(1) The kind of Gatesian solutions they like to fund like mosquito nets are part of the problem, not part of the solution as I see it. If things are going to get better in Africa, it will be because Africans grow their economy and pay taxes and their governments can provide the services that they want. Expecting NGOs to do everything for them is the same kind of neoliberal thinking that has rotted state capacity in the core and set us up for a political crisis.
(2) It is one thing to do something wrong, realize it was a mistake, and then make amends. It's another thing to do plan to do something wrong and to try to offset it somehow. Many of the high paying jobs that EA wants young people to enter are "part of the problem" when it comes to declining stage capacity, legitimation crisis, and not dealing with immediate problems -- like the fact that one of these days there's going to be a heat wave that is a mass causality event.
Furthermore
(3) Time discounting is a central part of economic planning
It is controversial as hell, but one of the many things the Soviet Union got wrong before the 1980s was planning with a discount rate of zero, which led to many economically and ecologically harmful projects. If you seriously think it should be zero you should also be considering whether anybody should work in the finance industry at all or if we should have dropped a hydrogen bomb on Exxon's headquarters yesterday. At some point speculations about the future are just speculation. When it comes to the nuclear waste issue, for instance, I don't think we have any idea what state people are going to be in 20,000 years. They might be really pissed that buried spent nuclear fuel some place they can't get at it. Even the plan to burn plutonium completely in fast breeder reactors has an air of unreality about it, even though it happens on a relatively short 1000 year timescale we can't be sure at all that anyone will be around to finish the job.
(4) If you are looking for low-probability events to worry about I think you could find a lot of them. If it was really a movement of free thinkers they'd be concerned about 4,000 horsemen of the apocalypse, not the 4 or so that they are allowed to talk about -- but talk about a bunch of people who'll cancel you if you "think different". Somehow climate change and legitimation crisis just get... ignored.
(5) Although it is run by people who say they are militant atheists, the movement has all the trappings of a religion, not least "The Singularity" was talked about by Jesuit Priest Teilhard de Chardin long before sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge used it as the hinge of a mystery novel.
> When it comes to the nuclear waste issue, for instance ...
Nuclear waste issues are 99.9% present-day political/ideological. Huge portions of the Earth are uninhabitable due to climate and/or geology. Lead, mercury, arsenic, and other naturally-occurring poisons contaminate large areas. Volcanoes spew CO2 and toxic gasses by the megaton.
Vs. when is the last time you heard someone get excited over toxic waste left behind by the Roman Empire?
I agree with your lead (the issue is 99% political) but man does that last bit demand a rebuttal. Waste left behind by the roman empire isn't even remotely comparable to long term radioactive material. I suggest having a look through the wikipedia list of orphan source incidents to get an idea of what happens when people unknowingly come across radioactive material. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...
Also, PaulHoule's original comment said "in 20,000 years". Cobalt 60 (for example) has a half-life of 5 1/4 years - so there really won't be any of it left by then.
What's the rate conditioned on being near an incident though? And these are small, isolated incidents. How does what we see extrapolate to large scale nuclear waste storage, a state that failed a few hundred years ago, and someone inadvertently digging it up?
No one is talking about stuffing cobalt 60 in yucca mountain (at least as far as I know).
Compared to abandoned/forgotten mines (that eventually cave in) and mega-scale chemical waste dumps/sites/spills, nuclear waste sites - especially ones that'll still be seriously dangerous centuries or millennia from now - are profoundly rare.
And the tech to detect that you're digging into radioactive stuff is far simpler than the tech to detect that you're digging into some sort of chemical waste, or a failing old mine or tunnel.
If millennia-in-the-future humans care all that much about what we did with our nuclear waste, it'll either be political/ideological, or (as PaulHoule suggested) just one more "they didn't leave it somewhere really convenient for us" deal.
