Scriptwriter for RationalAnimations! Interested in lots of EA topics, but especially ideas for new institutions like prediction markets, charter cities, georgism, etc. Also a big fan of EA / rationalist fiction!
Jackson Wagner
Karma: 4,104
Jackson Wagner’s Quick takes
My advice for smart young people just starting university in 2026: be warned—if you don’t graduate from college within the next four years, you risk getting stuck as a freshman forever, thus joining the ranks of the Permanent Underclassmen.
Commercial planes would probably get lost a little bit more often?? (The original incident that motivated the USA to opening up GPS for civilian use was in 1983 when “Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down when it mistakenly entered Soviet airspace”.) But it’s not like planes NEED GPS in order to find their way—commercial aviation is (rightfully) obsessive about safety and redundancy, so planes have lots of ways to stay oriented (even in storms / at night / etc), including:
- Inertial navigation systems: per claude, “Every airliner carries ring-laser-gyro or fiber-optic inertial platforms that track position by integrating acceleration from a known starting point. They need no external signal at all. They drift — on the order of a couple nautical miles per hour of unaided flight — but modern aircraft run multiple IRUs and blend them, and over a typical flight the drift is manageable and bounded by periodic updates.”
- A variety of old-school navigation systems that the FAA specifically requires be kept in place precisely as a GPS backup, including for instance “VOR” beacons which are basically radio-signal landmarks scattered across america, emitting simple radio signals that planes can measure their distance & bearing to. (I assume all other developed countries also maintain similar navigation backups.)
- Ground-based flight controllers (ie the people who hang out in those airport control towers) have access to radar systems and thus can see exactly where all the planes are, and help guide planes even if the planes themselves get confused about their position.
You might think “sure, there are backups, but mightn’t you still end up with overloaded systems if everyone suddenly has to switch to using unfamiliar backups?” But it must be the case that aviation is (like the finance industry which has resilient backups for all their precision-timing needs) sufficiently paranoid that their backup systems are actually up to the task of smoothly taking over—the UK study looked at aviation but considered that the consequences of a 7-day outage would be negligible. Overally, the situation might be a little bit like the situation with the power grid—the power grid doesn’t need GPS for any of its normal functioning, but GPS timing information is an important tool for debugging / monitoring / maintaining the power grid, so the system gets more fragile without it. The civil aviation system in theory should be almost unaffected by the loss of GPS, but in practice you’ve lost one layer of your multilayered swiss-cheese-defense against accidents, so accidents are going to go up slightly.
Of course, for unmanned drones (which in many cases only have GPS), a GPS outage would be disastrous.
For military rather than civilian aviation, I think the airplanes themselves would probably find their way around fine in most circumstances, but GPS-enabled weapons (like JDAM guided bombs) obviously wouldn’t work, and the situation on the ground (tanks, vehicles, logistics stuff) would probably get messy in the same way that civilian ports & logistics stuff would get jammed up.
How bad would it be if GPS satellites were shot down?
Linkpost: New Vatican Encyclical on AI Governance
There are definitely some people out there (and these people are overrepresented among hardcore environmentalist types, of course) who seem to indeed have adopted “nature” as a kind of hippie religion that seems to have originated (or intensified) sometime in the 1970s. But this doesn’t strike me as explaining all or most of how ordinary people value nature:
even many people who believe ACTUAL religions, or who have other sorts of very strong ideologies that provide structure and meaning to their lives, nevertheless often seem to value nature highly in the ways Tandena outlined (spending time visiting national parks, sometimes voting for and donating to conservation programs, sometimes watching documentaties about the natural world, etc). So it can’t be that valuing nature is purely a religion-substitute filling a psychological hole, otherwise we’d see a much stronger anti-correlation between religious/ideological/etc people vs nature-enjoyers?
Many people certainly seem to treat respect for nature as a “sacred value”, and treat the idea of sacrificing nature for other goals as a “taboo tradeoff”. I sympathize with you that this is annoying and economically inefficient. But many things are considered “sacred values” or “taboo tradeoffs” in human culture, and this doesn’t make them 100% religious \ fake. For instance, people often treat “saving lives” or “protecting children” as sacred values and act as if any related tradeoffs are taboo (even though we are constantly trading off lives vs other things in many parts of society). But that doesn’t mean that “saving lives” is like a secular religion. In general, many things can be compared to a religion, but IMO this is often less informative than it appears. (“EA is like a religion! It has priests: 80k career advisers, temples: EAG conference venues, commandments: blog posts,...”)
