Increasing the ease/decreasing the formality of world leaders talking to each other as per the Red Phone. World leaders mostly getting educated at the same institutions helps enormously with communication as well, though it does increase other marginal risks due to correlated blind spots.
Biorisk mitigation becoming much higher status a field and thus attracting more top talent.
Ease of communication also opens up more opportunities for rash decisions and premature messages, can reduce the time available for decisions, and the potential for this infrastructure to be misused by malign actors.
Biorisk mitigation being higher status could contribute to making the dangers of bioweapons more widely known among malign actors, thus making it more likely that they’re being developed.
Pakistan not having nukes would alter the geopolitical situation in South Asia in major ways, with repercussions for the relationships between the major powers India, China, and the US. I find it highly non-obvious what the net effect of this would be.
Personally, I don’t find that skeptical comments like Max’s discourage me from ideating. And the suggestion to keep ideation and evaluation separate might discourage the latter, since it’s actually not obvious how to operationalize ‘keeping separate’.
I’ve previously read a study that suggested evaluation during brainstorming led to less ideas—I don’t remember where.
Personally, I feel less inclined to post when I know someone will tell me my idea is wrong.
Edit: A Harvard Business Review article about brainstorming and ‘evaluation anxiety’ led me to this article, which I have not been able to read yet.
A general comment about this thread rather than a reply to Khorton in particular: The original post didn’t suggest that this should be a brainstorming thread, and I didn’t interpret it like that. I interpreted it as a question looking for answers that the posters believe, rather than only hypothesis generation/brainstorming.
When I was studying maths it was made clear to us that some things were obvious, but not obviously obvious. Furthermore, many things I thought were obvious were in fact not obvious, and some were not even true at all!
Thanks for this suggestion. I agree that in general brainstorming and debates are best kept separate. I also wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from posting an answer to this question—in fact, I’m unusually interested in more answers to this question. I’m not sure if you were saying that you in particular feel discouraged from ideating as a response to seeing my comment, but I’m sorry if so. I’m wondering if you would have liked me to explain why I was expressing my disagreement, and to explicitly say that I value you suggesting answers to the original question (which I do)?
Further the OP gives a specific notion of obviousness to use here:
“obviously” (meaning: you believe it with high probability, and you expect that belief to be uncontroversial)
This doesn’t leave a lot of room for debate about what is “obvious” unless you want to argue that a person doesn’t believe it with high probability and they are wrong about their own belief about how controversial it is.
Increasing the ease/decreasing the formality of world leaders talking to each other as per the Red Phone. World leaders mostly getting educated at the same institutions helps enormously with communication as well, though it does increase other marginal risks due to correlated blind spots.
Biorisk mitigation becoming much higher status a field and thus attracting more top talent.
Pakistan not having nukes.
Again, I disagree that any of these is obvious:
Ease of communication also opens up more opportunities for rash decisions and premature messages, can reduce the time available for decisions, and the potential for this infrastructure to be misused by malign actors.
Biorisk mitigation being higher status could contribute to making the dangers of bioweapons more widely known among malign actors, thus making it more likely that they’re being developed.
Pakistan not having nukes would alter the geopolitical situation in South Asia in major ways, with repercussions for the relationships between the major powers India, China, and the US. I find it highly non-obvious what the net effect of this would be.
I’d suggest keeping brainstorming and debates about obviousness thresholds separate as the latter discourages people from ideating.
Personally, I don’t find that skeptical comments like Max’s discourage me from ideating. And the suggestion to keep ideation and evaluation separate might discourage the latter, since it’s actually not obvious how to operationalize ‘keeping separate’.
I’ve previously read a study that suggested evaluation during brainstorming led to less ideas—I don’t remember where. Personally, I feel less inclined to post when I know someone will tell me my idea is wrong.
Edit: A Harvard Business Review article about brainstorming and ‘evaluation anxiety’ led me to this article, which I have not been able to read yet.
https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-group-brainstorming-is-a-waste-of-time
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8616.00154
A general comment about this thread rather than a reply to Khorton in particular: The original post didn’t suggest that this should be a brainstorming thread, and I didn’t interpret it like that. I interpreted it as a question looking for answers that the posters believe, rather than only hypothesis generation/brainstorming.
When I was studying maths it was made clear to us that some things were obvious, but not obviously obvious. Furthermore, many things I thought were obvious were in fact not obvious, and some were not even true at all!
Thanks for this suggestion. I agree that in general brainstorming and debates are best kept separate. I also wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from posting an answer to this question—in fact, I’m unusually interested in more answers to this question. I’m not sure if you were saying that you in particular feel discouraged from ideating as a response to seeing my comment, but I’m sorry if so. I’m wondering if you would have liked me to explain why I was expressing my disagreement, and to explicitly say that I value you suggesting answers to the original question (which I do)?
+1
Further the OP gives a specific notion of obviousness to use here:
This doesn’t leave a lot of room for debate about what is “obvious” unless you want to argue that a person doesn’t believe it with high probability and they are wrong about their own belief about how controversial it is.