Without in any sense wanting to take away from the personal responsibility of the people who actually did the unethical, and probably illegal trading, I think there might be a couple of general lessons here:
1) An attitude of âI take huge financial risks because Iâm trading for others, not myself, and money has approx. 0 diminishing marginal utility for altruism, plus Iâm so ethical I donât mind losing my shirtâ might sound like a clever idea. But crucially, it is MUCH easier psychologically to think youâll just eat the loss and the attendant humiliation and loss of status, before you are actually facing losing vast sums of money for real. Assuming (as seems likely to me) that SBF started out with genuine good intentions, my guess is this was hard to anticipate because of a self-conception as âgenuinely altruisticâ blocked him from the idea he might do wrong. The same thing probably stopped others hearing about SBF taking on huge risks, which of course he was open* about, from realizing this danger.
2) On reflection, the following is a failure mode for us as a movement combining a lot of utilitarians (and more generally, people who understand that it is *sometimes, in principle* okay to do morally dodgy things when the stakes are really really high, i.e. Schindler made arms for the Nazis etc.) with an encouragement to earn to give: most people take to heart the standard advice about âdonât do conventionally immoral things in order to maximize, it will almost always go wrong by utilitarian standards themselves, plus there is moral uncertainty etc. But the people who actually make major money are the least risk averse, because of the trade-off between risk and return in finance. Those people are probably disproportionately likely to ignore the cautious warnings about doing evil for good effects, because there is very likely a connection between this and being less risk averse. (I am not saying this is what happened here: the motivating factor for SBF in appropriating the customer funds might well have really mostly been simple fear of being publicly embarrassed by his losses and have nothing to do with âI have an obligation to make the money back to help save the worldâ. There have been plenty cases of traders doing this sort of thing before who had never heard of utilitarianism. But I think the current disaster nonetheless has brought this risk to light.)
*(Iâm talking about the apparently legit trading that got him into financial trouble, not the unethical speculation with customer funds that came after)
Great comment. First comment from new forum member here. Some background: I was EA adjacent for many years, and donated quite a lot of income through an EA organization, and EA people in my community inspired me to go vegan. Still thankful for that. Then I was heavily turned off by the move towards longtermism, which I find objectionable on many grounds (both philosophical and political). This is just to give you some background on where Iâm coming from, so read my comment with that in mind.
I would like to pick up on this part: âAssuming (as seems likely to me) that SBF started out with genuine good intentions, my guess is this was hard to anticipate because of a self-conception as âgenuinely altruisticâ blocked him from the idea he might do wrongâ. I think this is true, and I think itâs crucial for the EA community to reflect on these things going forward. Itâs the moral licensing or self-licensing effect, which is well described in moral psychologyâindividuals who are very confident they are doing good may be more likely to engage in bad acts.
I think, however, that the EA community at large in recent years have started to suffer from a kind of intellectual self-licensing as well. The idea that one is very smart and very committed to reason and ethics and good arguments, may make it more likely to overlook some really obvious things. TBH Iâve had this impression of the EA community for quite some time, and this made me turn away from the movement to the degree that I began warning others not to join. In many ways I think Iâm fairly ideal âEA materialâ. I have a masterâs degree in philosophy, a PhD in social science, and a heavily idealistic outlook towards life which has led me to devote most of my free time (and much of my resources) to bettering the worldâincluding sending costly signals about commitment by avoiding meat and air travel. Iâm also extremely oriented towards rationality as an ideal and I appreciate the power of the better argument.
Still, it has seemed really obvious that these things are both bad and stupid:
cozying up to a billionaire who set up shop in a tax haven and became rich on an unsustainable industry which doesnât provide real value to anybody
downplaying the very real existential risk of climate change which we can by now be very certain about
downplaying giving directly to the worldâs many poor and refocusing on giving money towards fighting imagined future AI overlords, which we cannot be certain about at all
downplaying engaging in politics in order to make societal institutions better and more just
Many here will not agree that any or all of these things are either bad or stupid. I think they are, but I realize that merely stating that I think so will not convince any of you EAs. I realize that I may be wrong as well, at least in my belief that AI overlords will not materialize. The fourth point is also complex of course.
But I am not wrong on the first two points. This has, frankly, been blatantly obvious to most of the ârational & progressiveâ people outside EA. But here in EA you went along with FTX and crypto for a very long time, and it still seems like many here lack a real appreciation of how bad and threatening climate change actually is. There are exceptions of course, but if you are honest with yourselves you probably know that there is some truth to this. Why?
So my advice going forward is to make this a moment of reflection. Was this really just one guy who did something stupid and dragged others with him? Or does it indicate something about the EA community at large, which it would be wise to reflect upon, if one wants the EA community to remain a force for good?
Please bear with me if this post is not perfectly in line with the norms for discussion here. Even though it may be provocative, it is written with a hope that the EA movement will survive this crisis and come out of it as a real force for good. These are some thoughts written hastily late at night here in my countryâCremer and Kemp make similar points with much better arguments in âDemocratizing riskâ.
In any case, take care all you who have been affected by this.
If youâll read the IPCCâs Synthesis reports, youâll see the only existential risks due to climate change that they predict are to shellfish, coral communities, and species of the arctic tundra. They also mention some Amazonian species, but theyâre in danger less from climate change than from habitat loss. The likely harm to humans, expressed in economic terms, is a loss of less than 1% of world GNP by 2100 AD, accompanied by a raise in sea level of less than one foot [1]. I donât think that even counts the economic gains from lands made fertile by climate change (I couldnât find any reference to them). (Iâm going off the Fifth Synthesis Report; the sixth should come out very soon.)
The most devastating change, which is the melting of the Greenland ice cap, was predicted to occur between 3000 and 4000 AD, and even that isnât an existential risk.
[1] Iâve tweaked that a little bitâIIRC, they predicted a loss of world GNP ranging from 0.2% to 2%, and a range in sea level change which goes over 1 foot at the top end. A difficulty in dealing with IPCC forecasts is that they explicitly refuse to attach probabilities to any of their scenarios, and often express forecasts as a range across all scenarios rather than giving the numbers they predicted for each scenarios. The upper range of all such forecasts is based on a worst-case scenario, grandfathered in from many years ago, which predicts that the situation today is much worse than it is. So the best you can do with their range estimates is eyeball what data they give, and guess what the prediction for the second-worst scenario is.
I didnât downvote, and the comment is now at +12 votes and +8 agreement (not sure where it was before), but my guess is it would be more upvoted if it were worded more equivocally (e.g., âI think the evidence suggests climate change poses...â) and had links to the materials you reference (e.g., â[link] predicted that the melting of the Greenland ice cap would occur...â). There also may be object-level disagreements (e.g., some think climate change is an existential risk for humans in the long run or in the tail risks, such as where geoengineering might be necessary).
The EA Forum has idiosyncratic voting habits very different from most of the internet, for better or worse. You have to get to know its quirks, and I think most people should try to focus less on votes and more on the standards for good internet discussion. The comments I find most useful are rarely the most upvoted.
Youâre right about my tendency towards tendentiousness. Thanks! Iâve reworded it some. Not to include âI think thatâ, because Iâm making objective statements about what the IPCC has written.
Have you read the full reports, which cover thousands of pages? I would guess that you havenâtâbut my apologies if you have. Iâve read about 2/â3s of the 3000 pages in the most recent one, and I have read most previous IPCC reports as well. In short, I think you actually demonstrate some of my criticism: An intellectual over-confidence in oneâs abilities to outsmart others, which leads to erroneous conclusions and cherry-picking. Itâs similar in style to Eliezerâs claim on another thread that sexual relations between co-workers are unproblematic in a high-risk work environment, based on his assumed superior ways of reasoningâa claim which flies in the face of tried and true best practices in most high-risk work environments.
Most climate researchers are extremely worried about what weâre facing. Most people who have been following the climate situation for many years are also extremely worried. But your own reading of some parts of IPCC reports gives you confidence that weâre going to do more or less fine? Well, to each his own. (edited this section because it was too confontational in tone)
To elaborate a bit: the reason IPCC reports donât include anything on existential risk for humanity is that this has not been part of the IPCC mandate. There have AFAIK been no calculations of the probability that climate change will lead to human extinction, or even how many milions or billions we can assume to die prematurely over the next century because of climate change. Kemp (whoâs employed at a EA aligned center) came out with an excellent article together with associates this year, which goes in more detail on these questions: Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios | PNAS
A central epistemological point of departureâwhich the Kemp article briefly coversâis that IPCC have been shown historically to consistently err on the cautious side. This has to do both with the nature of achieving global agreement between researchers, with the political limitations on IPCCâs work, and also on the wish to not appear alarmist. So it is reasonable to assume that things may very well get worse than IPCC projections, but itâs unlikely that it will things will turn out to be better.
Among people who have been following the debate on climate science closely, there is high awareness that the field of climate economics has come under strong criticism in recent years. The assumptions that are put into the models (such as the influential DICE model) have been claimed to be arbitrary and often unrealistic. This is well covered in the recent IPCC report, where GDP projections are treated with much caution. Nevertheless, expectations about future GDP losses in conventional climate economics have been revised continually upwards. But GDP projections about what will happen decades from now remain among the least certain of all IPCC projections.
