuable —at an almost negligible cost ...
Besides the general and deep reasons to avoid EA communities to become silos, thinking this would be a bit myopic, since plenty of people noticed red flags about SBF and nothing happened nonetheless.
My social life is pretty much only people who aren't in the EA community at this point.
Super! :-D
I think I would also agree regarding the community building organisations. I haven't really thought about that case, but it intuitively makes sense.
I'm sad that such events are often needed to make some common sense ideas arise, but I am very happy that they nonetheless arose!
Some particular comments:
if someone who might feel ‘on your side’ appears to be doing unusually well, try to increase scrutiny rather than reduce it
Yes! This is general. Mostly everyone is interested that their side is "good". Taking shortcuts, low moral standards, etc. help doing particularly well, so one needs to be particularly careful with those people.
...we should be skeptical about the idea that EAs have better jud
Measure growth from peak-to-peak or trough-to-trough rather than trough-to-peak – I knew crypto was in a huge bull market
What does this mean?
Why is gender separated into "men" and "non-men"? I find it very weird but I guess there is a reason. Is something like "men", "women", "other" not optimal for any reason? If so, is there a reason to keep "men" instead of "women"?
Here’s a video that gives you a decent overview of the author’s approach
Very interesting! (Although I think, at least for people living in Europe, not too surprising). But I deeply hated his Florida's-car-seller-from-the-80's style of speaking. The worse is that I will listen to it again because I was not too focused on it!
BTW, you made me buy a Roomba... It never crossed my mind I could buy it second hand :-)
Do you have any quote from someone who says we shouldn't care about catastrophic risks at all?
I'm not saying this. And I really don't see how you came to think I do.
The only thing I say is that I don't see how anyone would argue that humanity should devote less effort to mitigate a given risk just because it turns out that it is not actually existential even though it may be more than catastrophic. Therefore, finding out if a risk is actually existential or not is not really valuable.
I'm not saying anything new here, I made this point several times above. Maybe it is not very clearly done, but I don't really know how to state it differently.
Let's speak about humanity in general and not about EAs, cause where EA focus does not only depend on the degree of the risk.
Yes, I don't think humanity should currently devote less efforts to prevent such risks than x-risks. Probably the point is that we are doing way too less to tackle dangerous non-immediate risks in general, so it does not make any practical difference whether the risk is existential or only almost existential. And this point of view does not seem controversial at all, it is just not explicitly stated. It is not just not-EAs that are devoting a lot of effort to prevent climate change, an increasing fraction of EAs do as well.
Exactly. Even if the ant path may not be permanent, ie. if we could climb out of it.
My point is that, in terms of the effort I would like humanity to devote to minimise this risk, I don't think it makes any difference whether the ant state is strictly permanent or we could eventually get out of it. Maybe if it were guaranteed to get out of it or even "only" very likely that we could get out of this ant state I could understand devoting less effort in mitigating this risk than if we'd think the AGI will eliminate us (or the ant state would be unescapable).
If we agree on this, the fact that a risk is actually existential or not is in practice close to irrelevant.
Even if we think we eventually could climb out of our 'ant state' to a state with more potential for humanity...
;-)
[I just quickly listened to the post and I'm not philosopher, nor I know deeply about Ergodicity Economics]
Maybe Ergodicity Economics (EE) [site, wikipedia] could be relevant here? It is relevant for the St. Petersburg experiment. It has to do with expected values of stochastic processes not being equal to their time averages (ensemble average ≠ time average).
I am sure there is much more to EE than this, but the one insight that I took from it when I got to know about EE is that when one of the outcomes of the game is to lose everything, expected val...
Thanks for the answer. I was referring to 2. I thought it was something we'll established. But I think I was so convinced of it because I did not think much about and I probably conflated it with 1 as well.
Similar to what Brad says, posts not in line with EA mainstream, or just exploring or giving ideas, or not written in EA-style, or drafty are often down-voted very early on without engaging in discussion or giving any reason for the down-vote.
Even though forum moderators try to engage people to write even if the post is not perfectly polished or thought through --most people are very busy!-- to incentivize exchange of ideas, the dynamics of the forum make it basically useless as such posts are usually very quickly hidden. It often feels useless to write an... (read more)