All of philgoetz's Comments + Replies

You're right. Thanks! It's been so long since I've written conversions of English to predicate logic.

I just posted an explanation of why I think the scenario in my fable is even more intractable than it appears: De Dicto and De Se Reference Matters for Alignment. 

Thank you.  I should have checked this 7 hours ago!  But probably I wouldn't have finished if I had.

I have taken down my entry, though I don't "retract" it.

Does "submitted by September 1st" mean "submitted before Sept 1" or "submitted by the end of Sept 1"?

Why only a few million?  You'll have to kill 9 billion people, and to what purpose?  I don't see any reason to think that the current population of humans wouldn't be infinitely sustainable.  We can supply all the energy we need with nuclear and/or solar power, and that will get us all the fresh water we need; and we already have all the arable land that we need.  There just isn't anything else we need.

Re. "You had mentioned concern about there being no statements of existential threat from climate change. Here's the UN Secretary Genera... (read more)

Thanks!  That's a lot to digest.  Do you know how "government approval" of IPCC reports is implemented, e.g., does any one government have veto power over everything in the report, and is this approval granted by leaders, political appointees, or more-independent committees or organizations?

Re. "Right now, I believe that all renewables are a sideshow, cheap or not, until we grasp that population decline and overall energy consumption decline are the requirements of keeping our planet livable for our current population" -- How does this belief aff... (read more)

I was hoping for an essay about deliberately using nonlinear systems in constructing AI, because they can be more-stable than the most-stable linear systems if you know how to do a good stability analysis.  This was instead an essay on using ideas about nonlinear systems to critique the AI safety research community.  This is a good idea, but it would be very hard to apply non-linear methods to a social community.   The closest thing I've seen to doing that was the epidemiological models used to predict the course of Covid-19.

The essay says, ... (read more)

Thanks for the link to Halstead's report!

I can't be understating the tail risks, because I made no claims about whether global warming poses existential risks.  I wrote only that the IPCC's latest synthesis report didn't say that it does.

I thought that climate change obviously poses some existential risk, but probably not enough to merit the panic about it.  Though Halstead's report that you linked explicitly says not just that there's no evidence of existential risk, but that his work gives evidence there is insignificant existential risk.  ... (read more)

I'm not claiming to have outsmarted anyone.  I have claimed only that I have read the IPCC's  Fifth Synthesis Report, which is 167 pages, and it doesn't report any existential threats to humans due to climate changes.  It is the report I found to be most often-cited by people claiming there are existential threats to humans due to global warming.  It does not support such claims, not even once among its thousands of claims, projections, tables, graphs, and warnings.

Neither did I claim that there is no existential threat to humanity from... (read more)

You're right about my tendency towards tendentiousness. Thanks!  I've reworded it some.  Not to include "I think that", because I'm making objective statements about what the IPCC has written.

That footnote is an important point.  People need to learn to use odds ratios.  Though I think that with odds ratios, the equivalent increase is to 1 - ((1/99) x ((1/99) / (10/90))) = 99.908%, not the intuitive-looking 99.9%.

Also, the interpretation of odds ratios is often counter-intuitive when comparing test groups of different sizes.  If P(X) >> P(~X) or P(X) << P(~X), the probability ratio P(W|X) / P(W|~X) can be very different from the odds ratio [P(W,X) / P(W,~X)] / [P(~W,X) / P(~W,~X)].  (Hope I've done that math right.  The odds ratio would normally just use counts, but I used probabilities for both to make them more visually comparable.)

I see lots of downvotes, but no quotations of any predictions from any recent IPCC report that could qualify as "existential risk".

If you'll read the IPCC's Synthesis reports, you'll see the only existential risks due to climate change that they predict are to shellfish, coral communities, and species of the arctic tundra.  They also mention some Amazonian species, but they're in danger less from climate change than from habitat loss.  The likely harm to humans, expressed in economic terms, is a loss of less than 1% of world GNP by 2100 AD, accompanied by a raise in sea level of less than one foot [1].  I don't think that even counts the economic gains from lands made f... (read more)

You wrote, "we think it's really possible that… a bunch of this AI stuff is basically right, but we should be focusing on entirely different aspects of the problem," and that you're interesting in "alternative positions that would significantly alter the Future Fund's thinking about the future of AI."  But then you laid out specifically what you want to see: data and arguments to change your probability estimates of the timeline for specific events.

This rules out any possibility of winning these contests by arguing that we should be focusing on entire... (read more)

Re. "Few of us would unhesitatingly accept the repugnant conclusion":  I unhesitatingly accept the repugnant conclusion.  We all do, except for people who say that it's repugnant to place the welfare of a human above that of a thousand bacteria.  (I think Jainists say something like that.)

Arriving at the repugnant conclusion presumes you have an objective way of comparing the utility of two beings.  I can't just say "My utility function equals your utility function times two".  You have to have some operationalized, common definiti... (read more)