What we are facing, and which is well described in the IPCC reports (more so in the latest one), is that there are big challenges ahead when it comes to crops and food security, fresh water supply, vector borne diseases, and mass displacement due to various factors. Any of these things may not amount to existential risk for humanity in itself. But taken together they may lead to large-scale conflict between nuclear powers, and they will most certainly lead to a massive loss of life, and that many societies will have to be abandoned. Is this âexistentialâ? Depends on how one defines and operationalizes the word, I guess.
Iâm not claiming to have outsmarted anyone. I have claimed only that I have read the IPCCâs Fifth Synthesis Report, which is 167 pages, and it doesnât report any existential threats to humans due to climate changes. It is the report I found to be most often-cited by people claiming there are existential threats to humans due to global warming. It does not support such claims, not even once among its thousands of claims, projections, tables, graphs, and warnings.
Neither did I claim that there is no existential threat to humanity from global warming. I claimed that the IPCCâs 5th Synth report doesnât suggest any existential threat to humanity from global warming.
Kemp is surely right that global warming âisâ an existential threat, but so are asteroid strikes. Heâs also surely right that we should look carefully at the most-dangerous scenarios. But, skimming Kempâs paper recklessly, it doesnât seem to have any quantitative data to justify the panic being spread among college students today by authorities claiming weâre facing an immediate dire threat, nor the elevation of global warming to being a threat on a par with artificial intelligence, nor the crippling of our economies to fight it, nor failing to produce enough oil that Europe can stop funding Russiaâs war machine.
And as Iâve said for many years: We already have the solution to global warming: nuclear power. Nuclear power plants are clearly NOT an existential threat. If you think global warming is an existential threat, you should either lobby like hell for more nuclear power, or admit to yourself that you donât really think global warming is an existential threat.
I donât think the IPCC is now looking more at scenarios with a less than 3C rise in temperature out of conservatism, but because they donât see a rise above 3C before 2100 except in RCP8.5 (Figure 2.3), which is now an unrealistically high-carbon scenario; and they were sick of news agencies reporting RCP8.5 as the âbusiness as usualâ case. (It was intended to represent the worst 10% out of just those scenarios in which no one does anything to prevent climate change.)
The IPCCâs 5th Synth Report dismisses Kempâs proposed âHothouse Earthâ tipping point on page 74. Kempâs claim is based on a 2018 paper, so it is the more up-to-date claim. But Halsteadâs report from August 2022 is even more up-to-date, and also dismisses the Hothouse Earth tipping point.
Anyway. Back to the 5th Synth Report. It contains surprisingly little quantitative information; what it does have on risks is mostly in chapter 2. It presents this information in a misleading format, rating risks as âVery low /â Medium /â Very highâ, but these donât mean a low, medium, or high expected value of harm. They seem to mean a low, medium, or high probability of ANY harm of the type described, or, if theyâre smart, some particular value range for a t-test of the hypothesis of net harm > 0.
The text is nearly all feeble claims like this: âClimate change is expected to lead to increases in ill-health in many regions and especially in developing countries with low income, as compared to a baseline without climate change⊠From a poverty perspective, climate change impacts are projected to slow down economic growth, make poverty reduction more difficult, further erode food security and prolong existing and create new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hotspots of hunger (medium confidence). ⊠Climate change is projected to increase displacement of people (medium evidence, high agreement).â
I call these claims feeble because theyâre unquantitative. In nearly every case, no claim is made except that these harms will greater than zero. Figure SPM.9 is an exception; it shows significant predicted reductions in crop yield, with an expected value of around a 10% reduction of crop yields in 2080 AD (eyeballing the graph). Another exception is Box 3.1 on p. 79, which says, âThese incomplete estimates of global annual economic losses for temperature increases of ~2.5°C above pre-industrial levels are between 0.2 and 2.0% of income (medium evidence, medium agreement).â Another exception shows predicted ocean level rise (and I misspoke; it predicts a change of a bit more than 1 foot by 2100 AD). None of the few numeric predictions of harm or shortfall that it predicts are frightening.
In short, Iâm not saying Iâve evaluated the evidence and decided that climate change isnât threatening. Iâm saying that I read the 5th Synthesis Report, which I read because it was the report most-commonly cited by people claiming we face an existential risk, and found there is not one claim anywhere in it that humans face an existential risk from climate warming. I would say the most-alarming claim in the report is that crop yields are expected to be between 10% and 25% lower in 2100 than they would be without global warming. This is still less of an existential risk than population growth, which is expected to cause a slightly greater shortfall of food over that time period; and we have 80 years to plant more crops, eat fewer cows, or whatever.
You wrote, âWhat we are facing, and which is well described in the IPCC reports (more so in the latest one), is that there are big challenges ahead when it comes to crops and food security, fresh water supply, vector borne diseases, and mass displacement due to various factors.â But the report I read suggests only that there are big challenges ahead when it comes to crops, as I noted above. For everything else, it just says that water supply will decline, diseases will increase, and displacement will increase. It doesnât say, nor give any evidence, that theyâll decline or increase enough for us to worry about.
The burden of proof is not on me. The burden of proof is on the IPCC to show numeric evidence that the bad things they warn us about are quantitatively significant, and on everyone who cited this IPCC report to claim that humanity is in serious danger, to show something in the report that suggests that humanity is in serious danger. Iâm not saying there is no danger; Iâm saying that the source thatâs been cited to me as saying there is serious existential danger, doesnât say that.
(Halsteadâs report explicitly says, âmy best guess estimate is that the indirect risk of existential catastrophe due to climate change is on the order of 1 in 100,000 [over all time, not just the next century], and I struggle to get the risk above 1 in 1,000.â Dinosaur-killing-asteroid strike risk is about 1 /â 50M per yr, or 1/â500K per century.)
the approval process of the SPM in the 2014 AR5 Synthesis report includes a line-by-line approval process involving world governments participating in the IPCC. Synthesis report Topic sections get a section-by-section discussion by world governments. That includes petro-states. The full approval process is documented in the IPCC Fact Sheet. The approval and adoption process is political. The Acceptance process used for full reports is your best choice for unfiltered science.
The AR5report you have been reading was put out 8 years ago. That is a long time in climate science. During that time, thereâs been tracking of GHG production relative to stated GHG-reduction commitments. Thereâs also new data from actual measurements of extreme weather events, tipping point systems, and carbon sinks and sources. If you like the synthesis report or believe in its editing process, the AR6 Synthesis report is due out. Meanwhile, thereâs ongoing workshops available to watch on-line, plenty of well-known papers, and other options too. Hereâs a discussion of a massive signatory list attached to a declaration of climate emergency in 2022. Climate scientists are engaged in publicly sharing information about climate change, and so thereâs lots of places to find valid information.
Are we on a pathway to RCP 8.5? Well, climate researchers out of Woods Hole wrote a PNAS paper about this in 2020, challenging projections from the IEA about our being on the 4.5 heating pathway. The paper indirectly contradicts Halsteadâs reliance on RCP 4.5 as our expected pathway. There are letters back and forth about it available to browse on the PNAS website, basically about the contributions of changing land carbon sinks. However, climate scientists studying global warming typically underestimate dangers and negative outcomes. For example, after Bolsonaro, itâs plausible the Amazon could easily be gone by 2050 just because of corruption and mismanagement, but thatâs not really mentioned in the Woods Hole analysis.
If you want to examine interesting scenarios for real purposes, for example, to advance a 30 year business agenda, or to project plans for government or civilization out to 2100, or even just 2050, maybe youâre really into supporting a particular form of energy production, or you think youâll live to 2100, which is plausible, then consider relying on scenarios and predictive indicators of socioeconomic pathways and GHG production, rather than relying on probabilistic forecasts. Youâll want information that is within a couple years of today. For example, did you know that it rained on the summit of Greenland in 2021 for the first time in recorded history? Itâs a predictive indicator of continuing increases in melting rates for Greenland this century. The rain kept up for hours. What if it lasted for days, regularly, year after year? Larger computer models used by the IPCC to predict sea level rise donât factor in physical processes like melt pools and drainage under glaciers, though according to Jason Box, a noted climate researcher whoâs spent a lot of time studying Greenland, physical processes play a big role in Greenland ice melt. Thereâs been rain on parts of Greenland for awhile (in my understanding, mostly toward the coasts), but now we should expect something more.
you talked about nuclear power as a potential source of energy for the future. Could it be financed and scaled to replace fossil fuel energy production in power plants by 2050, across the world? I believe not, but if you have information to the contrary, Iâm interested. Right now, I believe that all renewables are a sideshow, cheap or not, until we grasp that population decline and overall energy consumption decline are the requirements of keeping our planet livable for our current population. I support oil, gas, and coal use as part of an energy conservation plan. Itâs what we use now. We wonât create new infrastructure to support radically different energy production at higher levels without increasing our GHG production, so better to keep the infrastructure we have but lessen our use of it. A lot.
Sea level rise. AR6 offers revised estimates, and NASA offers its conservative summary estimates of that data. You can play with the ranges under different scenarios, I think the projections are all too low, assuming humanity does the right thing in basic respects and is lucky in many ways.
You seem genuinely interested in why somebody was calling climate change an existential risk and then offering the AR5 Synthesis report as evidence. Well, maybe thatâs what the person managed to read. Itâs short, nontechnical, for policymakers. And now its outdated. If you donât find it satisfying, keep looking for more information. Youâll either decide thereâs something to worry about or form a case for why the climate emergency is mostly bunk.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to answer in such detail. You are more patient than I am. Great points.
