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Interesting, and this will sound very off-topic, but it's actually completely connected - there are any number of technical domains in which, if a given project

Interesting, and this will sound very off-topic, but it's actually completely connected - there are any number of technical domains in which, if a given project is taken to an extreme in one particular circumstance or another, can feed back and cause havoc on many who aren't even involved with the project, or who have the slightest clue about it and therefore didn't have agency to internalize the risks involved. I'm going to list in no particular order: • tetraethyl lead under Thomas Midgley Jr. and Charles Kettering • chlorofluorocarbons (also Midgely and Kettering) • Chernobyl (I would include other nuclear disasters in this bullet as well) • [90% probability] 1977 Russian flu pandemic • a [50%] probability research-related leak for the current pandemic (simply calling this 50% for this post's purposes because nobody knows and probabilities are difficult to weigh absent more data) They all involve insufficient, blinkered, or mis- or overly-incentivized oversight of the activities at hand. At some level, they all employ an attitude of "prove the work is likely to cause harm" rather than "prove the work carries acceptable level of risk". I don't necessarily know how to solve this without causing scientific and technical progress to slow to a crawl. But I think that stakeholder incentives to the green-lighting of any given project with a remotely global scope, and committees who could intervene to stop it in case of overwhelming safety concerns, should be mapped out in excruciating detail to ensure there isn't the faintest of COI (conflict of interest) that could influence decision-making however subtly. So circling back to the parent comment, the idea that one can modify weather, presumably confined locally or temporally, seems innocuous enough - - it would be impossible for that to have global-scale consequences, right? Fact is, I really don't know, and this article is a good example of such an artificial climate-shifting project. What I would want to be assured of as a member of the public, though, is that the oversight for considering such a project wouldn't unduly benefit in some way - financially, career status, family nepotism, etc. that could cloud sober judgement on whether/how the project should be allowed to proceed. To first-order, I'd like to see a problem-domain-agnostic approach to ensuring the human incentives across all aspects of approval couldn't possibly be operating out of the wrong place. I don't want to have to be able to understand the underlying respective technologies involved to feel assured that the risk-to-public-benefit reward trade-off has been undertaken through an irreproachably sober lens.

bee_rider 5y ago
There is little value to slapping numbers on to probabilities that haven't been calculated, why not just say "seemingly likely" and "unknown probability" instead of "90%" and "50%, with an explanation that it isn't really 50%."
- toxik 5y ago
  No you see it either is true or it isn’t true, so 50-50.
- medstrom 5y ago
  You should read about the CIA's study about words of estimative probability : https://waf.cs.illinois.edu/visualizations/Perception-of-Probability-Words/ https://waf.cs.illinois.edu/visualizations/Perception-of-Pro... Basically, when you use a term like "seemingly likely", you do have a number range in mind. Always. Be it 50%-70% or 40%-60%. It's impossible not to. And it became a problem for CIA agents communicating with each other, because different people have different sense of what numbers fit a given term. It's better to be clear about what you mean by giving explicit numbers. It's understood in this sort of context anyway that your number is not calculated from anything, that it's only the rough middle of a range that sounds right to you.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    > Basically, when you use a term like "seemingly likely", you do have a number range in mind. Always. Be it 50%-70% or 40%-60%. It's impossible not to. I don't see how this is supported in the article. And the experiments they discussed -- asking people what probability they assign to certain expressions -- can't possibly support this statement. If you ask people to assign a number to an expression, they'll give you a number, but that doesn't mean they were originally thinking of one, or that the one they come up with is meaningful. > And it became a problem for CIA agents communicating with each other, because different people have different sense of what numbers fit a given term. It's better to be clear about what you mean by giving explicit numbers. It's understood in this sort of context anyway that your number is not calculated from anything, that it's only the rough middle of a range that sounds right to you. My experience is with these sorts of number-like estimate things is that I should try to figure out what plain English phrase they are trying to over-specify. I mostly come to this conclusion by talking about current events with people (elections outcomes that they thing are sure things, for example), and comparing the numbers reported (by 538 for example) to odds that they are familiar with (D&D critical hits are a good one, as an event that is rare but memorably encountered). This tends to lower confidence, which indicates to me that people don't really have a feel for these numbers. I don't really think 70% and 60% are different from an operational point of view anyway. They are both events where we think the outcome has some skew but must plan on seeing the less likely outcome pretty often.

bee_rider 5y ago

There is little value to slapping numbers on to probabilities that haven't been calculated, why not just say "seemingly likely" and "unknown probability" instead of "90%" and "50%, with an explanation that it isn't really 50%."

toxik 5y ago
No you see it either is true or it isn’t true, so 50-50.
medstrom 5y ago
You should read about the CIA's study about words of estimative probability : https://waf.cs.illinois.edu/visualizations/Perception-of-Probability-Words/ https://waf.cs.illinois.edu/visualizations/Perception-of-Pro... Basically, when you use a term like "seemingly likely", you do have a number range in mind. Always. Be it 50%-70% or 40%-60%. It's impossible not to. And it became a problem for CIA agents communicating with each other, because different people have different sense of what numbers fit a given term. It's better to be clear about what you mean by giving explicit numbers. It's understood in this sort of context anyway that your number is not calculated from anything, that it's only the rough middle of a range that sounds right to you.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  > Basically, when you use a term like "seemingly likely", you do have a number range in mind. Always. Be it 50%-70% or 40%-60%. It's impossible not to. I don't see how this is supported in the article. And the experiments they discussed -- asking people what probability they assign to certain expressions -- can't possibly support this statement. If you ask people to assign a number to an expression, they'll give you a number, but that doesn't mean they were originally thinking of one, or that the one they come up with is meaningful. > And it became a problem for CIA agents communicating with each other, because different people have different sense of what numbers fit a given term. It's better to be clear about what you mean by giving explicit numbers. It's understood in this sort of context anyway that your number is not calculated from anything, that it's only the rough middle of a range that sounds right to you. My experience is with these sorts of number-like estimate things is that I should try to figure out what plain English phrase they are trying to over-specify. I mostly come to this conclusion by talking about current events with people (elections outcomes that they thing are sure things, for example), and comparing the numbers reported (by 538 for example) to odds that they are familiar with (D&D critical hits are a good one, as an event that is rare but memorably encountered). This tends to lower confidence, which indicates to me that people don't really have a feel for these numbers. I don't really think 70% and 60% are different from an operational point of view anyway. They are both events where we think the outcome has some skew but must plan on seeing the less likely outcome pretty often.