All of Robin's Comments + Replies

This article isn't an exclusive list of the countries that celebrate it, merely a list of how it's celebrated in 11 noteworthy nations. It's also celebrated in Iran, China, Germany...

Good analogy. Note that environmental statements made by oil companies cannot be trusted even for a few years when expected profits increase, even when costly actions and investment patterns appear to back them up temporarily. E.g.
https://www.ft.com/content/b5b21c66-92de-45c0-9621-152aa335d48c

'BPs chief executive Bernard Looney defended its latest reversal, stating that “The conversation three or four years ago was somewhat singular around cleaner energy, lower-carbon energy. Today, there is much more conversation about energy security, energy affordability.”'

Do current person-affecting ethicists become longtermist if we achieve negligible senescence? Will virtue-ethicists too if we can predict how their virtue will develop over time? Do development economists become longtermists if we develop Foundation-style Psychohistory? We don't have a singular term for "not a virtue ethicist" other than "non-virtue ethicist" and there's no commonality amongst nonlongtermists other than being the out-group to longtermists.

Neartermist = explicitly sets a high effective discount rate (either due to uncertainty or a pure rate of time preference) should not include non-consequentialists or people with types of person-affecting views resulting in a low concern for future generations.

On your new document: I think I generally nod along to the peak oil and efficiency stuff. The renewables section is unconvincing, as you might imagine from our discussion above. You are right that there are a bunch of problems with IAMs making simplifications, but you don't demonstrate that any of the factors they are missing would seriously change the results of them. It's good to see that some of your arguments have grown more nuanced, but it also makes reviewing it more complicated and I don't really have the time to debug the report in detail. I'm some... (read more)

Yes, that is the "arguably": do you require agency in your definition of trade, and at what level. There is a mutualistic relationship with the honeybee hives  that produce honey and pollinate well, hence their levels are rising during generally declining  numbers of other bees. Similarly, we have traded with the genomes of domestic animals, increasing their number, even if the individuals that hold the genes have a worse life because of this trade. There are several stages and timescales to these interactions. The bees trade labor for nectar wit... (read more)

Agree. We don't trade with ants but we do trade with monkeys, both in experiments https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=675503 and when tourists have things stolen https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/monkeys-bali-swipe-tourists-belongings-and-barter-them-snacks-180963485/. It seems to me that communication is all that is really required. Arguably all domestication is a trade that's become established over evolutionary timeframes. (Domesticated) honey bees are therefore both trading with us and with flowers when they pollinate and produc... (read more)

I'm sorry your situation has deteriorated from the FTX scandal, that must be very difficult. A lot of people have it much worse than me!

I don't see this as an argument between "everything will turn out fine" and "things will end badly", but "things will go badly for very specific reasons to do with materials accessibility" and "materials accessibility is not the limiting factor". I consider something a lack of imagination where every aspect of the solution exists, but for cost reasons we don't currently combine them in most supply chains. Entirely electrif... (read more)

I've been quite stressed, for reasons other than lack of materials! How about you?

I'm not particularly impressed by the podcast. It seems to lack any imagination in working out how to decarbonise the construction of renewable energy itself, which is not generally regarded as a fundamental problem (as opposed to being slightly expensive to transition).

I encountered this twitter thread which I think explains better than I did why EROI isn't that useful: https://mobile.twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1341730308060831744

Exponential energy consumption increase ... (read more)

Yes, I've also been busy and I think the conversation is getting hard to follow and delivering diminishing returns. But to address a few points: 

I think we are mostly in agreement that these scenarios are both bad and plausible, but disagree about the badness and plausibility. However on the second point, the paper you quote is simply not providing enough evidence of its point. Potentially 40 or so years of constant consumption would pass this test, but you should not assume that consumption of energy or resources is constant per GDP, as it simply has... (read more)