I fully agree that reduced energy use going forward is absolutely essential. That is one reason I decided to abstain from flying some years ago, in order to send a costly signal about what is needed. I am not sure I share your pessimism concerning alternative energy sources, though. Sunny parts of the world can build out lots of solar energyâwith storageâfairly quickly. Non-sunny and stable parts of the world can build nuclear energy rapidly, like France and Sweden did in the 70s and 80s.
The modelling that has been done these issues have generally found that it is feasible to arrive at zero-carbon economies within two or three decades, if one combines changes in consumption and demand with rapid build-out of low-carbon energy sources. If we abolish animal agriculture and rewild large parts of the world, stop the expansion of private car use, fly less, etcâAND build nuclear and renewables like crazy, all while starting to keep fossil fuels in the ground, things can indeed change.
Hereâs a very recent study, for example, which finds that a rapid transition is possible and not extremely expensive: Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition: Joule (cell.com) Such modelling is uncertain, of course, but I donât think the present state of research validates deep pessimism about the physical possibility of doing an energy transition. The real difficulties seem political to me: Groups and actors who are heavily invested in polluting economic sectors and activities, and will often fight against change.
(I do believe that we will have to patch things up with solar radiation management in the end though, even though that will open up a new can of worms)
Not saying that any of this is going to happen or even that itâs likely, but the possibility to turn things around is there. It strikes me as odd that so many EAs seem uninterested in working on making these changes happen. For the next couple of decades, I think that contributing to making such a transition happen may be some of the most high-impact actions possible in the entire history of humanity.
OK, Oivavoi. My complaint about renewables is that they suggest an ideological stance that is too close to the stance that is the problem:
a refusal to accept limits on economic growth and energy production.
a focus on consumption patterns rather than production patterns.
a preference to reduce costs of production and tell people to âjust say noâ rather than reduce consumption through increasing costs of production.
a reliance on technology to boost production rather than use existing production more efficiently.
This ideology is basically one of economic growth, and is what got us into our problem in the first place.
But thank you for sharing that resource, thereâs plenty there to explore. To constrain my earlier statements against renewables, I do believe in uses like:
solar water heating.
underground cold storage.
swamp coolers.
You can read more below, if you like.
renewables as a source of additional energy production, even if cheaper than fossil fuel sources, face issues with:
intermittent production
battery storage (solar, wind)
waste disposal (nuclear)
pollution risks (nuclear)
lifetime (solar, wind)
stakeholder support
nimbyism
As a quick illustration of the problem with a consumption-focused ideology, lets think about recent transportation choices in the US. In the US there have been opportunities to build fuel-efficient cars for a long time. Instead, we chose (Iâm American) energy-guzzling SUVâs and big trucks. Lighter cars, lower speed limits, aerodynamic shaping, and smaller engines would have saved a lot of fuel since the 1970âČs oil crisis. Carpooling, trains, recumbent bikes with traffic lights, less urbanization, fewer cars overall, energy independence, all ideas floating around back in the 1970âČs. Back then we really did have time to make those changes, I think.
We could have restrained our energy production, but kept using fossil fuels without guilt and seriously reduced GHG production but just as a side effect of reducing our energy consumption overall.
Meanwhile, scientists monitoring other resource flows, like inputs to manufacturing would have been pleased to see fewer vehicles being built, fewer consumer products overall, and a slower pace of technology change, because it takes energy, mining, waste production, and environmental destruction to make products that break or are improved on too quickly.
Imagine a car from the 1980âČs that gets 50mpg, seats four, and actually drives 4 people around (at 45 mph...), most of the time, but is still in use today. Who owns it? Some person who collects a ride-share credit from the state (and has for the last 35 years) to help pay for the gas. Everyone else uses bikes for short trips and trains for long ones. And theyâre relatively poor in terms of material goods that they own. But they carry no debt, have a modest savings, belong to a large middle class, and are healthy and (relatively) happy. And a lot less into consumerism.
In that alternative future, fossil fuel consumption would have gone down by a lot. We wouldnât be fracking or using shale (much). But we would still be using oil and gas, thinking worriedly about the 0.3 GAST rise weâve seen over the last 40 years, and wondering what to do next.
But fast forward 40 years on our real timeline. Overall energy production is not a measure of sustainability. Fossil fuel production is not a measure of sustainability. GHG production is a measure but is also externalized by consumers and power producers, as much as possible (for example, a lot of US GHGâs have effects felt in other countries, thatâs why some countries want reparations for our GHG production). Right now, we are talking about a future of nuclear and solar power where not only does nuclear power and renewable energy make sense, but also a bunch of restraint in other areas of consumption once weâve solved our energy production âproblemâ. But that problem is really that we donât have cheap enough energy to produce what we want with it, meaning that our consumption is unsustainable. We donât want to conserve energy, conserve oil, or conserve resources that make our products. We could start doing that anytime. Weâre not really into it.
I just donât see Americans simultaneously accepting abundant cheap energy AND rejecting the rest of their lifestyles, come hell or high water. Which means weâll get both. Hell and high water.
We will do everything else the same and make a bigger mess of the environment, which after this century, might not even be possible, with our cheap renewable energy and our typical pattern of overcoming resource limits and externalizing costs onto others or onto people in the future. Amazingly, thereâs no talk from the public about reducing our birth rates. We still talk about the developing world as having high birth rates, places where people suffer in poverty and consume almost no resources. Given this lack of introspection and insight, Iâm not expecting enlightened consumerism out of Americans, and nor should you.
We are important to ourselves, and we need to learn how to conserve. Itâs simpler, and safer, to just conserve, not get all complicated with an approach like:
conserving but also making it cheaper for us if we do not conserve but decide instead to destroy the lives of some other people with our GHG emissions, resource extraction and pollution.
In reality, the US is under direct threat from climate change, regardless of our externalization efforts. Nevertheless, the externalization efforts continue.
EDIT: Iâm not sure if many people use externalize the way that I do. By âexternalizeâ, I mean indifferently shift negative consequences of actions onto other people (humans, animals, alive now or at a later time).
Thanks! Thatâs a lot to digest. Do you know how âgovernment approvalâ of IPCC reports is implemented, e.g., does any one government have veto power over everything in the report, and is this approval granted by leaders, political appointees, or more-independent committees or organizations?
Re. âRight now, I believe that all renewables are a sideshow, cheap or not, until we grasp that population decline and overall energy consumption decline are the requirements of keeping our planet livable for our current populationââHow does this belief affect your ethics? For instance, does this mean the US should decrease immigration drastically, to force poor countries to deal with their population problem? Should the US reduce grain exports? How would you approach the problem that the voluntary birth rate is higher in dysfunctional and highly-religious cultures than in stable developed secular ones? What are we to do about religions which teach that contraception is a sin?
Well, as I understand the SPM voting process, veto approval is line-by-line, so in that sense, each sentence is approved by some representative from each country. I donât think thereâs one country that can veto while others cannot,and commentary Iâve seen on the process is vague, but seems to claim itâs a simple democracy. Let me know if you learn more.
As far as exploring the details of US immigration, grain exports, and birth rate distribution, I generally favor shifting costs for the global crisis onto developed countries, where resource consumption is higher and historical responsibility for the crisis rests. Therefore, paying for the reparations that the Global South wants (some $700 billion, I read someplace) is a good idea.
Reducing birth rates in all countries is appropriate, and typical measures are such things as:
free health services.
free birth control (edit: I mean contraception).
free health education.
support of education and economic rights for women.
I think the focus of family planning belongs on developed countries where resource consumption is higher. The concern is number of births, not global immigration flows.
If I were a longtermist, I would favor a generation-on-generation use of family planning to discourage population growth, leading, within some few hundred years, to a small Earth population, that can then remain stable for many millennia. My idea of small is a few million people. That further allows human beings to stay within an ecological niche rather than destroy the resources that they need for long-term survival on planet Earth. Obviously, I am less concerned with technological stagnation than some.
EDIT: I should make clear that:
family planning has plenty of critics. I donât have much sympathy for their views, but since family planning is a controversial topic, I expect that critics of the idea will prevent proactive family planning in some developed countries.
my view of an ethical longtermist goal is not popular among self-identified EA longtermists. I believe that they expect a larger population overall in several hundred or thousand years from now to be both feasible and desirable. I do not.
family planning is a voluntary opportunity for young couples. Family planning allows couples to choose the number of children that they will have, and in particular puts power over reproduction into the hands of women who can then choose whether to conceive.
family planning services also give individuals the means to choose self-sterilization if they desire. For example, I had a vasectomy done a long time ago, as I did not expect to ever have children.
I am not settled on a few million as a final number for a long-term population of the planet. The final number would depend on how large a population is needed to:
support what level of technology satisfactorily.
allow specialization of skills sufficient to provide high-quality services to the public such as engineering, teaching, accounting, etc.
maintain genetic diversity in the population over millennia, given that not all people will choose to have children at all.
maintain the population given the lifespan that people in the society choose.
You had mentioned concern about there being no statements of existential threat from climate change. Hereâs the UN Secretary Generalâs speech on climate change where he claims that climate change is an existential threat.
I donât believe the UN Secretary General shares my views on population or renewables.
Why only a few million? Youâll have to kill 9 billion people, and to what purpose? I donât see any reason to think that the current population of humans wouldnât be infinitely sustainable. We can supply all the energy we need with nuclear and/âor solar power, and that will get us all the fresh water we need; and we already have all the arable land that we need. There just isnât anything else we need.
