A recent SSC blog post depicts a dialogue about Eugenics. This raised the question: how has the track record been for a community of reasonable people to identify the risks of previous catastrophes?
As noted in the post, at different times:
Many people were concerned about overpopulation posing an existential threat (c.f. population bomb, discussed at length in Wizard and The Prophet). It now seems widely accepted that the risk overpopulation posed was overblown. But this depends on how contingent the green revolution was. If there wasn’t a Norman Borlaug, would someone else have tried a little bit harder than others to find more productive cultivars of wheat?
Historically, there also appeared to be more worry about the perceived threat posed by a potential decline in population IQ. This flowed from the reasonable-sounding argument “Smart people seem to have fewer kids than their less intellectually endowed peers. Extrapolate this over many generations, and we have an idiocracy that at best will be marooned on earth or at worst will no longer be capable of complex civilization.” I don’t hear these concerns much these days (an exception being a recent Clearer Thinking podcast episode). I assume the dismissal would sound something like “A. Flynn effect.[1] B. If this exists, it will take a long time to bite into technological progress. And by the time it does pose a threat, we should have more elegant ways of increasing IQ than selective breeding. Or C. Technological progress may depend more on total population size than average IQ since we need a few Von Neumann’s instead of hordes of B-grade thinkers.”
I think many EAs would characterize global warming as tentatively in the same class: “We weren’t worried enough when action would have been high leverage, but now we’re relatively too worried because we seem to be making good progress (see the decline in solar cost), and we should predict this progress to continue.”
There have also been concerns about the catastrophic consequences of: A. Depletion of key resources such as water, fertilizer, oil, etc. B. Ecological collapse. C. Nanotechnology(???). These concerns are also considered overblown in the EA community relative to the preoccupation with AI and engineered pathogens.
Would communism’s prediction about an inevitable collapse of capitalism count? I don’t know harmful this would have been considered in the short run since most attention was about the utopia this would afford.
Most of the examples I’ve come up with seem to make me lean towards the view that “these past fears were overblown because they consistently discount the likelihood that someone will fix the problem in ways we can’t yet imagine.”
But I’d be curious to know if someone has examples or interpretations that lean more towards “We were right to worry! And in hindsight, these issues received about the right amount of resources. Heck they should have got more!”
What would an ideal EA have done if teleported back in time and mindwiped of foresight when these issues were discovered? If reasonable people acted in folly then, and EAs would have acted in folly as well, what does that mean for our priors?
I can’t find an OWID page on this, despite google image searches making it apparent it once existed. Might not have fed the right conversations to have allowed people to compare IQs across countries?
What’s the track record of secular eschatology?
A recent SSC blog post depicts a dialogue about Eugenics. This raised the question: how has the track record been for a community of reasonable people to identify the risks of previous catastrophes?
As noted in the post, at different times:
Many people were concerned about overpopulation posing an existential threat (c.f. population bomb, discussed at length in Wizard and The Prophet). It now seems widely accepted that the risk overpopulation posed was overblown. But this depends on how contingent the green revolution was. If there wasn’t a Norman Borlaug, would someone else have tried a little bit harder than others to find more productive cultivars of wheat?
Historically, there also appeared to be more worry about the perceived threat posed by a potential decline in population IQ. This flowed from the reasonable-sounding argument “Smart people seem to have fewer kids than their less intellectually endowed peers. Extrapolate this over many generations, and we have an idiocracy that at best will be marooned on earth or at worst will no longer be capable of complex civilization.” I don’t hear these concerns much these days (an exception being a recent Clearer Thinking podcast episode). I assume the dismissal would sound something like “A. Flynn effect.[1] B. If this exists, it will take a long time to bite into technological progress. And by the time it does pose a threat, we should have more elegant ways of increasing IQ than selective breeding. Or C. Technological progress may depend more on total population size than average IQ since we need a few Von Neumann’s instead of hordes of B-grade thinkers.”
I think many EAs would characterize global warming as tentatively in the same class: “We weren’t worried enough when action would have been high leverage, but now we’re relatively too worried because we seem to be making good progress (see the decline in solar cost), and we should predict this progress to continue.”
There have also been concerns about the catastrophic consequences of: A. Depletion of key resources such as water, fertilizer, oil, etc. B. Ecological collapse. C. Nanotechnology(???). These concerns are also considered overblown in the EA community relative to the preoccupation with AI and engineered pathogens.
Would communism’s prediction about an inevitable collapse of capitalism count? I don’t know harmful this would have been considered in the short run since most attention was about the utopia this would afford.
Most of the examples I’ve come up with seem to make me lean towards the view that “these past fears were overblown because they consistently discount the likelihood that someone will fix the problem in ways we can’t yet imagine.”
But I’d be curious to know if someone has examples or interpretations that lean more towards “We were right to worry! And in hindsight, these issues received about the right amount of resources. Heck they should have got more!”
What would an ideal EA have done if teleported back in time and mindwiped of foresight when these issues were discovered? If reasonable people acted in folly then, and EAs would have acted in folly as well, what does that mean for our priors?
I can’t find an OWID page on this, despite google image searches making it apparent it once existed. Might not have fed the right conversations to have allowed people to compare IQs across countries?
Right to worry about nuclear war, based on information later revealed about the Cuban Missile Crisis and other near misses
Good point, but I think people worried about extinction risk from nuclear war before a really plausible mechanism-nuclear winter-was found by which that would occur following a US-Soviet exchange. There’s a nuclear doomsday device in Dr. Strangelove, a novel about post-nuclear war human extinction from the 50s etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel) Though to be fair, these are fiction, and it’s not clear the idea was without foundation pre-nuclear winter research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_device
Unclear if Y2K was fixed or was never really a problem—this article suggests the latter. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/Y2K-bug/#:~:text=Software and hardware companies raced,worked to address the problem.