All of turchin's Comments + Replies
The main point you miss is that the main goal of all this is to get a better negotiation position on Earth with our own superintelligence (and there are high chances that it will be soon and misaligned)- which at early stages will also very uncertain about aliens detraction in the universe. It is like crying into an open window - "a guy, Jack, is in my room and is going to kill me!" You don't know if there is police outside - but you hope to affect Jack's calculus.
Between 1 and 10 years - likely 3
After it crosses Saturn orbit, it will take 5.25 years to get to the Sun. Unlikely it will be observed before crossing Saturn orbit as there is no constant monitoring there and it is very dim there.
One thing about DA is that I have to know that I am selected randmoly from the group of observers. A first AI will know that it is the first, so there is no randomness.
If there are many AIs, then there is no singleton and opinion of each is not important.
Also I think that DA and anthropics is solvable and the most of assumptions are true but in slightly different situations: they answer different questions.
However, such full anthropic solution require a lot of cognitive work to map full anthropic landscape. An AI may use some conservative approach before it is solved adding weights to different solutions.
Universe will choose the simplest way to stop time travel. It doesn't care is it the destruction of a civilization or some mysterious way to prevent changes in the past. Moreover, as civilizations naturally have a tendency to fall and this prevents all time machines, then civilization destruction is easier way to prevent time travel.
If a non-cancel principle is false, then causality should move along a timeline twice. First normally, and second time - when the time line is canceled. The interesting question arises: can the canceling wave reach the normal w...
Let's assume that time travel becomes possible when an advance civilization reach a rotating black hole, as it follows from general relativity.
However, non-cancel principle is valid and can't be fulfilled by new timeline creation. (That is, equal to Novikov's principle).
In that case, the only way to prevent timeline collapse is to prevent civilizations to achieve blackholes!
In that case, the universe should be organized in the way which prevents large scale civilizations and space travel. This solves Fermi paradox and really terrifying to us.
However, if we precomit never come close to black holes, we can escape the "curse"!
Maybe better say 'zoo' vs 'forest', or 'very well protected area' vs 'partly protected area'.
If there is only a few habited planets inside grabby alien sphere, they will be very valuable and very well protected so no UFOs will be observed.
If there are millions of them, they are less valuable and thus less protected and therefore can be used for some practical activity, like turism, hunting or mining unobtanium. Obviously, if UFOs are aliens, local alien authorities let them be visible sometimes, so local aliens laws are not very strict.
Observation selection effects like SIA favors the hypothesis that there millions habitable planets inside any grabby aliens.
I think that your model is correct and 'anthropically' supported.
In some sense it favors 'zoo hypothesis". However, there is an important distinction: is it zoo or natural reserve. In general, on Earth zoos are rare but well kept and natural reserves are more abundant, but less controlled. The same anthropic considerations which favor silent rulers, favor natural reserves vs zoos.
This has bad consequences for us: natural reserves are more likely to be visited by unauthorized visitors and poachers. Or if we will be less anthrophomorphisng, they have l...
I think that UFOs are really a wildcard in x-risk research.
1.Even if UFOs don't have any serious substance behind them, the fact that many serious military people and even presidents believed in them, should update our prior about human irrationality and therefore increase our expectation that nuclear risks and AI risks will be mismanaged.
2.If UFOs have an interesting, but not world-model-shattering explanation, e.g. they are a form of ball lightings, this opens a possibility of creating new weapons after their nature will be learned.
3. If thei...
Critics: "‘Long Reflection’ Is Crazy Bad Idea" https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/10/long-reflection-is-crazy-bad-idea.html
Actually, I am going to write someday a short post "time machine as existential risk".
Technically, any time travel is possible only if timeline is branching, but it is ok in quantum multiverse. However, some changes in the past will be invariants: they will not change the future in the way that causes ground father paradox. Such invariants will be loopholes and have very high measure. UFO could be such invariants and this explains their strangeness: only strange thing are not changing future ti prevent their own existence.
Thanks for these details!
The report doesn't mention any likelihood of any of these events happening
May be you discuss a different report than I read. The one I read says:
In fact there is evidence of eruptions at Kivu in about 1000 year cycles and predictions based on observed accumulation rates (10-14% per year) suggest an eruption in the next 100-200 years, see Report [1].
Three arguments in favor of war soon:
- Chips. While China chip industry is getting sanctioned, most of the world production of advanced chip remains on Taiwan. But this is not for long, as manufacturing start relocating in other places. Attack on Taiwan could prevent US dominance in chips and AI.
- Ukraine war strained US production of some weapons, but US invested in increase of production of missiles and artillery ships. So in future situation will be less advantageous for war.
- China has clear advantage now in cheap drones produced in mass, like DJI. But is is also not for long.
I think it is more interesting to think about other people as of rational agents. If bitcoin grew to 100K as it was widely expected in 2021, SBF bets will pay off and he will become the first trillioner. He will also be able to return all money he took from creditors.
He may understood that there was only like 10 per cent chance to become trillioner, but if he thought that trillion dollars for preventing x-risks is the only chance to save humanity, then he knew that he should bet on this opportunity.
Now we live in a timeline where he lost and it is more tempting to say that he was irrational or mistaken. But maybe he was not.
I am interested to see how wood gasification s an energy source for cars could be bootstrapped in the case of industry collapse.
Another topic: how some cold tolerant crops from nothern regions ( fodder beet, rutabaga) could be planted in South in the case of nuclear war winter. I already tried some experiment remotely (asked friend) but it failed.
