jackva

Karma: 3,953

jackva Sep 16, 2024, 8:14 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Tom Dlal’s comment on: Tom Dlal’s Quick takes
It turned out to be a very easily solvable problem (heavily concentrated industry, very few production plants, technological substitution being very easy).

I think the Montreal Protocol is often misunderstood to be a great success story / positively indicative reference class for much harder problems like climate, AI, etc., biosecurity, when it really is an example of an exceptionally easy problem to solve.

jackva Sep 16, 2024, 3:26 PM
4 points
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in reply to: LewisBollard’s comment on: Positive trends on alternative proteins
Apologies for my delay here.

There is indeed no contradiction—solar got cheap through massive public support, first mostly R&D and later deployment subsidies / market creation policies in the hundreds of billions.

So the lesson from solar is definitely that public innovation support massively matters, it is more that different forms of support are most critical at different times (that is something the Kavlak paper emphasizes, how at early TRL R&D dominates and then later induced demand becames the major source of cost reduction) and that the R&D money cited is a small contributor to the cost reductions observed then.

If APs were like solar, I think we should expect things to take a lot longer and require a lot more support and maybe the current plateau would be like the 1980s for solar. (But I think there are good reasons to be more optimistic).

jackva Sep 16, 2024, 3:25 PM
4 points
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in reply to: jackva’s comment on: Who looked into extreme nuclear meltdowns?
Apologies for the delay, Remmelt.
What I meant to say in my original comment is that when someone who has a bad reputation for being truth seeking / has a reputation for being a conspiracy theorist says something on an area outside their expertise we should not give a lot of credence to it.
The burden of this not being a credible scenario should—in my view—not lie with commenters and, at the time I was commenting, most comments seemed incremental instead of pointing to a strong skepticism on Weinstein’s take to start as if it were a plausible situation that a guy on a podcast without specific relevant expertise has uncovered a mechanism that 50 years of anti-nuclear activism have not produced (or, more nuanced, something that is so implausible that even typical anti-nuclear advocates wouldn’t lead with it because they know it won’t stand).
To the specific question—we do have a long section on nuclear in our 2018 report and I’ve obviously also spent a lot of time on it though I haven’t written it up, but it took me several years to turn from German anti-nuclear environmentalist to the positions I hold now.
Here is an article on why a Chernobyl-style event is not possible with modern reactors. And the diesel generators would not be refueled for a year, given in the scenario there would be a failure of the entire power grid you would just use them to have enough electricity to shut things down safely.

jackva Sep 6, 2024, 7:45 AM
4 points
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in reply to: Remmelt’s comment on: Who looked into extreme nuclear meltdowns?
I’ll address the rest later (hopefully this weekend), but just to clarify that I did not mean to call you or your summary conspiratorial, Remmelt!

I only meant the substantive claim and coming from Bret Weinstein, but I’ll address this with more time and the rest of your comment later.

jackva Sep 5, 2024, 8:47 PM
28 points
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on: Positive trends on alternative proteins
Great stuff!

I am not sure how crucial this is, but I do think this piece gets some of the renewable energy analogies importantly wrong. In particular:

1. The primary drivers of making solar cheap where policies passed in the early 2000s, in particular massive deployment subsidies, not primarily R&D. So, the 30B R&D number for 2004-2012 are unlikely to be a major driver of the dramatic cost reductions in solar, at the same time countries like Germany spent 100s of B on subsidizing solar deployment (see e.g. Kavlak et al 2018, also Nemet’s book)

2. By 2010, while solar was still marginal, the cost reduction dynamic was largely triggered through those policies and the virtuous cycle of investment, economies of scale, and China becoming interested in becoming a renewables manufacturing powerhouse. It is not driven by 2004-2012 R&D and it is not really driven by things that started after 2010, more a self-reinforcing dynamic playing out.

Hopefully and plausibly, APs are an easier technology to get cheap than solar panels!

(3. Nitpick: Solar is 4% of electricity, not energy, electricity is only ~1/3 of energy.)

jackva Sep 2, 2024, 9:20 AM
10 points
4 ∶ 0
on: Who looked into extreme nuclear meltdowns?
This sounds quite conspiratorial and it comes from someone (Bret Weinstein) who is known to be far down the conspiracy rabbit hole and misrepresenting science (e.g. on COVID). So I am surprised we are paying any attention to it.