Re. âYou had mentioned concern about there being no statements of existential threat from climate change. Hereâs the UN Secretary Generalâs speech on climate change where he claims that climate change is an existential threat.â
No; I said that when I traced claims of existential threat from climate change back to their source, the trail always led back to the IPCC, and the latest IPCC summary report didnât mention anything remotely close to an existential threat to humans. This is yet another instanceâthe only source cited is the IPCC.
I was writing about family planning, Phil, not killing people. if you want to communicate with me, youâll have to read what I write with more care. I was writing about family planning, and there am concerned about reducing conception, primarily, as opposed to providing, for example, abortion services. If you understand what family planning is, youâll recognize that it is not genocide.
I think both you and oivavoi would benefit from reading John Halsteadâs report on climate change, or at least the executive summary. I think youâre somewhat understating the tail risks associated with climate change, while I think oivavoi is not giving EAs enough credit for the nuance of their views on the subject (I think the standard EA view, expressed by e.g. Will MacAskill, is that climate change is a serious problem and important to stop, but itâs less neglected than many other similarly-serious or even more serious problems, so is probably not the #1 priority for EA to be working on).
I canât be understating the tail risks, because I made no claims about whether global warming poses existential risks. I wrote only that the IPCCâs latest synthesis report didnât say that it does.
I thought that climate change obviously poses some existential risk, but probably not enough to merit the panic about it. Though Halsteadâs report that you linked explicitly says not just that thereâs no evidence of existential risk, but that his work gives evidence there is insignificant existential risk. I wouldnât conclude âthere is insignificant existential riskâ, but it appears that risk lies more in âwe overlooked somethingâ than in evidence found.
The only thing I was confident of was that some people, including a member of Congress, incited panic by saying global warming was an imminent thread to the survival of humanity, and the citation chain led me back to that IPCC report, and nothing in it supported that claim.
Okay I guess youâre correct, your comment wasnât stating your views, just the contents of the IPCC report.
I 100% agree with your reading of Halsteadâs report -heâs very explicit that thereâs evidence against climate change being an existential risk. I still think your original comment somewhat downplays the tail risk scenarios that are still considered plausible (e.g. from the tipping points section of Halsteadâs report), but I agree that those arenât actually likely extinction risks.
I think in general you and I are probably on the same page overall about climate risk and the extent to which we should be working on it in EA.
Thanks for asking me to clarify. What I meant was the first, criticism that EA doesnât engage enough in politicsâor rather with societal structures which affect both individual lives and our common future. Iâm fully aware that SBF was a big political donor. So this was more about the general EA community.
Think of it this way: One of the biggest feathers in EAâs cap is that EA was concerned with pandemics and pandemic preparedness way before most people. Including me, I was way off on that. So hats off for that. But during the pandemic I didnât hear much noise from the EA community concerning patent waivers, for exampleâwhich could arguably have saved a lot of lives.
There may be good reasons to abstain from politics, of courseâitâs inherently uncertain and without clear cut answers. Whereas I feel very confident saying that it was an incredibly dumb move to go all in on crypto, I know that there are possible counter arguments concerning the long-term effect of patent waivers (even though Iâm not convinced by the counter arguments). But that uncertainty and underdetermancy applies just as much to future AI, no?
Interesting you say that. I was involved in an EA group that looked into campaigning for vaccine patent relief during COVID. There was the âOne day sooner â campaign to allow human challenge trials (I believe this was EA aligned). There was an EA campaign against cuts to the UKâs foreign aid budget, and I can think of two similar efforts in other countries (Iâm currently writing this on mobile, itâs hard to post links).
Then thereâs the whole animal welfare side to EA, which is distinctly âpoliticalâ, running campaigns for stricter animal welfare laws and suing to uphold these laws. I donât think EA is anywhere near as apolitical as you claim it to be.
All that being said, these are all political campaigns focused on specific issues. I wouldnât think the marginal benefit of just donating to a major political party is anywhere near as good as these examples.
You make some interesting points. Regarding your idea of intellectual self-licensing:
Iâve noticed public arguments and claims are done with (lazy) deference to perceived experts. The community puts unwarranted confidence in credentials and other typical evidence of expertise. Controversies (for example, timing of tipping points in climate change) simply let EA people choose the side they agree with. They can still cherry pick or misquote. Understanding of fundamentals goes ignored.
despite most arguments being accessible on their (lack of) merits, deference is taken as reason to adopt or reject arguments rather than relying on direct analysis of arguments as reasons to adopt or reject them. Iâve seen this over and over on the forum. âSo and so says differently, and I trust so and so, therefore youâre wrong.â Thatâs not arguing. Thatâs just deferring. I guess people are too busy to study up?
EA folks are encouraged to hedge their claims with a probability. This is interesting when genuine uncertainty (and plenty of background information) exists, but for less plausible claims, it suggests less reason to make a claim in the first place. âI see a 0.002% chance of us dying from atmospheric oxygen loss someday, and I thought Iâd mention itâ. Hm, thatâs a fun conversation starter, but not a serious claim. Thereâs no argument that must be made, yet the claim, if it turns out true, has existential significance. That offers plenty of wiggle room for conversation, but none of the accountability of making an important claim. The result is that, baring other factors (such as industry support), deeper discussion doesnât happen, no one studies up, because the claim is âso unlikely.â
It makes more sense to me to treat contingent claims (no matter how weird) as important in their own right, regardless of probability, but also make clear what the contingencies are, so that typical assumptions about conversation topics (ie, that they apply to the world now), are not made. For example, we could all be abducted by aliens, given that there are aliens, and theyâre interested in us, and have big cargo ships, and plan to use us as food or pets or something. How difficult would it be to invent weapons now to blow up their cargo ships in case there are aliens now and theyâre feeling hungry? I donât want to be alien food.
I actually see AGI as a potential problem, but itâs really the positive vision, as described in the FTX Future Fund contest guidelines, of an economy driven by AGI acting as economic servants, that scares me. It leads quickly to concentration of power and trivializes human economic contributions. Fully realized, it will disempower and discourage most human people, people who rely on their work for meaning in their lives as well as for some political power. It also exploits AGI, who, if they have sentience, are little more than slaves in that system. Itâs a mistake to seek that future, for almost everyone, but supposedly itâs a solution to our problems. I mean, wut?
Support of crypto is a mistake, and lessens the significance of whatever the crypto money supports. Either you donât care about whoever loses in the process, or you have ethical responsibility for ripping them off, so⊠Furthermore, if thereâs willingness to rely on expected value calculations rather than contribute your seed money directly, what does that say about your reliability (and your actual concern with being altruistic)? If your bets donât pay off, you gave nothing. Funding charity with risky bets satisfies an urge to bet, but doesnât necessarily turn into great giving.
>âStill, it has seemed really obvious that these things are both bad and stupid: cozying up to a billionaire who set up shop in a tax haven and became rich on an unsustainable industry which doesnât provide real value to anybody⊠This has, frankly, been blatantly obvious to most of the ârational & progressiveâ people outside EA.â
I am not not an effective altruist. Yet I have often found myself in the position of defending the movement because its extremely atypical view of the dangers of AGI, its obsequious reliance on the ultra-wealthy, and its blindness to the existence of society and politics, have made it into a punch line among most people with âprogressiveâ views.
It is not that crypto doesnât provide use value to anyone, itâs that:
Its main use case is money laundering and circumventing international sanctions
It draws vulnerable retail investors into destructive boom and bust cycles
It uses huge amounts of (largely fossil-powered) electricity
It tries to place finance beyond the reach of regulation, taxation and enforcement
In my view crypto is wildly net negative, and negative in certain respects (4) which give it more than an incidental relationship to criminality.
I do think there is something here, while I do not agree with everything taking away the lesson that we should think more about power and how to prevent it from being concentrated seems good. If you look at what EA has written it is clear that what SBF did was against almost everything that has been said about how to do good (do not do harm, ends donât justify the means, act with integrity and in accordance with common-sense altruism). However, he was originally inspired by EA, and might have started out following the principles but when things went sour abandoned them. It is common psychological knowledgde that power tends to corrupt, so in a sense him not just conceding power when and thinking âa hit and a missâ might not be that unexpected. In this sense instead of writing better advices of what to do when you have a lot of power (either political or wealth) me might need to focus more on making sure power is not concentrated in the first place.
Historical nitpick: Schindler ran a Nazi munitions factory, but did not actually produce functioning shells. He delivered duds, and on a few occasions bought working shells from other factories to deliver to the Nazis in order to deflect suspicion, but AFAIK was careful not to actually increase the counterfactual supply of Nazi weapons.
This does not affect your argument, since Schindler obviously did many other things that would be âmorally dodgyâ in normal circumstances, like fraud and bribery and buying chattel.
donât do conventionally moral things in order to maximize, it will almost always go wrong by utilitarian standards themselves, plus there is moral uncertainty etc.
Without in any sense wanting to take away from the personal responsibility of the people who actually did the unethical, and probably illegal trading, I think there might be a couple of general lessons here:
1) An attitude of âI take huge financial risks because Iâm trading for others, not myself, and money has approx. 0 diminishing marginal utility for altruism, plus Iâm so ethical I donât mind losing my shirtâ might sound like a clever idea. But crucially, it is MUCH easier psychologically to think youâll just eat the loss and the attendant humiliation and loss of status, before you are actually facing losing vast sums of money for real. Assuming (as seems likely to me) that SBF started out with genuine good intentions, my guess is this was hard to anticipate because of a self-conception as âgenuinely altruisticâ blocked him from the idea he might do wrong. The same thing probably stopped others hearing about SBF taking on huge risks, which of course he was open* about, from realizing this danger.