I am forgetting the exact Yudkowsky essay(s) where he lambasts people for simply worshipping the mysterious (aka their own state of ignorance) and acting like additional knowledge inevitably ruins the supposedly sublime experience of ineffability that makes life worth living, or whatever. I agree with yudkowsky that it’s dumb when people are like that, and I agree with you that many people take that attitude to nature. But many others seem eager to learn more about the natural world and appreciate it in a deeper, more rationalist-approved way. For instance: scientists studying creatures, birders (and other hobby groups like people who like to fish, or scuba dive, or etc), little kids learning about zoo animals, anybody who watches nature documentaries or reads books about nature-related stuff or reads the posted informational signs at national parks, people who like to learn a lot of detailed skills for backpacking in wilderness areas, etc...
I also think it’s probably possible to steelman some version of the common nature vibe of “we should respect nature for its own sake, and not seek to control everything”, such that it might come off sounding less dumb than it usually seems. (Even though I expect, after reading such a steelman, I would still be pretty strongly in favor of controlling most things most of the time, to better achieve various goals.) Joe Carlsmith’s essay series “Otherness and Control in the Age of AGI”, particularly the essay “On Green” is partly about this.
One big point where I do think “nature as religion” matters a lot, though, is in shaping the *environmentalist movement* itself, since the movement is disproportionately steered by people who are really into nature-as-religion. Therefore our laws/norms about the environment, the way most academics/intellectuals discuss the value of nature, the sorts of things that are considered taboo within environmentalism (eg geoengineering, gene drives, etc), all end up significantly warped by the perspective you described, even though IMO it isn’t the main way most ordinary people relate to nature.
Fooming Shoggoths! (And, more generally, much of the secular-solstice music—there’s already a database full of this somewhere.)
EcoResilience Initiative (https://ecoresilienceinitiative.com) works on this, in particular on non-climate-related stuff. They agree with Giving Green that, counterintuitively, Good Food Institute (usually talked about by animal-welfare fans) might actually be one of the most promising charities in terms of protecting biodiversity and the environment, because if plant-based meat ever took off in a big way it would have massive effects on agricultural land use (ie much less deforestation & habitat destruction would happen).
They can keep their old branding if they just put an asterisk after “hours” and explain that 80,000 Hours* now refers to human-worker-hour-equivalent efforts spent on highly-effective cause areas (aka “effective compute”), not necessarily literal human labor hours.
Interesting and thoughtful post. However, I believe your Google Ngram result is potentially confounded by the imminent rise of the Antichrist and ensuing Tribulation of convulsive war and death that will rip like wildfire across all the nations of Earth. This event is projected to occur sometime in the early 2040s, c.f. Angela Cotra’s “Forecasting Transformative AC with Eschatological Anchors” (though more recent estimates like “AC 2027″ have argued for shorter timelines), which is spuriously boosting mentions of the “apocalypse”.
Once you correct for this confounding variable (ie, that each and every one of us is about to be plunged into a world of ceaseless conflict and violence, mercilessly hunted down by the Four Horsemen, moon turned to blood, etc), you’ll see that eschatologically-adjusted mentions of “apocalypse” are actually no higher than the historical base rate, proving that there’s nothing to worry about and everything will be fine.
Giving up on EA after 13 years
Talk to sperm whales --> the US military figures out how to pay them to covertly tail russian subs --> eventually more people find out about this and pretty soon thanks to whales everybody knows where everyone’s subs are at all times --> the assuredness of nations’ second-strike nuclear capability is eroded --> destabilized game-theoretic dynamics once again favor first-strike --> nuclear armageddon.
(This is 95% a joke, but if somebody would please research “do whales offer any notable advantages vs naval drones, satellite-based wake detection, or other techniques for tracking nuclear submarines” I would feel a bit more assured...)
“Articulate a stronger defense of why they’re good?”
I’m no expert on animal-welfare stuff, but just thinking out loud, here are some benefits that I could imagine coming from this technology (not trying to weigh them up versus potential harms or prioritize which seem largest or anything like that):You imagine negative PR consequences once we realize that animals might mostly be thinking about basic stuff like food and sex, but I picture that being only a small second-order consequence—the primary effect, I suspect, is that people’s empathy for animals might be greatly increased by realizing they think about stuff and communicate at all. The idea that animals (especially, like, whales) have sophisticated thoughts and communicate, and the intuition that they probably have valuable internal subjective experience, might both seem “obvious” to animal-welfare activists, but I think for most normal people globally, they either sorta believe that animals have feelings (but don’t think about this very much) or else explicitly believe that animals lack consciousness / can’t think like humans because they don’t have language / don’t have full human souls (if the person is religious) / etc. Hearing animals talk would, I expect, wake people up a little bit more to the idea that intelligence & consciousness exist on a spectrum and animals have some valuable experience (even if less so than humans).
