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No, that's a strawman. The severity of human extinction is not infinite. For instance, it would be preferable for humanity to go extinct than for every human to
by naasking 4y ago
No, that's a strawman. The severity of human extinction is not infinite. For instance, it would be preferable for humanity to go extinct than for every human to be tortured for every minute of their life, and since there is no number larger than infinity, the severity of human extinction must be finite.
This tells me that you haven't seriously engaged with the arguments over AGI. I'm sure there's plenty of nonsense armchair philosophising happening, but you don't take all the "quantum woo" that's out there as some indictment of real quantum mechanics, do you?
- tptacek 4y agoYou can replace "infinity" with any suitably huge number; I don't need to quibble over tenths, hundredths, and thousandths of a percentile risk that something is going to happen.
- naasking 4y agoYou absolutely do have to quibble over those numbers. Or do you not think we should be tracking asteroids either because they only kill 95% of all life once every few hundred million years?
- tptacek 4y agoI do not think people should be directing money to asteroid charities, no. It's their money, they can do what they want, but if their discipline demands that they do that, it's a bad discipline.
- naasking 4y agoSo to make sure I get this straight, if a plausible calculation suggested that we could see an extinction-level asteroid hurtling towards us in the next hundred years, you don't think that asteroid detection is worth funding via any means, like charities or governments?
- tptacek 4y agoSee above.
- naasking 4y agoBlows my mind that anyone would actually accept such a conclusion, but you do you I guess. Seriously undermines your criticisms of EA, IMO.
- tptacek 4y agoI'm pretty happy with what it says about my critique, too. For instance, my side of this "debate", such as it is, will never spend $100,000 funding a tabletop role playing game aiming to educate people on the dangers of asteroids.
- naasking 4y ago> I'm pretty happy with what it says about my critique, too. For instance, my side of this "debate", such as it is, will never spend $100,000 funding a tabletop role playing game aiming to educate people on the dangers of asteroids. I'm not sure how you can be so confident that raising awareness wouldn't have beneficial downstream effects. I'm skeptical too, but outright dismissal doesn't seem warranted. Then again, you are downright dismissive about the very real and scientifically proven dangers of asteroids wiping out most of life on Earth, so I suppose this is pretty mild by comparison.
- tptacek 4y agoI hereby dismiss all of this outright. Take that as you will.