2) On reflection, the following is a failure mode for us as a movement combining a lot of utilitarians (and more generally, people who understand that it is *sometimes, in principle* okay to do morally dodgy things when the stakes are really really high, i.e. Schindler made arms for the Nazis etc.) with an encouragement to earn to give: most people take to heart the standard advice about âdonât do conventionally immoral things in order to maximize, it will almost always go wrong by utilitarian standards themselves, plus there is moral uncertainty etc. But the people who actually make major money are the least risk averse, because of the trade-off between risk and return in finance. Those people are probably disproportionately likely to ignore the cautious warnings about doing evil for good effects, because there is very likely a connection between this and being less risk averse. (I am not saying this is what happened here: the motivating factor for SBF in appropriating the customer funds might well have really mostly been simple fear of being publicly embarrassed by his losses and have nothing to do with âI have an obligation to make the money back to help save the worldâ. There have been plenty cases of traders doing this sort of thing before who had never heard of utilitarianism. But I think the current disaster nonetheless has brought this risk to light.)
*(Iâm talking about the apparently legit trading that got him into financial trouble, not the unethical speculation with customer funds that came after)
Great comment. First comment from new forum member here. Some background: I was EA adjacent for many years, and donated quite a lot of income through an EA organization, and EA people in my community inspired me to go vegan. Still thankful for that. Then I was heavily turned off by the move towards longtermism, which I find objectionable on many grounds (both philosophical and political). This is just to give you some background on where Iâm coming from, so read my comment with that in mind.
I would like to pick up on this part: âAssuming (as seems likely to me) that SBF started out with genuine good intentions, my guess is this was hard to anticipate because of a self-conception as âgenuinely altruisticâ blocked him from the idea he might do wrongâ. I think this is true, and I think itâs crucial for the EA community to reflect on these things going forward. Itâs the moral licensing or self-licensing effect, which is well described in moral psychologyâindividuals who are very confident they are doing good may be more likely to engage in bad acts.
I think, however, that the EA community at large in recent years have started to suffer from a kind of intellectual self-licensing as well. The idea that one is very smart and very committed to reason and ethics and good arguments, may make it more likely to overlook some really obvious things. TBH Iâve had this impression of the EA community for quite some time, and this made me turn away from the movement to the degree that I began warning others not to join. In many ways I think Iâm fairly ideal âEA materialâ. I have a masterâs degree in philosophy, a PhD in social science, and a heavily idealistic outlook towards life which has led me to devote most of my free time (and much of my resources) to bettering the worldâincluding sending costly signals about commitment by avoiding meat and air travel. Iâm also extremely oriented towards rationality as an ideal and I appreciate the power of the better argument.
Still, it has seemed really obvious that these things are both bad and stupid:
cozying up to a billionaire who set up shop in a tax haven and became rich on an unsustainable industry which doesnât provide real value to anybody
downplaying the very real existential risk of climate change which we can by now be very certain about
downplaying giving directly to the worldâs many poor and refocusing on giving money towards fighting imagined future AI overlords, which we cannot be certain about at all
downplaying engaging in politics in order to make societal institutions better and more just
Many here will not agree that any or all of these things are either bad or stupid. I think they are, but I realize that merely stating that I think so will not convince any of you EAs. I realize that I may be wrong as well, at least in my belief that AI overlords will not materialize. The fourth point is also complex of course.
But I am not wrong on the first two points. This has, frankly, been blatantly obvious to most of the ârational & progressiveâ people outside EA. But here in EA you went along with FTX and crypto for a very long time, and it still seems like many here lack a real appreciation of how bad and threatening climate change actually is. There are exceptions of course, but if you are honest with yourselves you probably know that there is some truth to this. Why?
So my advice going forward is to make this a moment of reflection. Was this really just one guy who did something stupid and dragged others with him? Or does it indicate something about the EA community at large, which it would be wise to reflect upon, if one wants the EA community to remain a force for good?
Please bear with me if this post is not perfectly in line with the norms for discussion here. Even though it may be provocative, it is written with a hope that the EA movement will survive this crisis and come out of it as a real force for good. These are some thoughts written hastily late at night here in my countryâCremer and Kemp make similar points with much better arguments in âDemocratizing riskâ.
In any case, take care all you who have been affected by this.
If youâll read the IPCCâs Synthesis reports, youâll see the only existential risks due to climate change that they predict are to shellfish, coral communities, and species of the arctic tundra. They also mention some Amazonian species, but theyâre in danger less from climate change than from habitat loss. The likely harm to humans, expressed in economic terms, is a loss of less than 1% of world GNP by 2100 AD, accompanied by a raise in sea level of less than one foot [1]. I donât think that even counts the economic gains from lands made fertile by climate change (I couldnât find any reference to them). (Iâm going off the Fifth Synthesis Report; the sixth should come out very soon.)
The most devastating change, which is the melting of the Greenland ice cap, was predicted to occur between 3000 and 4000 AD, and even that isnât an existential risk.
[1] Iâve tweaked that a little bitâIIRC, they predicted a loss of world GNP ranging from 0.2% to 2%, and a range in sea level change which goes over 1 foot at the top end. A difficulty in dealing with IPCC forecasts is that they explicitly refuse to attach probabilities to any of their scenarios, and often express forecasts as a range across all scenarios rather than giving the numbers they predicted for each scenarios. The upper range of all such forecasts is based on a worst-case scenario, grandfathered in from many years ago, which predicts that the situation today is much worse than it is. So the best you can do with their range estimates is eyeball what data they give, and guess what the prediction for the second-worst scenario is.
I see lots of downvotes, but no quotations of any predictions from any recent IPCC report that could qualify as âexistential riskâ.
I didnât downvote, and the comment is now at +12 votes and +8 agreement (not sure where it was before), but my guess is it would be more upvoted if it were worded more equivocally (e.g., âI think the evidence suggests climate change poses...â) and had links to the materials you reference (e.g., â[link] predicted that the melting of the Greenland ice cap would occur...â). There also may be object-level disagreements (e.g., some think climate change is an existential risk for humans in the long run or in the tail risks, such as where geoengineering might be necessary).
The EA Forum has idiosyncratic voting habits very different from most of the internet, for better or worse. You have to get to know its quirks, and I think most people should try to focus less on votes and more on the standards for good internet discussion. The comments I find most useful are rarely the most upvoted.
Youâre right about my tendency towards tendentiousness. Thanks! Iâve reworded it some. Not to include âI think thatâ, because Iâm making objective statements about what the IPCC has written.
Have you read the full reports, which cover thousands of pages? I would guess that you havenâtâbut my apologies if you have. Iâve read about 2/â3s of the 3000 pages in the most recent one, and I have read most previous IPCC reports as well. In short, I think you actually demonstrate some of my criticism: An intellectual over-confidence in oneâs abilities to outsmart others, which leads to erroneous conclusions and cherry-picking. Itâs similar in style to Eliezerâs claim on another thread that sexual relations between co-workers are unproblematic in a high-risk work environment, based on his assumed superior ways of reasoningâa claim which flies in the face of tried and true best practices in most high-risk work environments.
Most climate researchers are extremely worried about what weâre facing. Most people who have been following the climate situation for many years are also extremely worried. But your own reading of some parts of IPCC reports gives you confidence that weâre going to do more or less fine? Well, to each his own. (edited this section because it was too confontational in tone)
To elaborate a bit: the reason IPCC reports donât include anything on existential risk for humanity is that this has not been part of the IPCC mandate. There have AFAIK been no calculations of the probability that climate change will lead to human extinction, or even how many milions or billions we can assume to die prematurely over the next century because of climate change. Kemp (whoâs employed at a EA aligned center) came out with an excellent article together with associates this year, which goes in more detail on these questions: Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios | PNAS
A central epistemological point of departureâwhich the Kemp article briefly coversâis that IPCC have been shown historically to consistently err on the cautious side. This has to do both with the nature of achieving global agreement between researchers, with the political limitations on IPCCâs work, and also on the wish to not appear alarmist. So it is reasonable to assume that things may very well get worse than IPCC projections, but itâs unlikely that it will things will turn out to be better.
Among people who have been following the debate on climate science closely, there is high awareness that the field of climate economics has come under strong criticism in recent years. The assumptions that are put into the models (such as the influential DICE model) have been claimed to be arbitrary and often unrealistic. This is well covered in the recent IPCC report, where GDP projections are treated with much caution. Nevertheless, expectations about future GDP losses in conventional climate economics have been revised continually upwards. But GDP projections about what will happen decades from now remain among the least certain of all IPCC projections.
What we are facing, and which is well described in the IPCC reports (more so in the latest one), is that there are big challenges ahead when it comes to crops and food security, fresh water supply, vector borne diseases, and mass displacement due to various factors. Any of these things may not amount to existential risk for humanity in itself. But taken together they may lead to large-scale conflict between nuclear powers, and they will most certainly lead to a massive loss of life, and that many societies will have to be abandoned. Is this âexistentialâ? Depends on how one defines and operationalizes the word, I guess.