Also creating self-sustaing community on an island would be an interesting experiment.
The relation between warming and CO2 is exponential, s we need to count the number of doublings of CO2. Every doubling gives a constant increase of the temperature. Assuming that each doubling gives 2C and 22= 2exp4.5, we get around 9C above preindustrial level before we reach tipping point.
In the article the tipping point is above 4C (in the chart) plus 6C from warmer world = 10C, which gives us approximately the same result as I calculated above.
"Transition to a Moist Greenhouse with CO2 and solar forcing” https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10627
I think that the difference between tipping point and existential temperature should be clarified. Tipping point is the temperature after which self-sustaining loop of positive feedback starts. In the moisture greenhouse paper it is estimated to be at +4C, after which the temperature jumps to +40C in a few years. If we take +4 C above preindustrial level, it will be 1-3 above current level.
From climate point of view, we need to estimate not only the warming, but also the speed of warming, as higher speed gives high concentration of methane (and this differential equation has exponential solution). Anthropogenic global warming is special as it has very high speed of CO2 emission never happened before. We also have highest ever accumulation of methane hydrates. We could be past tipping point but do not know it yet, as exponential growth is slow in the beginning.
From SIA counteragrument follows that anthropic shadow can't be very st...
I use exponential prior to illustrate the example with a car. For other catastrophes, I take the tail of normal distribution, there the probability declines very quickly, even hyperexponentially. The math there is more complicated. But it does not affect the main result: if we have anthropic shadow, the expected survival time is around 0.1 of the past time in the wide range of initial parameters.
And in the situation of anthropic shadow we have very limited information about the type of distribution. Exponential and normal seems to be two most p...
Sanberg recently published its summary in twitter. he said that he uses the frequency of near-misses to estimate the power of anthropic shadow and found that near misses was not suppressed during the period of large nuclear stockpiles and it is evidence against anthropic shadow. I am not sure that it is true, as in early times the policy was more risky.
We don't know where is the tipping point, so uninformed prior gives equal chances for any T between 0 and, say, 20 C additional temperature increase. In that case 2C is 2 times more likely.
But the idea of anthorpic shadow tells us that tipining point is likely to be 10 per cent of the whole interval. And for 40C before moisture greenhouse it is 4C. But, interestingly, anthropic shadow tells us that smaller intervals are increasingly unlikely. So 1C increase is orders of magnitude less likely to cause a catastrophe than 4 C increase.
I will illus...
Anthropic shadow applies not to humanity, but to underlying conditions on which we can survive.
For example, the waves of asteroid bombardment are every 30 million years, but not exactly 30 mln.
The next wave is normally distributed around 30 with mean deviation, say, 1 mln years. If 33 mln years have gone without it, it means that we are 3 sigmas after the mean.
Image as a toy example a tense spring which is described by Hooke's law. Fs = kx.
Imagine also that we can observe only those springs that are tensed far beyond their normal breaking point = it is a model of anthropic shadow.
From logarithmic nature of the relation between remaining life expectancy and the power (probability of past survival) of anthropic shadow follows that for almost any anthropic shadow the remaining life expectancy is between 5-20 per cent of past survival time, lets call it dA.
For a tensed spring it means that its additional lengt...
Yes, agree. Two more points:
Not all population counts, but only those who can think about anthropic. A nuclear war will disproportionally destroy cities with universities, so the population of scientists could decline 10 times, while other population will be only halved.
Anthropic shadow means higher fragility: we underestimate how easy it is to trigger a nuclear war. Escalation is much easier. Accidents are more likely to be misinterpreted.
If we create artificial nuclear winter - it could be created by one strong actor unilaterally. No coordination is needed.
Such nuclear winter may last few years and naturally resolve to normality. During this process two things could happen: either the tipping point conditions also stop, like methane leakage ends. Or we create more permanent solution to our problem like more stable form of geoengienering.
The artificial nuclear winter doesn't need to be very strong (in -2-3 C range), so no major disruption of food production will happen.
I think, yes. We need a completely new science of "urgent geoengineering" - that is something like creating artificial nuclear winter by controlled fires in forests which will give us a few years of time to develop better methods or to reverse the dangerous trend.
I tried 6 years ago to create a more detailed plan (it may obsolete, but that is what I have) here
http://immortality-roadmap.com/warming3.pdf it is a chart
and it is its explanation https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/C3F87C8r6QFXwnwqp/the-map-of-global-warming-prevention
Hi!
I have different understanding of moisture greenhouse based on what I've read. You said (oversimplifing) that the threshold for moisture greenhouse is 67C and the main risk from it is ocean evaporation.
But in my understanding 67 C is the level of moisture greenhouse climate. The climate according to some models will be stable on this level. 67 C mean temperature seems to almost lethal to humans but some people could survive on high mountains.
However, the threshold to moisture greenhouse, that is the tipping point after which the ...
There are two translation into Russian. One from 2009 in which Igor participated is here https://proza.ru/avtor/unau&book=4#4
But in 2020 a professional translation was made and is available here https://ubq124.wordpress.com/2019/12/22/the-hedonistic-imperative-pdf/
That is why we can target Andromeda - the distance is good enough so they didn't arrive yet and we can focus on many stars simultaneously and hope that aliens have very large receivers - maybe Dyson sphere-size. Also the main point is to affect local superintelliegce expected utility.