Alexander

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Alexander 15 Mar 2017 4:28 UTC
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on: Open Thread #36
I am wondering if anyone has suggestions on where to volunteer one’s time (not money)

Has this been discussed much by EA people?

Alexander 25 Feb 2017 18:44 UTC
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on: Why I left EA
I felt like this post just said that the person had some idiosyncratic reasons they did not like EA, so they left. Well, great, but I’m not sure how that helps anyone else.

Here’s a thought I think is more useful. For a long time I have been talking anonymously about politics online. Lately I think this is pointless because it’s too disconnected from anything I can accomplish. The tractability of these issues for me is too low. So to encourage myself to think more efficiently, and to think mainly about issues I can do something about, I’m cutting out all anonymous online talk about big social issues. In general, I’m going to keep anonymous communications to a minimum.

Alexander 20 Feb 2017 0:43 UTC
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on: The Map of Impact Risks and Asteroid Defense
Upvoted. I also thought this might be relevant.

https://www.gwern.net/Colder%20Wars

Alexander 24 Feb 2016 19:11 UTC
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in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: Why don’t many effective altruists work on natural resource scarcity?
There may be non-scientific or engineering advances (maybe coming from economies of scale) that you can take of advantage of and I think an expert can predict that they will be taken advantage of and yes prices will drop.

In fact there seems a decent chance from what I just read online that engineering alone can push the price of solar below current energy prices.

So I have to scrap my claim about prices.

Maybe some folks even claim you can get to 90% renewables usage with engineering alone, although this guy is not an expert. But I don’t have much faith in this guy compared with the expert study he criticizes, so I think that renewables cannot exceed half our energy generation without either new science or big rises in energy costs. (This is not only because of prices but because of intermittency.) And I think the chance of never getting new science is at least 5%.

The problem seems to be that given the lag until engineering peters out, you are talking about extremely long bets. Maybe we might be dead. Even so, I think Stuart Armstrong’s claim that we will not be constrained by energy is suspect.

If you save all or most of the resource, I agree the cost will be huge. But if you only save a little, if it could somehow be done securely for ages, I’d say it’s worth it as insurance.

Added 2/25-This last statement assumes there are actually uses for fossil fuels where it would be economical to pay 1/(5%) = 20 times as much as today’s market price. I don’t know if there are, or whether they would still exist in a future world.

Alexander 24 Feb 2016 5:00 UTC
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in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: Why don’t many effective altruists work on natural resource scarcity?
Any useful model does not try to analyze growth hundreds or thousands of years in the future. It is not really important for this topic, but anyway you can read the link in my last message if you’re interested.

On the definition of scientific stagnation-a decent measure would be that productivity growth stops. (Although maybe better engineering can also improve productivity without better science, but I don’t know if this makes a difference.)

Why is there a need for a disaster? Maybe cheap renewable energy turns out to be too hard a problem. Maybe more big scientific discoveries in general is too hard. That would be a departure from trends but trends have not continued enough for us to have absolute confidence in them.

But I might not actually differ with your 1% figure by too much-I’d guess a 5% chance that renewable energy prices now are roughly as low as they will ever be.

Even if you say 1%, however, it’s not clear to me that enough is being done on this topic, since if that 1% materializes, the waste could be huge.

Alexander 22 Feb 2016 23:50 UTC
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in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: Why don’t many effective altruists work on natural resource scarcity?
[deleted]

Alexander 22 Feb 2016 19:18 UTC
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in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: Why don’t many effective altruists work on natural resource scarcity?
How low? And, the issue is not so much that stagnation will definitely happen but that other assumptions are random noise and we cannot do any better than to assume stagnation.

If we assume a high chance of stagnation, and also that all generations are morally equal, then I think we should cut back fossil fuel use, and employ it only when greatly needed, in order to maximize the total usefulness to future generations. That is, it’s better that 50 generations use ¹⁄₅₀ the fuel for vital, truly essential purposes rather than one generation burning everything.

Yes you can increase capital stock and devote more people. But under these assumptions, maybe more resource production, or extraction, is actually neutral or even bad.

One consideration is how much society would be harmed if we ran out of various resources. That’s the limiting case. Here’s a Quora question on fossil fuels that might be a start.

There seems to be a literature on intergenerational equity and exhaustible resources-probably there are answers there, if a person dug enough. :)

Alexander 22 Feb 2016 17:29 UTC
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in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: Why don’t many effective altruists work on natural resource scarcity?
I happen to be quite skeptical of predicting science. Do you know what sort of conclusion you would reach about this post’s topic if we assume that, for the foreseeable future, science will not advance much? Or, a case of scientific stagnation.

Alexander 22 Feb 2016 17:17 UTC
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on: The EA Newsletter & Open Thread—January 2016
Nice Vox article on climate change-I felt that the argument was robust. Climate change may not end civilization but if humans lose 5% of their vitality over the next 10,000 years, that is terrible.

Alexander 21 Feb 2016 22:08 UTC
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on: Why don’t many effective altruists work on natural resource scarcity?
Stuart Armstrong relies on the price of solar continuing to drop, right? Maybe it will, but I think we would be wise to plan for if it does not. Plus, what about storing the energy? Overall, I would just note that fossil fuels have been proved to be very useful but (without new tech) they will eventually become scarce. So I do think stockpiling them would be good if it could be done securely. But the storage time needed might be extremely long, maybe hundreds of years. On whether any sort of coordination or planning would be effective over that that long a period, I am not too optimistic.