More substantively:
1. If electrical grids fail for a year, will nuclear reactors really be the problem? They all have diesel generators to supply power and could be shut down.
2. Also, Chernobyl-like events are not generally thought possible with reactors currently in operation.

jackva Aug 1, 2024, 11:08 AM
2 points
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in reply to: ClimateDoc’s comment on: The Precipice Revisited
Thanks, fascinating stuff!

jackva Jul 26, 2024, 12:09 PM
4 points
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in reply to: Matthew McRedmond🔹’s comment on: Climate Advocacy and AI Safety: Supercharging AI Slowdown Advocacy
Thanks, spelling these kind of things out is what I was trying to get at, this could make the case stronger working through them.

I don’t have time to go through these points here one by one, but I think the one thing I would point out is that this strategy should be risk-reducing in those cases where the risk is real, i.e. not arguing from current public opinion etc.

I.e. in the worlds where we have the buy-in and commercial interest to scale up AI that much that it will meaningfully matter for electricity demand, I think in those worlds climate advocates will be side-lined. Essentially, I buy the Shulmanerian point that if the prize from AGI is observably really large then things that look inhibiting now—like NIMBYism and environmentalists—will not matter as much as one would think if one extrapolated from current political economy.

jackva Jul 26, 2024, 11:55 AM
4 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Future deaths from non-optimal temperature and cost-effectiveness of stratospheric aerosol injection
Ok, so I think we converge pretty much then—essentially what I am saying is that people concerned about compounding risks would argue that these are not modeled correctly in GBD and that there is much more uncertainty there (and that the estimate is probably an underestimate, from the perspective of taking the compounding risk view seriously).

jackva Jul 26, 2024, 9:11 AM
4 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Future deaths from non-optimal temperature and cost-effectiveness of stratospheric aerosol injection
Thanks!
I think I remain confused as to what you mean with “all deaths from non-optimal temperature”.
It is clear that the data source you cite (GBD, focused on current deaths) will not feature nor proxy what people concerned about compounding risks from climate are concerned about.

So to me it seems you are saying “I don’t trust arguments about compounding risks and the data is evidence for that” whereas the data is inherently not set up to include that concern and does not really speak to the arguments that people most concerned about climate risk would make.

As said before, I think it is fine to say “I don’t trust arguments about compounding risks” and I am probably with you there to a large degree at least compared to people most concerned about this, but I don’t think the data from GBD is additional evidence for that mistrust, as far as I can tell.

By crude analogy, if you believed that COVID restrictions had a big toll on the young and this will affect long-run impacts somehow, pointing to few COVID deaths amongs this age cohort would not be evidence against this concern.

jackva Jul 26, 2024, 8:26 AM
4 points
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in reply to: Matthew McRedmond🔹’s comment on: Climate Advocacy and AI Safety: Supercharging AI Slowdown Advocacy
Something like this:
1. I think an obvious risk to this strategy is that it would further polarize AI risk discourse and make it more partisan, given how strongly the climate movement is aligned with Democrats.
2. I think pro-AI forces can reasonably claim that the long-term impacts of accelerated AI development are good for climate—increased tech acceleration & expanded industrial capacity to build clean energy faster—so I think the core substantive argument is actually quite weak and transparently so (I think one needs to have weird assumptions if one really believes short-term emissions from getting to AGI would matter from a climate perspective—e.g. if you believed the US would need to double emissions for a decade to get to AGI you would probably still want to bear that cost given how much easier it would make global decarbonization, even if you only looked at it from a climate maximalist lens).
3. If one looks at how national security / competitiveness considerations regularly trump climate considerations and this was true even in a time that was more climate-focused than the next couple of years, then it seems hard to imagine this would really constrain things—I find it very hard to imagine a situation where a significant part of US policy makers decide they really need to get behind accelerating AGI, but then they don’t do it because some climate activists protest this.
So, to me, it seems like a very risky strategy with limited upside, but plenty of downside in terms of further polarization and calling a bluff on what is ultimately an easy-to-disarm argument.

jackva Jul 25, 2024, 6:31 PM
12 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Future deaths from non-optimal temperature and cost-effectiveness of stratospheric aerosol injection
Thanks for this, Vasco, thought-provoking as always!
I do not have too much time to discuss this, but I want to point out that I am pretty unconvinced by the argument for why indirect effects should be easy to discount by the type of the argument you make. So, to be clear, I am not arguing that the conclusion is necessarily wrong (I think this would require stronger arguments), but rather that the argumentation strategy here does not work.

