6 ms·

The world should act better about catastrophic and existential risks. We think fine. We think when things get serious we'll act. Then things get serious -- lik

by spodek 6y ago

The world should act better about catastrophic and existential risks. We think fine. We think when things get serious we'll act. Then things get serious -- like billions of people locked down, plastic in our bloodstreams, would-be leaders exacerbating problems, etc -- and we don't act how we thought we would. The problem is our behavior. Thinking is relevant, but behavior is the issue.

thimkerbell 6y ago
The problem is that our priorities can be made to work against us.
- briefcomment 6y ago
  Can you elaborate on that?
  - kingaillas 6y ago
    I'm reading that as: in a world of scarce resources, there is always going to something higher priority to deal with than extremely low risk catastrophic/existential events.
    - jointpdf 6y ago
      risk = probability * impact - climate change: very high probability * very high impact - terrorism: low/med probability * low/med impact - thermonuclear war: low-ish(?) probability * extremely high impact - superhuman AGI: ??? probability * ??? impact (likely very high impact, but + or - is uncertain) In a standard rational decision-making framework, if: cost of action < risk, then: take action. [Edit: Of course this is all a gross simplification. See more here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_decision https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_decision]
      - bumby 6y ago
        Well said, but I believe the “thinking” problem is because we are not generally wired to think in a statistical sense. We can assess the severity fairly well, but we have all kinds of cognitive biases that get in the way of accurate probability assessments. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
      - briandear 6y ago
        > very high probability of climate change. There is a 100% probability. It has been happening since there was a climate. The question is how much can we really affect it or even if we should.
        rswail 6y ago
        Rephrase it as "very high probability of human-induced climate change" and the probability stays the same, but the impact of taking action changes completely. If the change is human induced and on a very short timeframe (ie since the industrial revolution), then action on a similar scale should be possible to mitigate the impact.
      - Spooky23 6y ago
        That’s a frequently used formula for security, and it’s dumb there too, manipulated to explain away problems or get money. Impact is more like “perceived impact to me” and risk is over a timeline that matters to the assessor of risk. War hawks see nuclear war as medium probability, low impact. Most people see climate change as something impactful in a timeframe they don’t give a shit about, and terrorism is medium or high impact with medium or high probability in a timeframe that matters to them.
        FeepingCreature 6y ago
        > terrorism is medium or high impact This implies that the best solution to terrorism is to abolish national news, in order to diminish its impact.
    - briefcomment 6y ago
      I think something else is being said. Along the lines of our priorities and concerns can be highjacked as a means to a different end. Which is almost certainly happening.
    - core-questions 6y ago
      Money is effectively priority, or at least control over the priorities of others. How do we ensure a greater return on investment for doing things that are actually in the public interest, so that people with money choose to use it in order to make people do actions that prioritize that?
sammalloy 6y ago
> We think fine Daniel Kahneman argues otherwise.
repsilat 6y ago
Funny, I think it's exactly the other way around -- people wring their hands about things that don't matter ("plastic in our bloodstreams") but tend to act appropriately. Don't panic. Carry on. Treating a threat as existential is often enormously costly, and we reliably overestimate threats. Ignoring them is a good first response, if not always a good second one. Being a week or a month late to the current pandemic is less costly than locking down for SARS, mad cow, bird flu, swine flu, ... Not to mention the times when we did overreact. The latest TSA budget is $8.24 billion dollars, or 824 lives per year (at a cost of $10 million per life), or 2.17 One World Trade Centers per year, or (verging into polemic) one 9/11 every four years. Isn't the lesson that we tend to overreact? Sure, maybe it'll be a pandemic, and let's not completely discount the idea, but why not just lock the plane's cabin doors and see if it gets worse?
- dumbfoundded 6y ago
  I think the tendency is slightly more complicated than that. I People tend to under react to a certain point and then tend to overreact past that point. The problem is that this inflection point is rarely informed by any sort of rational thought.
- quadrangle 6y ago
  Why is plastic in our bloodstream something that doesn't matter?
- vharuck 6y ago
  >Treating a threat as existential is often enormously costly, and we reliably overestimate threats. Ignoring them is a good first response, if not always a good second one. For the general public, ignoring and carrying on is a great response. We live in a world that capitalizes on specialists. The problem with COVID-19 was multiple failures by the people whose jobs were to care about pandemics. And we don't need massive budgets to prevent pandemics. Just epidemiologists and doctors on the lookout. Small teams working with hotspot countries. It's not the average citizen's fault we got here. It's the fault of the institutions tasked with protecting us, who only had to hire a small team of experts every two decades to write up short proposals of what to do in unusual but eventually guaranteed emergencies. From what I've seen, the majority of Western countries were making up their pandemic response on the fly. And it's a virus that spreads like the annual flu, so not even a "black swan" method of infection.
cortesoft 6y ago
One of my favorite essays of all time is "A Muscular Empathy": https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscular-empathy/249984/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscu... It explores this idea, that we like to think that we would be heroes if things got tough... even though we don't do anything heroic in our normal, cushy lives. We seem to think we would some how be better people if things are hard, when in reality it is often the opposite. This pandemic has really driven home this point. To quote the article: > Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. We are smart enough to get by, responsible enough to raise a couple of kids, thrifty to sock away for a vacation, and industrious enough to keep the lights on. We like our cars. We love a good cheeseburger. We'd die without air-conditioning. In the great mass of humanity that's ever lived, we are distinguished only by our creature comforts, and we are, on the whole, mediocre. That mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook--but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.
- ryan-allen 6y ago
  This reminds me of the book Ordinary Men, people overestimate their goodness, but put in the right (wrong) situation we can become monsters. https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution-ebook/dp/B01G1F0F84 https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...
buck4roo 6y ago
The problem is CAPITALISM. Capitalism prioritizes profits over people's lives. If it were profitable to stockpile resources to protect life and/or property, in advance of foreseeable adverse events, we would be more prepared. Precisely because it is not profitable, we are not.
- rswail 6y ago
  The problem is not the mechanism of capital distribution, it's the incentives. Effectively, government (through taxation and public works) is the mechanism of capital (re-)distribution that is not (or should not be) profit driven.
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    > The problem is not the mechanism of capital distribution, it's the incentives. ...which is exactly capitalism: 1) private companies are required to maximize (short term) profit as their first priority. 2) the billionaire class can heavily influence policy through regulatory capture

