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“All scientific work is incomplete," he said. "All scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us a free

by Gatsky 10y ago

“All scientific work is incomplete," he said. "All scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us a freedom to ignore the knowledge we already have, or to postpone the action that it appears to demand at a given time.” This is a very salient point, and I think defines the right attitude to these matters, eg climate change.

danieltillett 10y ago
Especially when you have very poor predictive models and some of the possible outcomes are catastrophic. As an aside it is impossible to calculate the net present value of a humanity ending catastrophic event. When we are weighing up the financial cost of doing anything about the release of more GHG into the atmosphere, we have have a finite positive benefit on the release more side (i.e. coal and oil are cheaper than renewals) added to potentially infinite negative extinction event (i.e. the climate hits a runaway positive feedback rise that make human life impossible). The sum is always negative no matter how low the risk of extinction.
- Iv 10y ago
  What if all the possible course of action do have a small probability of causing our extinction? After all, any money spent in any other matter than astronomy yields the risk to make us miss an incoming asteroid (or an angry alien fleet) If your tool allows infinite negative, it fails at providing guidelines.
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    I am just suggesting that this is an example of what the maths tells us, not that it is a useful model. In practice humans accepts some chance of extinction in return for an economic benefit. The only problem is as a species we do tend to ignore the long rail risk even when that risk is rather more than zero.
- slavik81 10y ago
  > The sum is always negative no matter how low the risk of extinction. That makes this model rather useless for arguing what must be done. For example, it's ridiculously, incredibly unlikely that making tea will lead to extinction by nuclear armageddon. But it's not impossible. As such, making tea would also have an infinite, negative expected value. It would be effectively as bad as just pressing the nuclear button. That being said, I think your only problem is in assuming that the human race is infinitely valuable. It's not. There's definitely a limit to how much an individual would give up to prevent extinction.
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    I did say that the net present value is impossible to calculate ;) More seriously what would you pay to avoid the extinction of humanity? If the answer is everything then the price is infinite.
    - intended 10y ago
      I would pay X-1 dollars, where X is the cost of creating a shelter for me and the people I care about from the apocalypse. There's a bunch of weird issues in this analysis when you pit morally good outcomes vs economically good outcomes.
      - danieltillett 10y ago
        Yes there certainly is. The best way to think about this I think is that the price you are willing to pay is a finite amount close to the maximum you are capable of paying. There might be difference between people in how close to the theoretical maximum they are willing to pay, but the differences are relative small in comparison to the total most are willing to pay.
    - slavik81 10y ago
      How much would a person pay to avoid their own death? I'm not willing to give up skiing, despite that doing so would slightly decrease the probability of accidental death. I enjoy it too much, and there's no point in living a life without joy. Similarly, there is a limit as to what the human race as a whole is willing to give up to prevent extinction. For example, it's not worth it to put every person on Earth into a lifetime of miserable slavery just to decrease the odds of extinction from 1% to 0.9%.
- gwern 10y ago
  But there's also the fact that not investing in x-risk enables you to invest in economic and scientific growth, which themselves enable future x-risk reduction. However high the cost of an x-risk, it's entirely possible that the optimal response is to not directly invest in it at the moment. Someone worried about asteroid impacts in 1800 would be best off working towards economic growth or better telescopes or something like that. So there are still rational grounds to prefer some actions to others.
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    Of course what is the best way to minimise the risk is a question for debate. Personally I think we should be investing a massive amount in energy R&D and efficient ways of extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere so if we do start to slip into a runaway greenhouse event we are in a position to do something about it. If we just continue along the path we are on (do nothing) if something catastrophic does happen we will not have the tools to respond.

by Gatsky 10y ago

danieltillett 10y ago

Especially when you have very poor predictive models and some of the possible outcomes are catastrophic. As an aside it is impossible to calculate the net present value of a humanity ending catastrophic event. When we are weighing up the financial cost of doing anything about the release of more GHG into the atmosphere, we have have a finite positive benefit on the release more side (i.e. coal and oil are cheaper than renewals) added to potentially infinite negative extinction event (i.e. the climate hits a runaway positive feedback rise that make human life impossible). The sum is always negative no matter how low the risk of extinction.

Iv 10y ago
What if all the possible course of action do have a small probability of causing our extinction? After all, any money spent in any other matter than astronomy yields the risk to make us miss an incoming asteroid (or an angry alien fleet) If your tool allows infinite negative, it fails at providing guidelines.
- danieltillett 10y ago
  I am just suggesting that this is an example of what the maths tells us, not that it is a useful model. In practice humans accepts some chance of extinction in return for an economic benefit. The only problem is as a species we do tend to ignore the long rail risk even when that risk is rather more than zero.
slavik81 10y ago
> The sum is always negative no matter how low the risk of extinction. That makes this model rather useless for arguing what must be done. For example, it's ridiculously, incredibly unlikely that making tea will lead to extinction by nuclear armageddon. But it's not impossible. As such, making tea would also have an infinite, negative expected value. It would be effectively as bad as just pressing the nuclear button. That being said, I think your only problem is in assuming that the human race is infinitely valuable. It's not. There's definitely a limit to how much an individual would give up to prevent extinction.
- danieltillett 10y ago
  I did say that the net present value is impossible to calculate ;) More seriously what would you pay to avoid the extinction of humanity? If the answer is everything then the price is infinite.
  - intended 10y ago
    I would pay X-1 dollars, where X is the cost of creating a shelter for me and the people I care about from the apocalypse. There's a bunch of weird issues in this analysis when you pit morally good outcomes vs economically good outcomes.
    - danieltillett 10y ago
      Yes there certainly is. The best way to think about this I think is that the price you are willing to pay is a finite amount close to the maximum you are capable of paying. There might be difference between people in how close to the theoretical maximum they are willing to pay, but the differences are relative small in comparison to the total most are willing to pay.
  - slavik81 10y ago
    How much would a person pay to avoid their own death? I'm not willing to give up skiing, despite that doing so would slightly decrease the probability of accidental death. I enjoy it too much, and there's no point in living a life without joy. Similarly, there is a limit as to what the human race as a whole is willing to give up to prevent extinction. For example, it's not worth it to put every person on Earth into a lifetime of miserable slavery just to decrease the odds of extinction from 1% to 0.9%.
gwern 10y ago
But there's also the fact that not investing in x-risk enables you to invest in economic and scientific growth, which themselves enable future x-risk reduction. However high the cost of an x-risk, it's entirely possible that the optimal response is to not directly invest in it at the moment. Someone worried about asteroid impacts in 1800 would be best off working towards economic growth or better telescopes or something like that. So there are still rational grounds to prefer some actions to others.
- danieltillett 10y ago
  Of course what is the best way to minimise the risk is a question for debate. Personally I think we should be investing a massive amount in energy R&D and efficient ways of extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere so if we do start to slip into a runaway greenhouse event we are in a position to do something about it. If we just continue along the path we are on (do nothing) if something catastrophic does happen we will not have the tools to respond.