Disenangling “nature.”
It is my favorite thing, but I want to know its actual value.
Is it replaceable. Is it useful. Is it morally repugnant. Is it our responsibility. Is it valuable.
“I asked my questions. And then I discovered a whole world I never knew. That’s my trouble with questions. I still don’t know how to take them back.”
EcologyInterventions
Karma: 270
How realistic are the optimistic views that technology will be able to deliver, fast enough, green energy, mitigate climate change, and bring us back under all the remaining planetary boundaries?
Predictions by International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook versus reality:A graph showing solar power exceeding expectations. A graph showing the cost of renewable energy prices falling below non-renewable prices over the last 10 years. How likely is it that we won’t run out of any crucial resource in the next century?
Predictions for “years of oil consumption left” have kept being wrong for the last 100 years, despite use exceeding expectations. Similarly for metals like copper, zinc, iron, and aluminum. On a planet of finite resources, it doesn’t seem like we can continue growing indefinitely – Under business-as-usual, when would we reach plateau/collapse?
Think of how foolish it would have been to throttle energy/resource use 100 years ago to protect ourselves from running out at 100-years-ago levels of use. When we start to run out, we have many options: alternative resources, efficient use, dilution, recycling, etc. This will extend the clock many fold. Resources may be finite, but need for them is not constant. I am confident they will become outdated in time, as resources historically have thusfar.
There are lots of very concerning problems arising from overapplying GDP, capitalism, gerontocracy, and neglecting environmental issues. But the above particular points do not seem substantive to me.
Thanks for raising the discussion.
I think the enormous diplomatic incident that would result if someone found a stray nuke in their country is enough of a deterrent to make this not a realistic scenario. At least not until tensions are very very high.
I am glad you addressed my concern by going over the health effects of nicotine distinct from plant combustion/smoke. I particularly liked your line about “tobacco may be more analogous to tea or coffee than to alcohol.” But I am unconvinced that this addictive substance has a net positive effect on well being.
My impression is that, much like caffeine, the body acclimates and suffers withdrawal without regular doses. Additionally, to get the same effect, an increasing treadmill of doses is required. This withdrawal and dependence seems to leave the user worse off than they were before substance use, (jittery, anxious, irritable) unless the use is regulated and occasionally paused. This is exceptionally hard with addictive substances.
In the case of caffeine, I have heard it argued that even if you arrive at the same net outcome of awareness, productivity and happiness total, there is a lot of utility in being able to control when one is awake, productive, and happy. This makes sense to me. But I don’t think nicotine allows that same control except for a few abnormal individuals. Rather, I expect abuse and over-dependence to be the normal state of affairs. This seems net negative. Even if it had a neutral effect, people would still be spending money to maintain neutral utility.Non-addictive nicotine would change my mind, and I would be potentially interested to apply it in my own life.
Just wanted to point out that the author rejects the Overton windows “if you’re worried about the Overton Window, most of the issues they’d run on (a complete abortion ban, abolition of all gun restrictions, huge tax cuts for the rich, no gay marriage) are pretty well placed in the GOP already. A few extra crazies won’t do anything”
I suspect you (and I) disagree that “a few extra crazies won’t do anything.”
Three years later, we have done our best to answer this.
Resilience & Biodiversity
Worthy goal.
I want there to be a lot more activity and discussion around this topic so I’m going to give some feedback and my guess as to why this post didn’t get more interaction:
I don’t see your current plans for coalition building resulting in making it a major part of the 2024 election cycle, nor creating a national conversation, much less requiring leaders to disarm.
I don’t see anything new in your methods or tactics. How do you propose to overcome the benefits countries see in the military advantage? What convincing arguments and diplomacy do you plan to use? Is there some kind of agreement that is about to be drafted/signed?
To be fair this will require political power, cultural power, and diplomacy so the solution is going to look like what you are doing. But I don’t understand why you think this will succeed when others have failed. Perhaps your swell of support is greater than it has ever been? I have no context to evaluate the long list of support you gave in your post. Forgive my ignorance, but is this a lot? Do they have a lot of power to control nuclear disarmament?
I was inspired to brainstorm by your list. 🙂
Tree of Possible Futures
Survival Tree
Survival Map
Our Future of Fire or Ashes
Branches of Light and Darkness
Branches of Life and Death
Map of Cliffs and Crossings
Tree of Paths Forward
Navigating the Future
Map of Futures
Possible Worlds Tree
(pun on Yggdrasil, the world tree)
The Choices Before Us
What Lies Ahead
The Branches Of Time
Our Branching Futures
Hopes and Endings
Tree of Tomorrows
I opened this to make sure the length estimate was short, discovered it was short, and couldn’t help reading it.
I think I learned something.
Lovely idea, lovely presentation, neglected area!
Quick impressions: Toggling the survival/extinction button wasn’t clear at first. I thought each branch was going to be a link to an end scenario, imagine my surprise when I clicked on one of the sustenance branches and was linked to the decimation of our civilization.
Thank you for the excellent write up! I will read it slowly over the next few days. This will be very useful to me as I continue to work on forming my own coherent position on “nature” and the source of its value.
Hi, I appreciated your research into this, welcome to the forum and the EA community!
About 2 “There is no obligation to repay. Giving to those in need should not create an obligation for them to repay”
It seems like there is no obligation to repay shortly after, or for a specific incident. No ‘debt’ But there is an expectation that they will give in a similar instance of need by the giver, yes?
I’m struggling to think of a good case to practice/apply this system. Especially because I’m not sure it scales to larger societies, nor am I sure how to create norms around “need” and “obligation” where none were before. Or could it be written as a formal agreement? This is far outside my area-of-expertise so I really don’t have experience from which to draw examples of places this could be applied.