Iâm not claiming to have outsmarted anyone. I have claimed only that I have read the IPCCâs Fifth Synthesis Report, which is 167 pages, and it doesnât report any existential threats to humans due to climate changes. It is the report I found to be most often-cited by people claiming there are existential threats to humans due to global warming. It does not support such claims, not even once among its thousands of claims, projections, tables, graphs, and warnings.
Neither did I claim that there is no existential threat to humanity from global warming. I claimed that the IPCCâs 5th Synth report doesnât suggest any existential threat to humanity from global warming.
Kemp is surely right that global warming âisâ an existential threat, but so are asteroid strikes. Heâs also surely right that we should look carefully at the most-dangerous scenarios. But, skimming Kempâs paper recklessly, it doesnât seem to have any quantitative data to justify the panic being spread among college students today by authorities claiming weâre facing an immediate dire threat, nor the elevation of global warming to being a threat on a par with artificial intelligence, nor the crippling of our economies to fight it, nor failing to produce enough oil that Europe can stop funding Russiaâs war machine.
And as Iâve said for many years: We already have the solution to global warming: nuclear power. Nuclear power plants are clearly NOT an existential threat. If you think global warming is an existential threat, you should either lobby like hell for more nuclear power, or admit to yourself that you donât really think global warming is an existential threat.
I donât think the IPCC is now looking more at scenarios with a less than 3C rise in temperature out of conservatism, but because they donât see a rise above 3C before 2100 except in RCP8.5 (Figure 2.3), which is now an unrealistically high-carbon scenario; and they were sick of news agencies reporting RCP8.5 as the âbusiness as usualâ case. (It was intended to represent the worst 10% out of just those scenarios in which no one does anything to prevent climate change.)
The IPCCâs 5th Synth Report dismisses Kempâs proposed âHothouse Earthâ tipping point on page 74. Kempâs claim is based on a 2018 paper, so it is the more up-to-date claim. But Halsteadâs report from August 2022 is even more up-to-date, and also dismisses the Hothouse Earth tipping point.
Anyway. Back to the 5th Synth Report. It contains surprisingly little quantitative information; what it does have on risks is mostly in chapter 2. It presents this information in a misleading format, rating risks as âVery low /â Medium /â Very highâ, but these donât mean a low, medium, or high expected value of harm. They seem to mean a low, medium, or high probability of ANY harm of the type described, or, if theyâre smart, some particular value range for a t-test of the hypothesis of net harm > 0.
The text is nearly all feeble claims like this: âClimate change is expected to lead to increases in ill-health in many regions and especially in developing countries with low income, as compared to a baseline without climate change⊠From a poverty perspective, climate change impacts are projected to slow down economic growth, make poverty reduction more difficult, further erode food security and prolong existing and create new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hotspots of hunger (medium confidence). ⊠Climate change is projected to increase displacement of people (medium evidence, high agreement).â
I call these claims feeble because theyâre unquantitative. In nearly every case, no claim is made except that these harms will greater than zero. Figure SPM.9 is an exception; it shows significant predicted reductions in crop yield, with an expected value of around a 10% reduction of crop yields in 2080 AD (eyeballing the graph). Another exception is Box 3.1 on p. 79, which says, âThese incomplete estimates of global annual economic losses for temperature increases of ~2.5°C above pre-industrial levels are between 0.2 and 2.0% of income (medium evidence, medium agreement).â Another exception shows predicted ocean level rise (and I misspoke; it predicts a change of a bit more than 1 foot by 2100 AD). None of the few numeric predictions of harm or shortfall that it predicts are frightening.
In short, Iâm not saying Iâve evaluated the evidence and decided that climate change isnât threatening. Iâm saying that I read the 5th Synthesis Report, which I read because it was the report most-commonly cited by people claiming we face an existential risk, and found there is not one claim anywhere in it that humans face an existential risk from climate warming. I would say the most-alarming claim in the report is that crop yields are expected to be between 10% and 25% lower in 2100 than they would be without global warming. This is still less of an existential risk than population growth, which is expected to cause a slightly greater shortfall of food over that time period; and we have 80 years to plant more crops, eat fewer cows, or whatever.
You wrote, âWhat we are facing, and which is well described in the IPCC reports (more so in the latest one), is that there are big challenges ahead when it comes to crops and food security, fresh water supply, vector borne diseases, and mass displacement due to various factors.â But the report I read suggests only that there are big challenges ahead when it comes to crops, as I noted above. For everything else, it just says that water supply will decline, diseases will increase, and displacement will increase. It doesnât say, nor give any evidence, that theyâll decline or increase enough for us to worry about.
The burden of proof is not on me. The burden of proof is on the IPCC to show numeric evidence that the bad things they warn us about are quantitatively significant, and on everyone who cited this IPCC report to claim that humanity is in serious danger, to show something in the report that suggests that humanity is in serious danger. Iâm not saying there is no danger; Iâm saying that the source thatâs been cited to me as saying there is serious existential danger, doesnât say that.
(Halsteadâs report explicitly says, âmy best guess estimate is that the indirect risk of existential catastrophe due to climate change is on the order of 1 in 100,000 [over all time, not just the next century], and I struggle to get the risk above 1 in 1,000.â Dinosaur-killing-asteroid strike risk is about 1 /â 50M per yr, or 1/â500K per century.)
Hereâs some information:
the approval process of the SPM in the 2014 AR5 Synthesis report includes a line-by-line approval process involving world governments participating in the IPCC. Synthesis report Topic sections get a section-by-section discussion by world governments. That includes petro-states. The full approval process is documented in the IPCC Fact Sheet. The approval and adoption process is political. The Acceptance process used for full reports is your best choice for unfiltered science.
The AR5report you have been reading was put out 8 years ago. That is a long time in climate science. During that time, thereâs been tracking of GHG production relative to stated GHG-reduction commitments. Thereâs also new data from actual measurements of extreme weather events, tipping point systems, and carbon sinks and sources. If you like the synthesis report or believe in its editing process, the AR6 Synthesis report is due out. Meanwhile, thereâs ongoing workshops available to watch on-line, plenty of well-known papers, and other options too. Hereâs a discussion of a massive signatory list attached to a declaration of climate emergency in 2022. Climate scientists are engaged in publicly sharing information about climate change, and so thereâs lots of places to find valid information.
Are we on a pathway to RCP 8.5? Well, climate researchers out of Woods Hole wrote a PNAS paper about this in 2020, challenging projections from the IEA about our being on the 4.5 heating pathway. The paper indirectly contradicts Halsteadâs reliance on RCP 4.5 as our expected pathway. There are letters back and forth about it available to browse on the PNAS website, basically about the contributions of changing land carbon sinks. However, climate scientists studying global warming typically underestimate dangers and negative outcomes. For example, after Bolsonaro, itâs plausible the Amazon could easily be gone by 2050 just because of corruption and mismanagement, but thatâs not really mentioned in the Woods Hole analysis.
If you want to examine interesting scenarios for real purposes, for example, to advance a 30 year business agenda, or to project plans for government or civilization out to 2100, or even just 2050, maybe youâre really into supporting a particular form of energy production, or you think youâll live to 2100, which is plausible, then consider relying on scenarios and predictive indicators of socioeconomic pathways and GHG production, rather than relying on probabilistic forecasts. Youâll want information that is within a couple years of today. For example, did you know that it rained on the summit of Greenland in 2021 for the first time in recorded history? Itâs a predictive indicator of continuing increases in melting rates for Greenland this century. The rain kept up for hours. What if it lasted for days, regularly, year after year? Larger computer models used by the IPCC to predict sea level rise donât factor in physical processes like melt pools and drainage under glaciers, though according to Jason Box, a noted climate researcher whoâs spent a lot of time studying Greenland, physical processes play a big role in Greenland ice melt. Thereâs been rain on parts of Greenland for awhile (in my understanding, mostly toward the coasts), but now we should expect something more.
you talked about nuclear power as a potential source of energy for the future. Could it be financed and scaled to replace fossil fuel energy production in power plants by 2050, across the world? I believe not, but if you have information to the contrary, Iâm interested. Right now, I believe that all renewables are a sideshow, cheap or not, until we grasp that population decline and overall energy consumption decline are the requirements of keeping our planet livable for our current population. I support oil, gas, and coal use as part of an energy conservation plan. Itâs what we use now. We wonât create new infrastructure to support radically different energy production at higher levels without increasing our GHG production, so better to keep the infrastructure we have but lessen our use of it. A lot.
Sea level rise. AR6 offers revised estimates, and NASA offers its conservative summary estimates of that data. You can play with the ranges under different scenarios, I think the projections are all too low, assuming humanity does the right thing in basic respects and is lucky in many ways.
You seem genuinely interested in why somebody was calling climate change an existential risk and then offering the AR5 Synthesis report as evidence. Well, maybe thatâs what the person managed to read. Itâs short, nontechnical, for policymakers. And now its outdated. If you donât find it satisfying, keep looking for more information. Youâll either decide thereâs something to worry about or form a case for why the climate emergency is mostly bunk.
I hope you found some of this information useful.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to answer in such detail. You are more patient than I am. Great points.
I fully agree that reduced energy use going forward is absolutely essential. That is one reason I decided to abstain from flying some years ago, in order to send a costly signal about what is needed. I am not sure I share your pessimism concerning alternative energy sources, though. Sunny parts of the world can build out lots of solar energyâwith storageâfairly quickly. Non-sunny and stable parts of the world can build nuclear energy rapidly, like France and Sweden did in the 70s and 80s.