Three scenarios where we do not make a green transition: 
Firstly, we are structurally prevented by government forces, for instance, in many countries there is difficulty in obtaining planning permission to get renewables in place, or have perverse tax incentives (gas cheaper than electricity for instance) that make the transition difficult. Both of these are currently happening in the UK, but  not enough to resist the pull of renewables completely!
Secondly,  energy demand takes off so quickly (perhaps due to AI) that we expand green power wi... (read more)

Yes, I think our exchange has been fruitful and thought-provoking. 
Battery-wise: I think this is why I focus on energy cost variability rather than absolute energy cost, energy may well have a negative cost at some times but very large at others. The analyses of the effects of these are different. 
Civilisation requires a large energy surplus, but I don't see any reason to assume that the EROI specifically needs to be any value above 1. If I change the unit of the solar cell (let's say EROI 10) to a solar-powered solar cell factory (EROI = 100 bec... (read more)

Getting closer, anyway. Maybe we will have to

We already know how to solve the blackouts problem via dedicated generation (or storage) for high-impact sectors. In a renewable economy, very large amounts of energy are available very cheaply at certain times, so for instance a factory with a 1-day battery that can produce at night before sunny days is able to work nearly as efficiently as they do now. You aren't actually relocating very much of the economy (only very heavy industry) and this constantly relocates towards incidentally-sunnier countries anyway f... (read more)

I think we're getting closer to an agreement. I would be more tempted if your thesis were "energy will become much more expensive at some times of day/year, as will certain minerals, and this will depress GDP compared to naive expectations." It's not obvious to me that low energy storage does more than require heavy industry to relocate to more consistent climes and/or stop for a few days each year, which would depress GDP but hardly to the level of existential threat. 

1. I think most of these are economic points about how expensive it is to make the tra

1. These are not new technologies - thin film and primarily-organic PV have been commercially available for decades. They don't out-compete silicon based on price point/efficiency, not unviability [1-2]. The organic films are again very thin, so very little land is required to grow the material to make them (the question would be how many times over a piece of land could produce the feedstock to cover itself in a year, I'm sure it would be tens of times). Similarly, the volume of copper and zinc mined in a year is enough to put a few nanometers around the wor

I think a deeper look at several of these points shows that it's not as bad as it seems. 

1) It is already quite possible to make solar cells  and batteries without any particularly rare metals [1], and some solar cells can be constructed either from films with active areas only nanometers thick (meaning only a few million tons are required to coat the world in them) or entirely out of organic components [2]. Similarly, while the most commercially viable batteries at present may involve somewhat scarce metals like lithium, it's possible to make th... (read more)

Strong agree, and part of this is just that EAs should be more modest about how much their assessments of sector impact out-perform other people's. In the long term, weird second-order social impacts of interventions matter a lot more than the direct impact. For example, the (disputed) effects of abortion on crime rates https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272721001043?via%3Dihub and female employment/social engagement https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12122-004-1028-3 may create social spirals that continue long after the medica... (read more)

I respect you immensely for writing this, but some degree of altruism is required for being an effective altruist - not an infinite duty to self-sacrifice, but the understanding that you can be trusted to do so on big things, and costly signs you will do so are helpful. 10% giving is one such costly sign and it's not required that you do all of them (I also think you overestimate the fraction of EAs who are vegan). However I  think the disjunction between wanting the best for the world and wanting to have a high profile by improving the world occurs e... (read more)

For those abroad unfamiliar with quite how unpopular Dominic Cummings is, here's an article arguing he was the most unpopular man in the country at the time

https://gulfnews.com/opinion/op-eds/newsmaker-dominic-cummings--britains-most-hated-man-1.71730676

and here's a poll from May 2021 showing only 14% of people trusted him on government handling of COVID, by comparison with 34% for the prime minister. https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/iszcru07g6/TheTimes_Coronahandling_Cummings_Results_210520.pdf