As far as I understand it your argument for “indirect effects cannot be very large” is something like:

1. Deaths from heat are very overstated and not that significant and they capture the most important direct effect.

2. A claim for strong indirect effects is then implausible because onto that direct effect you need to sequence a bunch of very uncertain additional effects with uncertain signs.

Insofar as is this a correct representation of your argument—please let me know—I think it has a couple of problems:

1.
a. Dying from heat stress is a very extreme outcome and people will act in response to climate change much earlier than dying. For example, before people die from heat stress, they might abandon their livelihoods and migrate, maybe in large numbers.

b. More abstractly, the fact that an extreme impact outcome (heat death) is relatively rare is not evidence for low impact in general. Climate change pressures are not like a disease that kills you within days of exposure and otherwise has no consequence.

2.

a. You seem to suggest we are very uncertain about many of the effect signs. I think the basic argument why people concerned about climate change would argue that changes will be negative and that there be compounding risks is because natural and human systems are adapted to specific climate conditions. That doesn’t mean they cannot adapt at all, but that does mean that we should expect it is more likely that effects are negative, at least as short-term shocks, than positive for welfare. Insofar as you buy a story where people migrate because of climate impacts, for example, I don’t think it is unreasonable to say that increased migration pressures are more likely to increase tensions than to reduce them, etc.

b. I think a lot of the other arguments on the side of “indirect risks are low” you cite are ultimately of the form (i) “indirect effects in other causes are also large” or (ii) “pointing to indirect effects make things inscrutable and unverifiable”. (i) might be true but doesn’t matter, I think, for the question of whether warming is net-bad and (ii) is also true, but does nothing by itself on whether those indirect effects are real—we can live in a world where indirect effects are rhetorically abused and still exist and indeed dominate in certain situations!

jackva Jul 25, 2024, 6:07 PM
2 points
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on: Climate Advocacy and AI Safety: Supercharging AI Slowdown Advocacy
I disagree with the substance, but I don’t understand why it gets downvoted.

jackva Jul 24, 2024, 7:03 PM
12 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: ClimateDoc’s comment on: The Precipice Revisited
Apologies if my comment was triggering the sense that I am questioning published climate science. I don’t. I think / hope we are mostly misunderstanding each other.
With “politicized” here I do not mean that the report says inaccurate things, but merely that the selection of what is shown and how things are being framed in the SMP is a highly political result.
And the climate scientists here are political agents as well, so comparing it with prior versions would not provide counter-evidence.

To make clear what I mean with “politicized”.
1. I do not think it is a coincidence that the fact that the graphic on climate impacts only shows very subtly that this assumes no adaptation.
2. And that the graph on higher impacts at lower levels of warming does not mention that since the last update of the IPCC report we also have now expectations of much lower warming.

These kind of things are presentational choices that are being made, omissions one would not make if the goal was to maximally clarify the situation because those choices are always made in ways justifying more action. This is what I mean with “politicized”, selectively presented and framed evidence.

[EDIT: This is a good reference from very respected IPCC authors that discusses the politicized process with many examples]

jackva Jul 23, 2024, 6:52 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Toby_Ord’s comment on: The Precipice Revisited
Sorry for the delay!
Here is a good summary of whether or not the recent warming should make us worried more: https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-why-the-recent-acceleration-in-global-warming-is-what-scientists-expect/
It is nuanced, but I think the TLDR is that recent observations are within the expected range (the trend observed since 2009 is within the range expected by climate models, though the observations are noisy and uncertain, as are the models).

jackva Jul 23, 2024, 6:46 PM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: ClimateDoc’s comment on: The Precipice Revisited
It is true that this is not true for the long-form summary of the science.
What I mean is that this graphic is out of the “Summary for Policymakers”, which is approved by policymakers and a fairly political document.

Less formalistically, all of the infographics in the Summary for Policymakers are carefully chosen and one goal of the Summary for Policymakers is clearly to give ammunition for action (e.g. the infographic right above the cited one displays impacts in scenarios without any additional adaptation by end of century, which seems like a very implausible assumption as a default and one that makes a lot more sense when the goal is to display gravity of climate impacts rather than making a best guess of climate impacts).

jackva Jul 12, 2024, 2:50 PM
49 points
2 ∶ 0
on: The Precipice Revisited
Thanks for this!
I think one important caveat to the climate picture is that part of the third of the three factors—climate impacts at given levels of warming—has also changed and that this change runs in the other direction.