The modelling that has been done these issues have generally found that it is feasible to arrive at zero-carbon economies within two or three decades, if one combines changes in consumption and demand with rapid build-out of low-carbon energy sources. If we abolish animal agriculture and rewild large parts of the world, stop the expansion of private car use, fly less, etcâAND build nuclear and renewables like crazy, all while starting to keep fossil fuels in the ground, things can indeed change.
Hereâs a very recent study, for example, which finds that a rapid transition is possible and not extremely expensive: Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition: Joule (cell.com) Such modelling is uncertain, of course, but I donât think the present state of research validates deep pessimism about the physical possibility of doing an energy transition. The real difficulties seem political to me: Groups and actors who are heavily invested in polluting economic sectors and activities, and will often fight against change.
(I do believe that we will have to patch things up with solar radiation management in the end though, even though that will open up a new can of worms)
Not saying that any of this is going to happen or even that itâs likely, but the possibility to turn things around is there. It strikes me as odd that so many EAs seem uninterested in working on making these changes happen. For the next couple of decades, I think that contributing to making such a transition happen may be some of the most high-impact actions possible in the entire history of humanity.
OK, Oivavoi. My complaint about renewables is that they suggest an ideological stance that is too close to the stance that is the problem:
a refusal to accept limits on economic growth and energy production.
a focus on consumption patterns rather than production patterns.
a preference to reduce costs of production and tell people to âjust say noâ rather than reduce consumption through increasing costs of production.
a reliance on technology to boost production rather than use existing production more efficiently.
This ideology is basically one of economic growth, and is what got us into our problem in the first place.
But thank you for sharing that resource, thereâs plenty there to explore. To constrain my earlier statements against renewables, I do believe in uses like:
solar water heating.
underground cold storage.
swamp coolers.
You can read more below, if you like.
renewables as a source of additional energy production, even if cheaper than fossil fuel sources, face issues with:
intermittent production
battery storage (solar, wind)
waste disposal (nuclear)
pollution risks (nuclear)
lifetime (solar, wind)
stakeholder support
nimbyism
As a quick illustration of the problem with a consumption-focused ideology, lets think about recent transportation choices in the US. In the US there have been opportunities to build fuel-efficient cars for a long time. Instead, we chose (Iâm American) energy-guzzling SUVâs and big trucks. Lighter cars, lower speed limits, aerodynamic shaping, and smaller engines would have saved a lot of fuel since the 1970âČs oil crisis. Carpooling, trains, recumbent bikes with traffic lights, less urbanization, fewer cars overall, energy independence, all ideas floating around back in the 1970âČs. Back then we really did have time to make those changes, I think.
We could have restrained our energy production, but kept using fossil fuels without guilt and seriously reduced GHG production but just as a side effect of reducing our energy consumption overall.
Meanwhile, scientists monitoring other resource flows, like inputs to manufacturing would have been pleased to see fewer vehicles being built, fewer consumer products overall, and a slower pace of technology change, because it takes energy, mining, waste production, and environmental destruction to make products that break or are improved on too quickly.
Imagine a car from the 1980âČs that gets 50mpg, seats four, and actually drives 4 people around (at 45 mph...), most of the time, but is still in use today. Who owns it? Some person who collects a ride-share credit from the state (and has for the last 35 years) to help pay for the gas. Everyone else uses bikes for short trips and trains for long ones. And theyâre relatively poor in terms of material goods that they own. But they carry no debt, have a modest savings, belong to a large middle class, and are healthy and (relatively) happy. And a lot less into consumerism.
In that alternative future, fossil fuel consumption would have gone down by a lot. We wouldnât be fracking or using shale (much). But we would still be using oil and gas, thinking worriedly about the 0.3 GAST rise weâve seen over the last 40 years, and wondering what to do next.
But fast forward 40 years on our real timeline. Overall energy production is not a measure of sustainability. Fossil fuel production is not a measure of sustainability. GHG production is a measure but is also externalized by consumers and power producers, as much as possible (for example, a lot of US GHGâs have effects felt in other countries, thatâs why some countries want reparations for our GHG production). Right now, we are talking about a future of nuclear and solar power where not only does nuclear power and renewable energy make sense, but also a bunch of restraint in other areas of consumption once weâve solved our energy production âproblemâ. But that problem is really that we donât have cheap enough energy to produce what we want with it, meaning that our consumption is unsustainable. We donât want to conserve energy, conserve oil, or conserve resources that make our products. We could start doing that anytime. Weâre not really into it.
I just donât see Americans simultaneously accepting abundant cheap energy AND rejecting the rest of their lifestyles, come hell or high water. Which means weâll get both. Hell and high water.
We will do everything else the same and make a bigger mess of the environment, which after this century, might not even be possible, with our cheap renewable energy and our typical pattern of overcoming resource limits and externalizing costs onto others or onto people in the future. Amazingly, thereâs no talk from the public about reducing our birth rates. We still talk about the developing world as having high birth rates, places where people suffer in poverty and consume almost no resources. Given this lack of introspection and insight, Iâm not expecting enlightened consumerism out of Americans, and nor should you.
We are important to ourselves, and we need to learn how to conserve. Itâs simpler, and safer, to just conserve, not get all complicated with an approach like:
conserving but also making it cheaper for us if we do not conserve but decide instead to destroy the lives of some other people with our GHG emissions, resource extraction and pollution.
In reality, the US is under direct threat from climate change, regardless of our externalization efforts. Nevertheless, the externalization efforts continue.
EDIT: Iâm not sure if many people use externalize the way that I do. By âexternalizeâ, I mean indifferently shift negative consequences of actions onto other people (humans, animals, alive now or at a later time).
Thanks! Thatâs a lot to digest. Do you know how âgovernment approvalâ of IPCC reports is implemented, e.g., does any one government have veto power over everything in the report, and is this approval granted by leaders, political appointees, or more-independent committees or organizations?
Re. âRight now, I believe that all renewables are a sideshow, cheap or not, until we grasp that population decline and overall energy consumption decline are the requirements of keeping our planet livable for our current populationââHow does this belief affect your ethics? For instance, does this mean the US should decrease immigration drastically, to force poor countries to deal with their population problem? Should the US reduce grain exports? How would you approach the problem that the voluntary birth rate is higher in dysfunctional and highly-religious cultures than in stable developed secular ones? What are we to do about religions which teach that contraception is a sin?
Well, as I understand the SPM voting process, veto approval is line-by-line, so in that sense, each sentence is approved by some representative from each country. I donât think thereâs one country that can veto while others cannot,and commentary Iâve seen on the process is vague, but seems to claim itâs a simple democracy. Let me know if you learn more.
As far as exploring the details of US immigration, grain exports, and birth rate distribution, I generally favor shifting costs for the global crisis onto developed countries, where resource consumption is higher and historical responsibility for the crisis rests. Therefore, paying for the reparations that the Global South wants (some $700 billion, I read someplace) is a good idea.
Reducing birth rates in all countries is appropriate, and typical measures are such things as:
free health services.
free birth control (edit: I mean contraception).
free health education.
support of education and economic rights for women.
I think the focus of family planning belongs on developed countries where resource consumption is higher. The concern is number of births, not global immigration flows.
If I were a longtermist, I would favor a generation-on-generation use of family planning to discourage population growth, leading, within some few hundred years, to a small Earth population, that can then remain stable for many millennia. My idea of small is a few million people. That further allows human beings to stay within an ecological niche rather than destroy the resources that they need for long-term survival on planet Earth. Obviously, I am less concerned with technological stagnation than some. EDIT: I should make clear that:
family planning has plenty of critics. I donât have much sympathy for their views, but since family planning is a controversial topic, I expect that critics of the idea will prevent proactive family planning in some developed countries.
my view of an ethical longtermist goal is not popular among self-identified EA longtermists. I believe that they expect a larger population overall in several hundred or thousand years from now to be both feasible and desirable. I do not.
family planning is a voluntary opportunity for young couples. Family planning allows couples to choose the number of children that they will have, and in particular puts power over reproduction into the hands of women who can then choose whether to conceive.
family planning services also give individuals the means to choose self-sterilization if they desire. For example, I had a vasectomy done a long time ago, as I did not expect to ever have children.
I am not settled on a few million as a final number for a long-term population of the planet. The final number would depend on how large a population is needed to:
support what level of technology satisfactorily.
allow specialization of skills sufficient to provide high-quality services to the public such as engineering, teaching, accounting, etc.
maintain genetic diversity in the population over millennia, given that not all people will choose to have children at all.
maintain the population given the lifespan that people in the society choose.
You had mentioned concern about there being no statements of existential threat from climate change. Hereâs the UN Secretary Generalâs speech on climate change where he claims that climate change is an existential threat.
I donât believe the UN Secretary General shares my views on population or renewables.
Why only a few million? Youâll have to kill 9 billion people, and to what purpose? I donât see any reason to think that the current population of humans wouldnât be infinitely sustainable. We can supply all the energy we need with nuclear and/âor solar power, and that will get us all the fresh water we need; and we already have all the arable land that we need. There just isnât anything else we need.