I think of the widespread heavy metal contamination in China which existed even before the modern age of manufacturing. Some might be naturally occurring but you had people like this guy
The difficulty is in deriving any useful utility function from prices (even via preferences :), and as you know, econs can't rid themselves of that particular intrusive thought
What makes it really bad is that you can't add different people's utility functions, or for that matter, multiply the utility function of some imagined galactic citizen by some astronomical amount. The question of "what distribution of wealth maximizes welfare" [1] is unanswerable in that framework and we're left with the Randian maxim that any transaction freely entered into is "fair" because nobody would enter into it if it didn't increase their utility function.
[1] Though you might come to the conclusion that greeder people should have the money because they like it more
Comic sophism ain't gonna make hypernormies reconsider lol
(Aside from the semi-tragic one to consider additive dilogarithms..)
One actionable (utility agnostic) suggestion: study the measureable consequences of (quantifiable) policy on carbon pricing, because this is already quite close to the uncontroversial bits
> "The Singularity" was talked about by Jesuit Priest Teilhard de Chardin long before sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge used it as the hinge of a mystery novel.
Similarly, Big Bang was talked about by Catholic priest Georges Lemaître, and Bayes' Theorem was invented by Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes. Does that prove anything beyond the fact that there are many smart religious people?
> If things are going to get better in Africa, it will be because Africans grow their economy and pay taxes and their governments can provide the services that they want
The problem with this argument is that the path to achieve this is unclear, and everyone who has tried has failed. In the absence of a clear path, it seems rational to set aside lofty ideals and do whatever good you can now.
> If you are looking for low-probability events to worry about I think you could find a lot of them.
Name one that hasn't already been considered that would be a serious threat to modern technological civilization.
> Although it is run by people who say they are militant atheists, the movement has all the trappings of a religion
Supposing you're correct this thought is incomplete. Take it to its logical conclusion: a religion centered around open rational debate is bad because...?
(1) The kind of Gatesian solutions they like to fund like mosquito nets are part of the problem, not part of the solution as I see it. If things are going to get better in Africa, it will be because Africans grow their economy and pay taxes and their governments can provide the services that they want. Expecting NGOs to do everything for them is the same kind of neoliberal thinking that has rotted state capacity in the core and set us up for a political crisis.
(2) It is one thing to do something wrong, realize it was a mistake, and then make amends. It's another thing to do plan to do something wrong and to try to offset it somehow. Many of the high paying jobs that EA wants young people to enter are "part of the problem" when it comes to declining stage capacity, legitimation crisis, and not dealing with immediate problems -- like the fact that one of these days there's going to be a heat wave that is a mass causality event.
Furthermore
(3) Time discounting is a central part of economic planning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_discount_rate
It is controversial as hell, but one of the many things the Soviet Union got wrong before the 1980s was planning with a discount rate of zero, which led to many economically and ecologically harmful projects. If you seriously think it should be zero you should also be considering whether anybody should work in the finance industry at all or if we should have dropped a hydrogen bomb on Exxon's headquarters yesterday. At some point speculations about the future are just speculation. When it comes to the nuclear waste issue, for instance, I don't think we have any idea what state people are going to be in 20,000 years. They might be really pissed that buried spent nuclear fuel some place they can't get at it. Even the plan to burn plutonium completely in fast breeder reactors has an air of unreality about it, even though it happens on a relatively short 1000 year timescale we can't be sure at all that anyone will be around to finish the job.
(4) If you are looking for low-probability events to worry about I think you could find a lot of them. If it was really a movement of free thinkers they'd be concerned about 4,000 horsemen of the apocalypse, not the 4 or so that they are allowed to talk about -- but talk about a bunch of people who'll cancel you if you "think different". Somehow climate change and legitimation crisis just get... ignored.
(5) Although it is run by people who say they are militant atheists, the movement has all the trappings of a religion, not least "The Singularity" was talked about by Jesuit Priest Teilhard de Chardin long before sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge used it as the hinge of a mystery novel.