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It's always lack and coordination and power, not lack of will. There might be around a thousand scientists in the world that are relevant enough to be able to c
by slx26 5y ago
It's always lack and coordination and power, not lack of will. There might be around a thousand scientists in the world that are relevant enough to be able to contact other big names and try to get the whole scientific community on board, not only with a massive effort to make the problem well known to the general public and try to gather enough attention to it, but also making some specific proposals on how this can be solved, and proposing some rather drastic measures if laws are not changed, like getting scientists to agree to ignore any paper that's not released freely and publicly online, and trying to get the media and everyone else on board. But those big names are usually very busy already, and doing useful things. Not more useful than this, but translating from will to coordination is one of the biggest problems preventing humanity from making the world a better place. Some essays like "meditations on moloch" have discussed this problem in more detail if you are interested, but the key idea is that existing power dynamics and the interests and willingness to cheat or be "cleverer" of a minority can deeply compromise the game for everyone else, moving the individual "rational" decision (low risk) very far away from the collective optimal.