In particular, I’m definitely picturing that the journalists covering such experiments are likely to be some combination of 1. environmentalists who like animals, 2. animal rights activists who like animals, 3. just think animals are cute and figure that a feel-good story portraying animals as sweet and cute will obviously do better numbers than a boring story complaining about how dumb animals are. So, with friendly media coverage, I expect the biggest news stories will be about the cutest / sweetest / most striking / saddest things that animals say, not the boring fact that they spend most of their time complaining about bodily needs just like humans do.
Compare for instance “news coverage” (and other cultural perceptions of) human children. To the extent that toddlers can talk, they are mostly just demanding things, crying, failing to understand stuff, etc. Yet, we find this really cute and endearing (eg, i am a father of a toddler myself, and it’s often very fun). I bet animal communication would similarly be perceived positively, even if (like babies) they’re really dumb compared to adult humans.
Talk-to-animals tech also seems potentially philosophically important in some longtermist, “sentient-futures” style ways:
What’s good versus bad for an animal? Right now we literally just have to guess, based on eyeballing whether the creature seems happy. And if you are less of a total-hedonic-utilitarian, more of a preference utilitarian, the situation gets even worse. It would be nice if we could just ask animals what their problems are, what kind of things they want, etc! Even a very small amount of communication would really increase what we are able to learn about animals’ preferences, and thus how well we are able to treat them in a best-case scenario.
Maybe we could use this tech to do scientific studies and learn valuable things about consciousness, language, subjective experience, etc, in a way that clarifies humanity’s thinking about these slippery issues and helps us better avoid moral catastrophes (perhaps becoming more sympathetic to animals as a result, or getting a better understanding of when AI systems might or might not be capable of suffering).
Perhaps humanity has some sort of moral obligation to (someday, after we solve more pressing problems like not destroying the world or creating misaligned AI) eventually uplift creatures like whales, monkeys, octopi, etc, so they too can explore and comprehend the universe together with us. Talk-to-animals tech might be an early first step toward such future goals, might set early precedents, might help us learn about some of the philosophical / moral choices we would need to make if we embarked on a path of uplifting other species, idk.
it also advocates for the government of California to in-house the engineering of its high-speed rail project rather than try to outsource it to private contractors
Hence my initial mention of “high state capacity”? But I think it’s fair to call abundance a deregulatory movement overall, in terms of, like… some abstract notion of what proportion of economic activity would become more vs less heavily involved with government, under an idealized abundance regime.
Sorry to be confusing by “unified”—I didn’t mean to imply that individual people like klein or mamdani were “unified” in toeing an enforced party line!
Rather I was speculating that maybe the reason the “deciding to win” people (moderates such as matt yglesias) and the “abundance” people, tend to overlap moreso than abundance + left-wingers, is because the abundance + moderates tend to share (this is what I meant by “are unified by”) opposition to policies like rent control and other price controls, tend to be less enthusiastic about “cost-disease-socialism” style demand subsidies since they often prefer to emphasize supply-side reforms, tend to want to deemphasize culture-war battles in favor of an emphasis on boosting material progress / prosperity, etc. Obviously this is just a tendency, not universal in all people, as people like mamdani show.
FYI, I’m totally 100% on board with your idea that abundance is fully compatible with many progressive goals and, in fact, is itself a deeply progressive ideology! (cf me being a huge georgist.) But, uh, this is the EA Forum, which is in part about describing the world truthfully, not just spinning PR for movements that I happen to admire. And I think it’s an appropriate summary of a complex movement to say that abundance stuff is mostly a center-left, deregulatory, etc movement.
Imagine someone complaining—it’s so unfair to describe abundance as a “democrat” movement!! That’s so off-putting for conservatives—instead of ostracising them, we should be trying to entice them to adopt these ideas that will be good for the american people! Like Montana and Texas passing great YIMBY laws, Idaho deploying modular nuclear reactors, etc. In lots of ways abundance is totally coherent with conservative goals of efficient government services, human liberty, a focus on economic growth, et cetera!!
That would all be very true. But it would still be fair to summarize abundance as primarily a center-left democrat movement.
To be clear I personally am a huge abundance bro, big-time YIMBY & georgist, fan of the Institute for Progress, personally very frustrated by assorted government inefficiencies like those mentioned, et cetera! I’m not sure exactly what the factional alignments are between abundance in particular (which is more technocratic / deregulatory than necessarily moderate—in theory one could have a “radical” wing of an abundance movement, and I would probably be an eager member of such a wing!) and various forces who want the Dems to moderate on cultural issues in order to win more (like the recent report “Deciding to Win”). But they do strike me as generally aligned (perhaps unified in their opposition to lefty economic proposals which often are neither moderate nor, like… correct).