by spodek 6y ago

thimkerbell 6y ago

The problem is that our priorities can be made to work against us.

briefcomment 6y ago
Can you elaborate on that?
- kingaillas 6y ago
  I'm reading that as: in a world of scarce resources, there is always going to something higher priority to deal with than extremely low risk catastrophic/existential events.
  - jointpdf 6y ago
    risk = probability * impact - climate change: very high probability * very high impact - terrorism: low/med probability * low/med impact - thermonuclear war: low-ish(?) probability * extremely high impact - superhuman AGI: ??? probability * ??? impact (likely very high impact, but + or - is uncertain) In a standard rational decision-making framework, if: cost of action < risk, then: take action. [Edit: Of course this is all a gross simplification. See more here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_decision https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_decision]
    - bumby 6y ago
      Well said, but I believe the “thinking” problem is because we are not generally wired to think in a statistical sense. We can assess the severity fairly well, but we have all kinds of cognitive biases that get in the way of accurate probability assessments. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
    - briandear 6y ago
      > very high probability of climate change. There is a 100% probability. It has been happening since there was a climate. The question is how much can we really affect it or even if we should.
      - rswail 6y ago
        Rephrase it as "very high probability of human-induced climate change" and the probability stays the same, but the impact of taking action changes completely. If the change is human induced and on a very short timeframe (ie since the industrial revolution), then action on a similar scale should be possible to mitigate the impact.
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      That’s a frequently used formula for security, and it’s dumb there too, manipulated to explain away problems or get money. Impact is more like “perceived impact to me” and risk is over a timeline that matters to the assessor of risk. War hawks see nuclear war as medium probability, low impact. Most people see climate change as something impactful in a timeframe they don’t give a shit about, and terrorism is medium or high impact with medium or high probability in a timeframe that matters to them.
      - FeepingCreature 6y ago
        > terrorism is medium or high impact This implies that the best solution to terrorism is to abolish national news, in order to diminish its impact.
  - briefcomment 6y ago
    I think something else is being said. Along the lines of our priorities and concerns can be highjacked as a means to a different end. Which is almost certainly happening.
  - core-questions 6y ago
    Money is effectively priority, or at least control over the priorities of others. How do we ensure a greater return on investment for doing things that are actually in the public interest, so that people with money choose to use it in order to make people do actions that prioritize that?