One flaw I can think of is that disaster risks tend to be localized. So if there is a bad year for crops, or a wildfire: chances are it hits both participant in the risk pool at the same time.
Can you explain why or which cases this is better than insurance for managing risk?
I am nowhere near the correct person to be answering this, my level of understanding of AI is somewhere around that of an average raccoon. But I haven’t seen any simple explanations yet, so here is a silly unrealistic example. Please take it as one person’s basic understanding of how impossible AI containment is. Apologies if this is below the level of complexity you were looking for, or is already solved by modern AI defenses.
A very simple “escaping the box” would be if you asked your AI to provide accurate language translation. The AI’s training has shown that it provides the most accurate language translations when it opted for certain phrasing. The reason those sets of translations were so good was because it caused subsequent requests for language translation to be on topics the AI has the best language-translation ability. The AI doesn’t know that, but in practice it is steering translations subtly toward “mentioning weather-related words so conversations are more likely to be about weather so my net translations score are most accurate.”
There’s no inside/outside the box, there’s no conscious goals, but it gets misaligned from our intended desires. It can act on the real world simply by virtue of being connected to it (we take actions in response to the AI) and observing its own increase in success/failures.
I don’t see a way to prevent this because hitting reset after every input doesn’t generally work for reaching complex goals which need to track the outcome of intermediate steps. Tracking the context of a conversation is critical to translating. The AI is not going to know it’s influencing anyone, just that it’s getting better scores when these words and these chains of outputs happened. This seems harmless, but a super powerful language model might do this on such abstract levels and so subtly that it might be impossible to detect at all.
It might be spitting out words that are striking and eloquent whenever it is most likely to cause business people to think translation is enjoyable enough to purchase more AI translator development (or rather, “switch to eloquence when particular business terms were used towards the end of conversations about international business”). This improves its scores.
Or it enhances a pattern where it tends to get better translation scores when it reduces speed of output in AI builder conversations. In the real world this is causing people designing translators to demand more power for translation.… resulting in better translation outputs overall. The AI doesn’t know why this works, only observes that it does.
Or undermining the competition by subtly screwing up translations during certain types of business deals so more resources are directed toward its own model of translation.
Or whatever unintended multitude of ways seems to provide better results. All for the sake of accomplishing a simple task of providing good translations. It’s not seizing power for powers sake, it has no idea why this works, but it sees the scores go higher when this pattern is followed, and it’s going to jack the performance score higher by all the ways that seem to work out, regardless of the chain of causality. Its influence on the world is a totally unconscious part of that.
That’s my limited understanding of agency development and sandbox containment failure.
Thanks, I get it now
Thank you so much. This is a concise synopsis of how net suffering/revealed preference nor reflective preference capture what seems to me to be optimal outcomes.
It seems self evident to me, but actually articulating that suffering is not the whole point, but neither is sentience, is proving tricky and making me question if I’m actually just Wrong About It. (Also I’m not very familiar with the philosophy in this area)
I’m not sure I understand number 2 - are humans imposing their human reflectance desires as surrogate for the non-humans? Or are humans attempting to interpret what the non-humans reflectance values would be, and imposing those? Saying reflective desires of humans made me initially interpret it as simply balancing human desires against non-human desires for cooperative living, but I no longer think that is the meaning you were intending to convey.
It was incredibly useful to be reminded of the obvious fact that rewriting a load-bearing belief is crazy. Doing it has had me in tumultuous staits that absolutely needed to be sorted out asap but I had no way forward and no way back.
Sometimes I have been uneasy for days trying to adjust to the new world. Sometimes it would make me feel like an imposter when I would talk to people about ordinary stuff. Incredibly uncomfortable experience that I do immediately forget.
This was really insightful: I can definitely envision how creating a warm, cozy atmosphere is crucial as a demonstration that 1) its safe to be vulnerable 2) other people have done this and it’s not so hard 3) that’s what we do here and it’s understood how difficult it is to do 4) you won’t be attacked for being unskilled at it
And it also helps elucidate how having an open but critical atmosphere doesn’t work for first time folks, even very thoughtful, open, truth-seeking ones. They aren’t ready to defend themselves in friendly combat, even as a game / helpful search for truth in such a state of world-instability.
Please do continue to write. This kind of explanation is so much more clear about the personal experience of what it feels like to communicate and share effectively. I haven’t been here long and am not a community builder, but the other posts I have seen about outreach—while accurate, admirably composed, and intellectually rigorous—have somehow lacked guidance. I read them and think: “Yeah! That’s perfect, I should do that!” But I knew in the day-to-day I would never remember the phrasing they so carefully calibrated unless I had several hours of practice by say, running an introduction to EA booth
Thinking about further posts of EA and the wider world:
EA is rightly working on what seems to be the most important cause areas. How do we reconcile that with people/groups who have no interest in doing that. Like say, a group dedicated to all things rock and roll. Convince them EA is also important? Do we help them to their own goal, to optimize rock ‘n roll? Encourage them to move on to the next most effective thing, whatever it is? Try to find ways rock ‘n roll can synergize with another EA project? (rock ’n roll with lyrics about EA?) Don’t waste time acknowledging a difference of opinion and moving on to find better low hanging fruit?I’m sure people have discussed this endlessly before, but that’s it’s what I’m currently thinking about.
- Is it possible for EA to remain nuanced and be more welcoming to newcomers? A distinction for discussions on topics like this one. by (Jul 15, 2022, 7:03 AM; 35 points)
- What is the journey to caring more about 1) others and 2) what is really true even if it is inconvenient? by (Jul 16, 2022, 11:31 AM; 6 points)
Excellent work making the world a better place. Thanks for sharing, I enjoyed your piece!
Recent relevant question and answer.