A couple more “out-there” ideas for ecological interventions:
“recording the DNA of undiscovered rainforest species”—yup, but it probably takes more than just DNA sequences on a USB drive to de-extinct a creature in the future. For instance, probably you need to know about all kinds of epigenetic factors active in the embryo of the creature you’re trying to revive. To preserve this epigenetic info, it might be easiest to simply freeze physical tissue samples (especially gametes and/or embryos) instead of doing DNA sequencing. You might also need to use the womb of a related species—bringing back mammoths is made a LOT easier by the fact that elephants are still around! -- and this would complicate plans to bring back species that are only distantly related to anything living. I want to better map out the tech tree here, and understand what kinds of preparation done today might aid what kinds of de-extinction projects in the future.
Normal environmentalists worry about climate change, habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, and other prosaic, slow-rolling forms of mild damage to the natural environment. Not on their list: nuclear war, mirror bacteria, or even something as simple as AGI-supercharged economic growth that sees civilization’s economic footprint doubling every few years. I think there is a lot that we could do, relatively cheaply, to preserve at least some species against such catastrophes.
For example, seed banks exist. But you could possibly also save a lot of insects from extinction by maintaining some kind of “mostly-automated insect zoo in a bunker”, a sort of “generation ship” approach as oppoed to the “cryosleep” approach that seedbanks can use. (Also, are even today’s most hardcore seed banks hardened against mirror bacteria and other bio threats? Probably not! Nor do many of them even bother storing non-agricultural seeds for things like random rainforest flowers.)
Right now, land conservation is one of the cheapest ways of preventing species extinctions. But in an AGI-transformed world, even if things go very well for humanity, the economy will be growing very fast, gobbling up a lot of land, and probably putting out a lot of weird new kinds of pollution. (Of course, we could ask the ASI to try and mitigate these environmental impacts, but even in a totally utopian scenario there might be very strong incentives to go fast, eg to more quickly achieve various sublime transhumanist goods and avoid astronomical waste.) By contrast, the world will have a LOT more capital, and the cost of detailed ecological micromanagement (using sensors to gather lots of info, using AI to analyze the data, etc) will be a lot lower. So it might be worth brainstorming ahead of time what kinds of ecological interventions might make sense in such a world, where land is scarce but capital is abundant and customized micro-attention to every detail of an environment is cheap. This might include high-density zoos like described earlier, or “let the species go extinct for now, but then reliably de-extinct them from frozen embryos later”, or “all watched over by machines of loving grace”-style micromanaged forests that achieve superhumanly high levels of biodiversity in a very compact area (and minimizing wild animal suffering by both minimizing the necessary population and also micromanaging the ecology to keep most animals in the population in a high-welfare state).
A lot of today’s environmental-protection / species-extinction-avoidance programs aren’t even robust to, like, a severe recession that causes funding for the program to get cut for a few years! Mainstream environmentalism is truly designed for a very predictable, low-variance future… it is not very robust to genuinely large-scale shocks.
It’s kind of fuzzy and unclear what’s even important about avoiding species extinctions or preserving wild landscapes or etc, since these things don’t fit neatly into a total-hedonic-utilitarian framework. (In this respect, eco-value is similar to a lot of human culture and art, or values like “knowledge” or “excellence” and so forth.) But, regardless of whether or not we can make philosophical progress clarifying exactly what’s important about the natural world, maybe in a utopian future we could find crazy futuristic ways of generating lots more ecological value? (Obviously one would want to do this while avoiding creating lots of wild-animal suffering, but I think this still gives us lots of options.)
Obviously stuff like “bringing back mammoths” is in this category.
But maybe also, like, designing and creating new kinds of life? Either variants of earth life (what kinds of interesting things might dinosaurs have evolved into, if they hadn’t almost all died out 65 million years ago?), or totally new kinds of life that might be able to thrive on, eg, Titan or Europa (though obviously this sort of research might carry some notable bio-risks a la mirror bacteria, thus should perhaps only be pursued from a position of civilizational existential security).
Creating simulated, digital life-forms and ecologies? In the same way that a culture really obsessed with cool crystals, might be overjoyed to learn about mathematics and geometry, which lets them study new kinds of life.
There is probably a lot of exciting stuff you could do with advanced biotech / gene editing technologies, if the science advances and if humanity can overcome the strong taboo in environmentalism against taking active interventions in nature. (Even stuff like “take some seeds of plants threatened by global warming, drive them a few hours north, and plant them there where it’s cooler and they’ll survive better” is considered controversial by this crowd!)