sammalloy 6y ago

> We think fine Daniel Kahneman argues otherwise.

repsilat 6y ago

Funny, I think it's exactly the other way around -- people wring their hands about things that don't matter ("plastic in our bloodstreams") but tend to act appropriately. Don't panic. Carry on. Treating a threat as existential is often enormously costly, and we reliably overestimate threats. Ignoring them is a good first response, if not always a good second one. Being a week or a month late to the current pandemic is less costly than locking down for SARS, mad cow, bird flu, swine flu, ... Not to mention the times when we did overreact. The latest TSA budget is $8.24 billion dollars, or 824 lives per year (at a cost of $10 million per life), or 2.17 One World Trade Centers per year, or (verging into polemic) one 9/11 every four years. Isn't the lesson that we tend to overreact? Sure, maybe it'll be a pandemic, and let's not completely discount the idea, but why not just lock the plane's cabin doors and see if it gets worse?

dumbfoundded 6y ago
I think the tendency is slightly more complicated than that. I People tend to under react to a certain point and then tend to overreact past that point. The problem is that this inflection point is rarely informed by any sort of rational thought.
quadrangle 6y ago
Why is plastic in our bloodstream something that doesn't matter?
vharuck 6y ago
>Treating a threat as existential is often enormously costly, and we reliably overestimate threats. Ignoring them is a good first response, if not always a good second one. For the general public, ignoring and carrying on is a great response. We live in a world that capitalizes on specialists. The problem with COVID-19 was multiple failures by the people whose jobs were to care about pandemics. And we don't need massive budgets to prevent pandemics. Just epidemiologists and doctors on the lookout. Small teams working with hotspot countries. It's not the average citizen's fault we got here. It's the fault of the institutions tasked with protecting us, who only had to hire a small team of experts every two decades to write up short proposals of what to do in unusual but eventually guaranteed emergencies. From what I've seen, the majority of Western countries were making up their pandemic response on the fly. And it's a virus that spreads like the annual flu, so not even a "black swan" method of infection.

cortesoft 6y ago

One of my favorite essays of all time is "A Muscular Empathy": https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscular-empathy/249984/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscu... It explores this idea, that we like to think that we would be heroes if things got tough... even though we don't do anything heroic in our normal, cushy lives. We seem to think we would some how be better people if things are hard, when in reality it is often the opposite. This pandemic has really driven home this point. To quote the article: > Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. We are smart enough to get by, responsible enough to raise a couple of kids, thrifty to sock away for a vacation, and industrious enough to keep the lights on. We like our cars. We love a good cheeseburger. We'd die without air-conditioning. In the great mass of humanity that's ever lived, we are distinguished only by our creature comforts, and we are, on the whole, mediocre. That mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook--but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.

ryan-allen 6y ago
This reminds me of the book Ordinary Men, people overestimate their goodness, but put in the right (wrong) situation we can become monsters. https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution-ebook/dp/B01G1F0F84 https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...

buck4roo 6y ago

The problem is CAPITALISM. Capitalism prioritizes profits over people's lives. If it were profitable to stockpile resources to protect life and/or property, in advance of foreseeable adverse events, we would be more prepared. Precisely because it is not profitable, we are not.

rswail 6y ago
The problem is not the mechanism of capital distribution, it's the incentives. Effectively, government (through taxation and public works) is the mechanism of capital (re-)distribution that is not (or should not be) profit driven.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  > The problem is not the mechanism of capital distribution, it's the incentives. ...which is exactly capitalism: 1) private companies are required to maximize (short term) profit as their first priority. 2) the billionaire class can heavily influence policy through regulatory capture