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> And yet, until much later when we understood the mechanisms and could evaluate mitigations, any restriction on industrialization based on purely speculative “

> And yet, until much later when we understood the mechanisms and could evaluate mitigations, any restriction on industrialization based on purely speculative “existential risk” that we could neither adequately explain nor provide a factually-grounded framework for evaluating relative risks of alternatives would mostly likely not have made things better, and could have made them (and even the real existential risk, as well as experienced conditions at the time) much worse. Really? I don't agree that strictly limiting plastic production and carbon emissions 100 years ago would have had zero or negative effect on the timeline of apocalyptic climate change or any other existential threat. It might have made us more vulnerable to natural pandemics... but it also would have slowed the emergence of natural pandemics and virtually prohibited artificial pandemics.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> Really? I don't agree that strictly limiting plastic production and carbon emissions 100 years ago would have had zero or negative effect on the timeline of apocalyptic climate change Neither do I, but then, 100 years ago doesn't clearly meet the description, anyhow. The discovery of the greenhouse effect and CO2’s role in it was after not very long after the dates usually used for the end of the (first) industrial revolution (which is usually what is meant without modifiers, not the second—fourth industrial revolutions) and well over 100 years ago.
- digging 3y ago
  What are you even arguing now? Replace "100 years" with whatever timeframe is perfect for you and I'll make the same argument. Please respond to that instead of nitpicking.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Replace "100 years" with whatever timeframe is perfect for you and I'll make the same argument At any time before we had the information to understand thr mechanism of problems and evaluate mitigations, its very unlikely that we would choose tbe right mitigations. Sure, if we choose thr mitigations that we would choose based on information today before we had that information, that would be great, but its at least as likely that any attempt to mitigate risk of unknown mechanism vefore we had that infornation would have done exactly the wrong thing. Basically, “Well, I have information today by which I can design a policy which would have been beneficial if implemented before that information was available” is not an argument that people seeking to mitigate a vaguely imagined risk without any understanding of its mechanism would have the means to design a productive intervention.
    - digging 3y ago
      Ok, that makes more sense. I'm saying that with what we know now, it's clear we could have made different choices that would have worked out better for us earlier in industry. You're saying that the information at the time made it impossible to correctly make the optimal choice. (By that I mean, making the optimal choice would have appeared to be the wrong choice, based on information available.) I don't agree with your point; I think we knew that burning carbon was going to change the atmosphere for the worse and we could have been more careful by simply burning less carbon. However, I concede that it's unknowable what science and technology would look like if we had done that. In analogy to AI, that is very much a point of conversation in alignment/safety discussions. Should we wait until we have better tools to figure out alignment, since it's so insanely difficult to figure out now? Frankly, nobody knows for sure the answer to that question either. My contention is that you (and others) are assuming the answer to that question is yes, but that's not necessarily correct, even based on all the information and analogies we have now.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> Really? I don't agree that strictly limiting plastic production and carbon emissions 100 years ago would have had zero or negative effect on the timeline of apocalyptic climate change Neither do I, but then, 100 years ago doesn't clearly meet the description, anyhow. The discovery of the greenhouse effect and CO2’s role in it was after not very long after the dates usually used for the end of the (first) industrial revolution (which is usually what is meant without modifiers, not the second—fourth industrial revolutions) and well over 100 years ago.

digging 3y ago
What are you even arguing now? Replace "100 years" with whatever timeframe is perfect for you and I'll make the same argument. Please respond to that instead of nitpicking.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Replace "100 years" with whatever timeframe is perfect for you and I'll make the same argument At any time before we had the information to understand thr mechanism of problems and evaluate mitigations, its very unlikely that we would choose tbe right mitigations. Sure, if we choose thr mitigations that we would choose based on information today before we had that information, that would be great, but its at least as likely that any attempt to mitigate risk of unknown mechanism vefore we had that infornation would have done exactly the wrong thing. Basically, “Well, I have information today by which I can design a policy which would have been beneficial if implemented before that information was available” is not an argument that people seeking to mitigate a vaguely imagined risk without any understanding of its mechanism would have the means to design a productive intervention.
  - digging 3y ago
    Ok, that makes more sense. I'm saying that with what we know now, it's clear we could have made different choices that would have worked out better for us earlier in industry. You're saying that the information at the time made it impossible to correctly make the optimal choice. (By that I mean, making the optimal choice would have appeared to be the wrong choice, based on information available.) I don't agree with your point; I think we knew that burning carbon was going to change the atmosphere for the worse and we could have been more careful by simply burning less carbon. However, I concede that it's unknowable what science and technology would look like if we had done that. In analogy to AI, that is very much a point of conversation in alignment/safety discussions. Should we wait until we have better tools to figure out alignment, since it's so insanely difficult to figure out now? Frankly, nobody knows for sure the answer to that question either. My contention is that you (and others) are assuming the answer to that question is yes, but that's not necessarily correct, even based on all the information and analogies we have now.