This is an incredibly important question. It is also an incredibly dangerous one. There are many real EA whose views on this topic constitute either an X-risk or an S-risk to EAs with only subtly different assessments: people who, given a truly aligned omnipotent AGI would either wipe out the majority of humans or create many lives others view as unhappy. Historically, well-intentioned eugenicists have killed many people who self-identify as having worthwhile lives. 
I also think there is a miscalibration in the creation test; many humans instinctively... (read more)

I agree with the comments that you are massively overconfident in the applicability of your logic and your title, but raise a good point for a marginal-but-political voter. However in practice both USA parties are actively ridding themselves of moderates, so an important first step is to push for voting reforms that make it possible for young, sane people to get into positions of power in the Republican party without either actually or pretending to hold a swathe of clearly harmful views about e.g. climate change, abortion access and pandemic preparedness.... (read more)

I can't imagine much worse for the prospects of EA than to be associated with Dominic Cummings. He of course now claims to have had very little influence on COVID policy, since it was widely regarded as a shambles during his time. Whatever the truth of this, it's precisely through association with widely hated figures like this that EA risks evaporating as quickly as it has grown. This is also why we need to make a strong distinction between "the abstract idea of maximising positive impact," which would survive this, and "the social movement that this forum is part of",  a member of a rather short-lived reference class (albeit with some good signs at the moment, as you say). 

I feel like it defeats the whole point of April 1st if articles clearly declare themselves to be parodies  at the top of the page. Although it's still a fair bet that some people won't notice. 

This info was not present at the time I wrote this reply. As you say, most of this doesn't apply in the case of Russians, but it seems unwise to even discuss the optimal actions for Russians in a non-anonymised public chat. 

I'm deeply skeptical that this is a good action for anyone who isn't personally tied to Ukraine.  Foreigners fighting is a substantial propaganda boost for Putin ("Look, Ukraine is a Western stooge after all") and risks muddying the water around whether or not the nation they are from is at war with Russia, potentially spiralling the conflict. NATO is holding off doing any act tantamount to declaring war for a reason. Ukrainians have the benefit of local geographic knowledge, being trusted by the community and speaking the co-ordinating languages; wha... (read more)

Indeed, although CATF is still very North America-centric. I'd be more excited to learn about a similar charity acting in China (assuming it wanted Western money). 

This is a really great discussion piece and a very mature response from Giving Green (GG) to it. I would mostly second jackva’s comments, and will just raise a few additions points. 

There seems to be a misapprehension on the core criticism. The fundamental criticism of this article is not just that GG don’t do things quantitatively, but that they have completely neglected the “cost” side of cost-benefit analysis. The qualitative metrics don’t attempt to account for either the actual scale of money needed to do anything, nor the potential negatives of ... (read more)

TL;DR: Assuming everything can be fit with a linear trend completely overwhelms the importance of working out what that trend is in these extreme cases, so while instructive for median behaviour, I don’t believe this approach is sufficient to assert anything about tail probabilities.

It’s good to see so much work summarised in one page, but the cost of this is rigour. I agree with the problems with using ECS as mentioned above, and add that, since these trajectories do not result in net 0 CO$_2$ emissions at 2100, it’s not even a good ... (read more)

Something that the authors of this book perhaps should have highlighted is that DICE's main virtue is its simplicity: it is far from being either the only or the best IAM for most analyses. However, to appreciate how badly calibrated the damage function is, here's a note from the documentation:

"However, current studies generally omit several important factors (the economic value of losses from biodiversity, ocean acidification, and political reactions), extreme events (sea-level rise, changes in ocean circulation, and accelerated climate ch... (read more)

For most reasonable emissions pathways, temperature and linked physical effects depend only on cumulative emissions*. Delaying a given emission by some time therefore does not impact the amount of climate change it causes, so from a climate-focused perspective we don’t see any change in the harm of emissions with time (this may not be true at very low net emissions rates but is at rates similar to present-day). This would mean that the only time delaying emissions would have any climatic benefit would be if they are delayed until a time when net emi... (read more)