Alexander 21 Feb 2016 6:46 UTC
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in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: Why don’t many effective altruists work on natural resource scarcity?
Does anyone know if futures markets for crude oil exist on more than a 10-year time frame?

Alexander 16 Feb 2016 19:19 UTC
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on: If tech progress might be bad, what should we tell people about it?
Even if growth were bad or neutral, there would have to be specific activities that were bad, and other activities that remained good. So how does this differ from just telling folks to look for ways that their society might hurt itself, or ways that they might be contributing to this antisocial behavior? There is a lot of disagreement about which behaviors, exactly, are antisocial.

I do worry that given enough time, industrialized countries will, um, self-destruct by using nuclear weapons. But in that case the remedy would probably not be giving up industrialization. That seems like too high a cost.

It’s also possible that growth may not be that important because growth is becoming much harder or impossible. But is it?

One point you make is that during the last 200 years growth has helped. Without strong evidence against it, it seems hard to make any assumption but that trends continue. So I think growth is good; growing societies will either be looked to and emulated by other groups that want the same rewards, or else powerful growing societies will just conquer other weaker ones. Either way, growth seems like the winning strategy.

Alexander 5 Feb 2016 22:16 UTC
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in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: Some considerations for different ways to reduce x-risk
Okay. Do you see any proxies (besides other people’s views) that, if they changed in our lifetime, might shift your estimates one way or the other?

Alexander 5 Feb 2016 21:52 UTC
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in reply to: Owen Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: Some considerations for different ways to reduce x-risk
Ok. This is not too related to this thread, but I wonder how big a risk a US-Russia (or equivalently-sized) nuclear war is in the next century. This article suggests between a 1% per year and 1% per decade risk, based on Martin Hellman’s work. Hellman prefers 1% per year. But a risk that high seems hard to square with how folks are acting now-you would think that if the risk was that high, the wealthiest and smartest folks in the world would avoid living in cities that are vulnerable to being blown up. I don’t think they are avoiding cities. So I am inclined to go with 1% per decade. This is still very uncertain.

2/9-Looks like the experts have spoken and so I raise that to 2% per decade. But it could still be 1% for a “total” war that destroys major cities.

2/13-Here is an even better report that gives about the same odds, but a 6.8% chance of a nuclear conflict anywhere in the world killing more people than in WWII. The highest odds seem to be from countries like Israel, Iran, North Korea, India, and Pakistan, as opposed to the great powers.

Alexander 5 Feb 2016 1:24 UTC
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in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: Some considerations for different ways to reduce x-risk
In your essay you place a lot of weight on other people’s opinions. I wonder, if for some reason you decided to disregard everyone else’s opinion, do you know if you would reach a different conclusion?

Alexander 4 Feb 2016 23:17 UTC
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in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Some considerations for different ways to reduce x-risk
In the first post, there is a link to a study. The estimate for all humanity dying in war within one century is 4% but the chance of them perishing in a nuclear war is 1%. This implies a 3% chance of extinction in a non-nuclear war. Am I reading this right? How would that make sense?

Alexander 4 Feb 2016 22:54 UTC
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on: Some considerations for different ways to reduce x-risk
Do you see any specific examples where reducing other types of existential risks could increase quality risks?

Alexander 4 Feb 2016 5:44 UTC
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in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: Some considerations for different ways to reduce x-risk
The effect of most disasters decays over time, but this does not mean that a disaster so big it ends humanity is not possible. So I don’t see why that most societal changes decay over time bears on whether large trajectory changes could happen. Maybe someday, there will be a uniquely huge change.

Also, I don’t understand why Bostrom mentions a “thought” that all sufficiently good civilizations will converge toward an optimal track. This seems like speculation.

Here is a concern I have. It may be that reducing many types of existential risk, like of nuclear war, could lower economic growth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/14/upshot/the-lack-of-major-wars-may-be-hurting-economic-growth.html?hpw&rref=

How do we know that by avoiding war we are not increasing another sort of existential risk, or the risk of permanent economic stagnation? Depending on how much we want to risk a total nuclear war, human development on Earth might have many permanent equilibria.

Alexander 11 Oct 2015 16:12 UTC
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in reply to: kbog’s comment on: EA Open Thread: October
I would agree there is more interest in war than international charity. On the other hand it could be that charity is limited in the interest it is capable of drawing, so there is effectively a hidden obstacle, or apathy. This would not pertain to your personal donations (since EAs are presumably not apathetic), but if you were thinking about outreach to build a movement with others, it would matter.

Also, even if changing these policies as a whole is not cost effective, I don’t see why changes orthogonal to partisan disputes would also be. For example, EAs prioritize Africa because of its low living standard. On immigration policy, instead of just fighting for more immigration, you might push for less immigration from, say, Mexico, and more from Africa.

Alexander 11 Oct 2015 15:35 UTC
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in reply to: kbog’s comment on: EA Open Thread: October
Is it publicly given advice?