Critics: “‘Long Reflection’ Is Crazy Bad Idea” https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/10/long-reflection-is-crazy-bad-idea.html
turchin
Karma: 592
[Draft amnesty] The Probability of a Global Catastrophe in the World with Exponentially Growing Technologies
Actually, I am going to write someday a short post “time machine as existential risk”.
Technically, any time travel is possible only if timeline is branching, but it is ok in quantum multiverse. However, some changes in the past will be invariants: they will not change the future in the way that causes ground father paradox. Such invariants will be loopholes and have very high measure. UFO could be such invariants and this explains their strangeness: only strange thing are not changing future ti prevent their own existence.
Thanks for these details!
The report doesn’t mention any likelihood of any of these events happening
May be you discuss a different report than I read. The one I read says:
In fact there is evidence of eruptions at Kivu in about 1000 year cycles and predictions based on observed accumulation rates (10-14% per year) suggest an eruption in the next 100-200 years, see Report [1].
Cause prioritisation: Preventing lake Kivu in Africa eruption which could kill two million.
Link is not working for me
Buying a house is a bet on long AI timelines and absence of all other catastrophes.
Buying a house protects you against rent growth, income decline and inflation, as well as bad landlords and time consuming rent hunt.
Three arguments in favor of war soon:
Chips. While China chip industry is getting sanctioned, most of the world production of advanced chip remains on Taiwan. But this is not for long, as manufacturing start relocating in other places. Attack on Taiwan could prevent US dominance in chips and AI.
Ukraine war strained US production of some weapons, but US invested in increase of production of missiles and artillery ships. So in future situation will be less advantageous for war.
China has clear advantage now in cheap drones produced in mass, like DJI. But is is also not for long.
And did the purchase come with any conditions, like the right for the billionaire to use the venue as his house between the conferences?
How much are electricity, maintenance and property tax for this venue? Historic building may require expensive restoration and are subject to complex regulation.
I think it is more interesting to think about other people as of rational agents. If bitcoin grew to 100K as it was widely expected in 2021, SBF bets will pay off and he will become the first trillioner. He will also be able to return all money he took from creditors.
He may understood that there was only like 10 per cent chance to become trillioner, but if he thought that trillion dollars for preventing x-risks is the only chance to save humanity, then he knew that he should bet on this opportunity.
Now we live in a timeline where he lost and it is more tempting to say that he was irrational or mistaken. But maybe he was not.
One thing that he didn’t use in his EV calculations is meta-level impact of failure on the popularity of EA and utilitarianism. Even relatively small failure in money could have almost infinite negative utility if topics like x-risks prevention become very unpopular.
I am interested to see how wood gasification s an energy source for cars could be bootstrapped in the case of industry collapse.
Another topic: how some cold tolerant crops from nothern regions ( fodder beet, rutabaga) could be planted in South in the case of nuclear war winter. I already tried some experiment remotely (asked friend) but it failed.
Also creating self-sustaing community on an island would be an interesting experiment.
The relation between warming and CO2 is exponential, s we need to count the number of doublings of CO2. Every doubling gives a constant increase of the temperature. Assuming that each doubling gives 2C and 22= 2exp4.5, we get around 9C above preindustrial level before we reach tipping point.
In the article the tipping point is above 4C (in the chart) plus 6C from warmer world = 10C, which gives us approximately the same result as I calculated above.
“Transition to a Moist Greenhouse with CO2 and solar forcing” https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10627
I think that the difference between tipping point and existential temperature should be clarified. Tipping point is the temperature after which self-sustaining loop of positive feedback starts. In the moisture greenhouse paper it is estimated to be at +4C, after which the temperature jumps to +40C in a few years. If we take +4 C above preindustrial level, it will be 1-3 above current level.
I didn’t try to make any metaphysical claims. I just pointed on conditional probability: if someone is writing comments on LW, (s)he is (with very high probability) not an animal. Therefore LW-commentators are special non-random subset from all animals.
I think that here are presented two different conjectures:
“I am animal”—therefore liquid water on the planets etc.
“I am randomly selected from all animals”.
The first is true and the second is false.
It also happens in personal life.