Below is the graphic on this from the recent IPCC Synthesis Report (p. 18), which shows on the right hand side how the expected occurrence of reasons for concern has moved downwards between AR 5 (2014) and AR6 (2022). In other words, there is an evidential change that moves higher impacts towards lower temperatures and could potentially compensate the effect of lower expected temperature (eyeballing this, for some of the global reasons for concern it moves down by a degree).

I think one should treat the IPCC graphic with some skepticism—it is a bit suspicious that all the impact estimates move to lower temperatures at the same time as higher temperatures become less likely and IPCC reports are famously politicized documents—but it is still a data point worth taking into account.

I haven’t done the math on this, but I would expect that the effect of a lowered distribution of warming will still dominate, but it is something that moderates the picture and I think is worth including when giving complete accounts to avoid coming across as cherry-picking only the positive updates.

jackva Jul 10, 2024, 7:23 PM
6 points
2 ∶ 0
on: A breakdown of OpenAI’s revenue
We looked into OpenAI’s revenue because financial information should be a strong indicator of the business decisions they make in the coming months, and hence an indicator of their research priorities

Is this really true? I am quite surprised by this given how much of the expected financial value of OpenAI (and valuation of AI companies more generally) is not in the next couple of months, but based on being at the frontier of a technology with enormous future potential.

jackva Jun 28, 2024, 8:58 AM
11 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: JamesÖz 🔸’s comment on: “Denmark will be first to impose CO2 tax on farms, government says”
Sure! Here is the unpacked version (trying real hard to sound like an LLM):

There are lots of complementarities (or also just similar effects applied to beef and chicken) that I think complicate a picture focused on short-term marginal consumption shifts:
- (1) I think investor confidence / durable public support is the single-most important predictor of most “easy” technological transformations (APs aren’t like fusion, there isn’t really a world where APs fail for lack of technical feasibility, APs are modular technologies that can be made reliably cheaper and better if invested in).
- (2) APs and climate regulation are not exactly having a great year and an ambitious carbon tax covering agriculture is a signal bucking this trend (if indeed passed), something that could give investors more confidence to continue investing in APs. Historically, Nordic carbon taxes have been a leading indicator and inspiration to ambitious climate jurisdiction so I also do not see this primarily as a Danish thing but as a broader signal where the ambitious climate policy coalition will move.
- (3) If one believes the basic AP theory of victory – APs get cheap and competitive and this makes norm changes and regulatory policy feasible in the long run (and there is a mutually reinforcing dynamic or near-competitive technology and changing political feasibility as we are seeing with other forms of clean tech) – then I find it pretty hard to imagine that we end up in a world where we say “the Danish carbon tax increased suffering on net” based on short-term marginal dynamics. I find it pretty implausible that people at scale will say “I will eat AP beef, but this does not affect my view of animal suffering at all and I will continue to eat animal chicken”. I am generally pretty skeptical based on such arguments based on current techno-economic dynamics since I think getting serious about investing into technologies usually unveils lots of new opportunities to make things cheaper and easier.
- (4) One should also not forget that there is a strong signal here for chicken as well, there is a clear signal that “yes, we will get more seriously about regulating animal agriculture”.
- (5) By close analogy, the most important short-term effect of a carbon tax on electricity is usually to make natural gas more competitive than coal. But I think it would be mistaken to conclude that ambitious carbon taxes are good for the natural gas industry in the long run.
I haven’t done the math on this. My original comment was mostly motivated by the prior discussion being what I found too focused on short-term marginal changes that I think are likely to miss the big picture here. So, I mostly wanted to provide an alternative take and considerations not reflected here before.

jackva Jun 27, 2024, 12:59 PM
4 points
2 ∶ 0
on: “Denmark will be first to impose CO2 tax on farms, government says”
I would expect the main effect of stronger regulation of agriculture to be the innovation signal for alternative proteins.

If passed, this would be a pretty strong carbon tax and a pretty clear signal that at least some countries will get serious about decarbonizing agriculture, so even if it leads to suffering-increasing short-term changes I would expect the long run effect for animals to be positive (essentially, it seems to me the complementarities for AP-innovation between chicken and beef seem larger than the short-term shifts one would expect—we do not get AP beef without ever getting AP chicken).