Just like gene drives could help eradicate / suppress human scourges like malaria-carrying mosquitoes, we could also use gene drives to do tailored control of invasive species (which are something like the #2 cause of species extinctions, after #1 habitat destruction). Right now, the best way to control invasive species is often “biocontrol” (introducing natural predators of the species that’s causing problems) -- biocontrol actually works much better than its terrible reputation suggests, but it’s limited by the fact that there aren’t always great natural predators available, it takes a lot of study and care to get it right, etc.
Possibly you could genetically-engineer corals to be tolerant of slightly higher temperatures, and generally use genetic tech to help species adapt more quickly to a fast-changing world.
EcoResilience Inititative is working on applying EA principles (ITN analysis, cost-effectiveness, longtermist orientation, etc) to ecological conservation. But right now it’s just my wife Tandena and a couple of her friends doing research on a part-time volunteer basis, no funding or anything, lol.
Here are two recent posts of theirs describing their enthusiasm for precision fermentation technologies (already a darling of the animal-welfare wing of EA) due to its potentially transformative impact on land use if lots of people ever switch from eating meat towards eating more precision-fermentation protein. And here are some quick takes of theirs on deep ocean mining (investigating the ecological benefits of mining the seabed and thereby alleviating current economic pressures to mine in rainforest areas) and biobanking (as a cheap way of potentially enabling future de-extinction efforts, once de-extinction technology is further advanced).
There are also some bigger, more established EA groups that focus mostly on climate interventions (Giving Green, Founder’s Pledge, etc); most of these have at least done some preliminary explorations into biodiversity, although there is not really much published work yet. Hannah Ritchie at OurWorldInData has compiled some interesting information about various ecological problems, and her book “Not The End of the World” is great—maybe the best starting place for someone who wants to get involved to learn more?
There is a very substantial “abundance” movement that (per folks like matt yglesias and ezra klein) is seeking to create a reformed, more pro-growth, technocratic, high-state-capacity democratic party that’s also more moderate and more capable of winning US elections. Coefficient Giving has a big $120 million fund devoted to various abundance-related causes, including zoning reform for accelerating housing construction, a variety of things related to building more clean energy infrastructure, targeted deregulations aimed at accelerating scientific / biomedical progress, etc. https://coefficientgiving.org/research/announcing-our-new-120m-abundance-and-growth-fund/
You can get more of a sense of what the abundance movement is going for by reading “the argument”, an online magazine recently funded by Coefficient giving and featuring Kelsey Piper, a widely-respected EA-aligned journalist: https://www.theargumentmag.com/
I think EA the social movement (ie, people on the Forum, etc) try to keep EA somewhat non-political to avoid being dragged into the morass of everything becoming heated political discourse all the time. But EA the funding ecosystem is significantly more political, also does a lot of specific lobbying in connection to AI governance, animal welfare, international aid, etc.
Yup, I think there’s a lot of very valuable research / brainstorming / planning that EA (and humanity overall) hasn’t yet done to better map out the space of ways that we could create moral value far greater than anything we’ve seen in history so far.
In EA / rationalist circles, discussion of “flourishing futures” often focuses on “transhumanist goods”, like:
extreme human longevity / immortality through super-advanced medical science
intelligence amplification
reducing suffering, and perhaps creating new kinds of extremely powerful positive emotions
you also hear a bit about AI welfare, and the idea that maybe we could create AI minds experiencing new forms of valuable subjective experience
But there are perhaps a lot of other directions worth exploring:
various sorts of spiritual attainment that might be possible with advanced technology / digital minds / etc
things that are totally out of left field to us because we can’t yet imagine them, like how the value of consciousness would be a bolt from the blue to a planet that only had plants & lower life forms.
instantiating various values, like beauty or cultural sophistication or ecological richness, to extreme degrees
On a more practical note, the Forum does support markdown headings if you enable the “activate markdown editor” feature on the EA Forum profile settings! This would turn all your ##headings into a much more beautiful, readable structure (and it would create a little outline in a sidebar, for people to jump around to different sections).
Definitely agree that shooting down GPS satellites (or satellites of any kind, really) is a really agressive move that would make all countries super mad at you, thus probably only happens in a pretty serious “all or nothing” great-power conflict!
I’ll try to talk more about the military dynamics around GPS in my later post, although I’m not an expert. My impression is that although militaries do indeed have lots of backup systems, none of them is perfect and some systems (like many existing drones and guided bombs) do rely exclusively on GPS, so losing GPS would still be a big problem even though the military has done a lot of work to try and ensure that it wouldn’t be a totally overwhelming catastrophe.