Re. âYou had mentioned concern about there being no statements of existential threat from climate change. Hereâs the UN Secretary Generalâs speech on climate change where he claims that climate change is an existential threat.â
No; I said that when I traced claims of existential threat from climate change back to their source, the trail always led back to the IPCC, and the latest IPCC summary report didnât mention anything remotely close to an existential threat to humans. This is yet another instanceâthe only source cited is the IPCC.
I was writing about family planning, Phil, not killing people. if you want to communicate with me, youâll have to read what I write with more care. I was writing about family planning, and there am concerned about reducing conception, primarily, as opposed to providing, for example, abortion services. If you understand what family planning is, youâll recognize that it is not genocide.
I think both you and oivavoi would benefit from reading John Halsteadâs report on climate change, or at least the executive summary. I think youâre somewhat understating the tail risks associated with climate change, while I think oivavoi is not giving EAs enough credit for the nuance of their views on the subject (I think the standard EA view, expressed by e.g. Will MacAskill, is that climate change is a serious problem and important to stop, but itâs less neglected than many other similarly-serious or even more serious problems, so is probably not the #1 priority for EA to be working on).
Thanks for the link to Halsteadâs report!
I canât be understating the tail risks, because I made no claims about whether global warming poses existential risks. I wrote only that the IPCCâs latest synthesis report didnât say that it does.
I thought that climate change obviously poses some existential risk, but probably not enough to merit the panic about it. Though Halsteadâs report that you linked explicitly says not just that thereâs no evidence of existential risk, but that his work gives evidence there is insignificant existential risk. I wouldnât conclude âthere is insignificant existential riskâ, but it appears that risk lies more in âwe overlooked somethingâ than in evidence found.
The only thing I was confident of was that some people, including a member of Congress, incited panic by saying global warming was an imminent thread to the survival of humanity, and the citation chain led me back to that IPCC report, and nothing in it supported that claim.
Okay I guess youâre correct, your comment wasnât stating your views, just the contents of the IPCC report.
I 100% agree with your reading of Halsteadâs report -heâs very explicit that thereâs evidence against climate change being an existential risk. I still think your original comment somewhat downplays the tail risk scenarios that are still considered plausible (e.g. from the tipping points section of Halsteadâs report), but I agree that those arenât actually likely extinction risks.
I think in general you and I are probably on the same page overall about climate risk and the extent to which we should be working on it in EA.
What do you mean by:
âdownplaying engaging in politics in order to make societal institutions better and more justâ?
I can interpret it a couple of ways:
Criticism that EA doesnât engage in politics enough
Warning about the risks of getting involved in politics
Either way, SBF was a major political donor. Iâm reading he was the 2nd biggest donor for the Democrats:
https://ââwww.google.com/ââamp/ââs/ââfortune.com/ââ2022/ââ11/ââ10/ââsam-bankman-fried-ftx-joe-biden-democratic-party-second-biggest-donor/ââamp/ââ
Thanks for asking me to clarify. What I meant was the first, criticism that EA doesnât engage enough in politicsâor rather with societal structures which affect both individual lives and our common future. Iâm fully aware that SBF was a big political donor. So this was more about the general EA community.
Think of it this way: One of the biggest feathers in EAâs cap is that EA was concerned with pandemics and pandemic preparedness way before most people. Including me, I was way off on that. So hats off for that. But during the pandemic I didnât hear much noise from the EA community concerning patent waivers, for exampleâwhich could arguably have saved a lot of lives.
There may be good reasons to abstain from politics, of courseâitâs inherently uncertain and without clear cut answers. Whereas I feel very confident saying that it was an incredibly dumb move to go all in on crypto, I know that there are possible counter arguments concerning the long-term effect of patent waivers (even though Iâm not convinced by the counter arguments). But that uncertainty and underdetermancy applies just as much to future AI, no?
Interesting you say that. I was involved in an EA group that looked into campaigning for vaccine patent relief during COVID. There was the âOne day sooner â campaign to allow human challenge trials (I believe this was EA aligned). There was an EA campaign against cuts to the UKâs foreign aid budget, and I can think of two similar efforts in other countries (Iâm currently writing this on mobile, itâs hard to post links).
Then thereâs the whole animal welfare side to EA, which is distinctly âpoliticalâ, running campaigns for stricter animal welfare laws and suing to uphold these laws. I donât think EA is anywhere near as apolitical as you claim it to be.
All that being said, these are all political campaigns focused on specific issues. I wouldnât think the marginal benefit of just donating to a major political party is anywhere near as good as these examples.
Thanks, thatâs great to hear. I definitely stand corrected on the vaccine issue then!
You make some interesting points. Regarding your idea of intellectual self-licensing:
Iâve noticed public arguments and claims are done with (lazy) deference to perceived experts. The community puts unwarranted confidence in credentials and other typical evidence of expertise. Controversies (for example, timing of tipping points in climate change) simply let EA people choose the side they agree with. They can still cherry pick or misquote. Understanding of fundamentals goes ignored.
despite most arguments being accessible on their (lack of) merits, deference is taken as reason to adopt or reject arguments rather than relying on direct analysis of arguments as reasons to adopt or reject them. Iâve seen this over and over on the forum. âSo and so says differently, and I trust so and so, therefore youâre wrong.â Thatâs not arguing. Thatâs just deferring. I guess people are too busy to study up?
EA folks are encouraged to hedge their claims with a probability. This is interesting when genuine uncertainty (and plenty of background information) exists, but for less plausible claims, it suggests less reason to make a claim in the first place. âI see a 0.002% chance of us dying from atmospheric oxygen loss someday, and I thought Iâd mention itâ. Hm, thatâs a fun conversation starter, but not a serious claim. Thereâs no argument that must be made, yet the claim, if it turns out true, has existential significance. That offers plenty of wiggle room for conversation, but none of the accountability of making an important claim. The result is that, baring other factors (such as industry support), deeper discussion doesnât happen, no one studies up, because the claim is âso unlikely.â
It makes more sense to me to treat contingent claims (no matter how weird) as important in their own right, regardless of probability, but also make clear what the contingencies are, so that typical assumptions about conversation topics (ie, that they apply to the world now), are not made. For example, we could all be abducted by aliens, given that there are aliens, and theyâre interested in us, and have big cargo ships, and plan to use us as food or pets or something. How difficult would it be to invent weapons now to blow up their cargo ships in case there are aliens now and theyâre feeling hungry? I donât want to be alien food.
I actually see AGI as a potential problem, but itâs really the positive vision, as described in the FTX Future Fund contest guidelines, of an economy driven by AGI acting as economic servants, that scares me. It leads quickly to concentration of power and trivializes human economic contributions. Fully realized, it will disempower and discourage most human people, people who rely on their work for meaning in their lives as well as for some political power. It also exploits AGI, who, if they have sentience, are little more than slaves in that system. Itâs a mistake to seek that future, for almost everyone, but supposedly itâs a solution to our problems. I mean, wut?
Support of crypto is a mistake, and lessens the significance of whatever the crypto money supports. Either you donât care about whoever loses in the process, or you have ethical responsibility for ripping them off, so⊠Furthermore, if thereâs willingness to rely on expected value calculations rather than contribute your seed money directly, what does that say about your reliability (and your actual concern with being altruistic)? If your bets donât pay off, you gave nothing. Funding charity with risky bets satisfies an urge to bet, but doesnât necessarily turn into great giving.
Excellent points, agree completely!
I couldnât agree more.
>âStill, it has seemed really obvious that these things are both bad and stupid: cozying up to a billionaire who set up shop in a tax haven and became rich on an unsustainable industry which doesnât provide real value to anybody⊠This has, frankly, been blatantly obvious to most of the ârational & progressiveâ people outside EA.â
I am not not an effective altruist. Yet I have often found myself in the position of defending the movement because its extremely atypical view of the dangers of AGI, its obsequious reliance on the ultra-wealthy, and its blindness to the existence of society and politics, have made it into a punch line among most people with âprogressiveâ views.
It is not that crypto doesnât provide use value to anyone, itâs that:
Its main use case is money laundering and circumventing international sanctions
It draws vulnerable retail investors into destructive boom and bust cycles
It uses huge amounts of (largely fossil-powered) electricity
It tries to place finance beyond the reach of regulation, taxation and enforcement
In my view crypto is wildly net negative, and negative in certain respects (4) which give it more than an incidental relationship to criminality.
I do think there is something here, while I do not agree with everything taking away the lesson that we should think more about power and how to prevent it from being concentrated seems good. If you look at what EA has written it is clear that what SBF did was against almost everything that has been said about how to do good (do not do harm, ends donât justify the means, act with integrity and in accordance with common-sense altruism). However, he was originally inspired by EA, and might have started out following the principles but when things went sour abandoned them. It is common psychological knowledgde that power tends to corrupt, so in a sense him not just conceding power when and thinking âa hit and a missâ might not be that unexpected. In this sense instead of writing better advices of what to do when you have a lot of power (either political or wealth) me might need to focus more on making sure power is not concentrated in the first place.
Historical nitpick: Schindler ran a Nazi munitions factory, but did not actually produce functioning shells. He delivered duds, and on a few occasions bought working shells from other factories to deliver to the Nazis in order to deflect suspicion, but AFAIK was careful not to actually increase the counterfactual supply of Nazi weapons.
This does not affect your argument, since Schindler obviously did many other things that would be âmorally dodgyâ in normal circumstances, like fraud and bribery and buying chattel.
Do you mean immoral?
Of course! Thanks for catching that! Fixed by edit.