All of Stephen Beard's Comments + Replies

Hi Locke - I'm not 100% sure how seriously nuclear Armageddon is taken in the EA community as I'm also pretty new. I'm just starting a piece of research to try and highlight where specific de-carbonisation efforts will be found (focused on a specific country - in my case Canada). Even though I haven't started I strongly suspect the answer will be agriculture, as it accounts for a very large proportion of emissions, there are many proven, scalable low cost solutions and it seems to me to be very neglected from a funding point of view (I say that based on some brief research I did on the UK) compared to other areas like electric vehicles and renewable energy.   

Hi Dem, I don't really have a defined framework for thinking about existential threats. I have read quite a lot around AI, Nuclear (command and control is a great book on the history of nuclear weapons) and Climate Change. I tend to focus mainly on the likelihood of something occurring and the tractability of preventing it. On a very high level I've concluded that the AI threat is unlikely to be catastrophic, and until a general AI is even invented there is little research or useful work that can be done in this area. I think the nuclear weapons threat is ... (read more)

Thanks Kim - I had a read, a very interesting high level summary on these topics.

Thanks - leaving aside the debate on whether nuclear power is unfairly underrated by Drawdown, I'd certainly agree with some of the criticisms. It's a great opening list of ideas, but it excludes unproven solutions which rules out obviously essential solutions like carbon capture and storage. They do not give a cost effectiveness ranking to the solutions and tractability doesn't seem to be a major consideration (from listening to the podcast they have clearly considered this, but not in the depth that EA folk would probably like). Really it's these critici... (read more)

Hi All, 

Just introducing myself! I've been an advocate of EA for a number of years but I'm new to the forum. I've spent a while reading though various posts and it's great to see a forum with such a reasonable, open minded and friendly tone. 

Like most people here I'm really interested in how humanity responds to existential threats (e.g. climate change) and global living standards (e.g. economic development in poorer regions). My background has been working in a start up - so I feel very comfortable starting projects, getting things off the groun... (read more)