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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34083 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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I saw this tweet by Palmer Luckey the other day:

"The real secret of of global warming is that the climate can be whatever humanity wants it to be. Two dozen nations could each single-handedly send us all into an ice age."

He's right. It wouldn't be that hard to prevent climate change via geoengineering. In fact we did some geoengineering by mistake last year. New regulations limited the amount of sulfur that oceangoing ships could emit. This caused an increase in the global temperature.

So, if climate change is such a threat, why don't we do something about it?

Because, let's be honest, our current climate change mitigation strategies are doomed to fail and will only make us poor.

Even if the United States and Europe cut 100% of carbon emissions tomorrow, the climate is going to get hotter. China already emits about 3 times as much carbon as the United States. In the developing world, new coal plants are being built every day. 2024 will set a record for coal production, and 2025 will be greater still. And there is hundreds of years of coal left to be consumed.

Getting people to downsize their SUV to a Prius isn't going to fix the problem. Renewables are not the answer either, being both unreliable and requiring constant upgrades. We are using huge amounts of resources to build solar and wind capacity, but the lifetime of these projects is just a couple of decades. So we need more metals and more concrete, which will result in more emissions, not to mention the associated ecological destruction from strip mines.

Did you know that 8% of global carbon emissions come from the production of concrete, the same amount produced by all private passenger automobiles? Fantasies about electric cars solving global warming are just that.

To fully fix global warming, we need to reduce global carbon emissions by at least 90%, more likely 99%. Carbon in the atmosphere has been increasing since before 1800 AD.

So why are we spending trillions trying to nibble at the edges when we could spend billions and achieve much better results. We can cool the climate to an acceptable level while we wait for the carbon removal technology that is the only way to fully solve the problem.

This is my bugbear so I'll say it again - because nobody's willing to bite the bullet.

If you consider human-caused climate change an imminent existential threat, you turn industrializing nations to glass using weapons of mass destruction, or any such weapon that has an outsized kill ratio to effort and value cost. You then promise to do the same to any society that rises above subsistence farming. It's not worth the risk that some guy might mine some coal and maybe build a steam engine. AI doomers, take note - if you're not willing to do this, as insane as Big Yud's missile strike proposal sounded in practice - then it's basically a moot point.

People are not rational beings. They are also content to offload any negative costs onto others as long as their own lifestyle and pleasures can be sustained - this is what winning means.

Currently, it can be best understood as a big political stick to beat people they don't like, because it exposes them to barely any political risk while offloading the problems onto their outgroup. You could address the political risk, but doing so requires more information than can easily fit in a tweet or soundbyte. This is a drug greater than any the pharmaceutical industry can ever produce; it combines the pleasure of feeling superior and self-righteous with that of making others suffer.

AI doomers, take note - if you're not willing to do this, as insane as Big Yud's missile strike proposal sounded in practice - then it's basically a moot point.

Yep, absolutely. For Butlerian Jihad to work, there has to be total escalation dominance, where trying to build AGI is banned everywhere, and any government that doesn't enforce that ban is knocked over and replaced with one that will. If a great power tries to not enforce it, the RoW has to have the willingness to go all the way:

RoW: You aren't enforcing the AI ban.

GP: Fuck you, we'll do what we want.

RoW: If you don't start enforcing the AI ban, we'll nuke you.

GP: If you nuke us, we'll nuke you back.

RoW: We know, but being nuked isn't as bad as getting exterminated by AI, so we've got nothing to lose.

GP: You're bluffing.

RoW: *launches nukes*

That's the goal line. Nothing short of that mindset will work, even if in practice I suspect that it could be implemented without requiring an actual nuclear war due to the limited number of great powers that need to get on board or decide not to force the matter (I have essentially zero hope that it could be implemented without war at all, but I think it could plausibly be just a few small and notoriously-defiant countries which have to be knocked over).

If you consider human-caused climate change an imminent existential threat,

I'm not going to go into the rest of your post, but as an environmentalist I don't think climate change is an imminent existential threat. First of all, there's nothing imminent about it - the process has already started. 2023 is the hottest year on record, and the previous holder of that esteemed title was 2022. Climate change is not some threat that could appear off in the distance, but a present reality. Coral reefs are bleaching, currents in the oceans and atmosphere are changing, ice is melting and the sea-level is rising. All of this is happening right now and if you live in the right places you can just go stick your head out of the window and see it.

At the same time, it isn't really that existential of a threat - if you're talking about humanity as a whole. If you want a good article which explains what I think is the most realistic evaluation of climate change outcomes, I recommend https://www.ecosophia.net/riding-the-climate-toboggan/

How exactly do you propose that a society of subsistence farmers build WMDs?

So why are we spending trillions trying to nibble at the edges when we could spend billions and achieve much better results. We can cool the climate to an acceptable level while we wait for the carbon removal technology that is the only way to fully solve the problem.

Because the point of 'climate advocacy' isn't controlling the weather. It's demanding every left wing idea under the sun get enacted, and spending trillions to do it. See also: nuclear energy.

I think that you're mischaracterising the thought process of climate activists. They're not pretending to care about the climate. They do actually care about it. It's just that most of the loud ones also have a bunch of other causes and are unwilling to "sully" themselves by compromising any of their other causes in order to more effectively oppose global warming. You can't do nuclear, because radiation is bad. You can't subsidise corporations without DIE, because DIE is important. And on it goes.

They're absolutely guilty of refusing to accept "impure" solutions, and thus of refusing to think realistically, but it's not intended as a Trojan Horse.

Isn’t that just social signaling with extra steps? If I really truly believe that something is an existential threat to humans, I’m not going to let petty politics on other subjects get in the way of fixing it. If I believe that AGI is going to kill humanity, I’ll throw everything else aside to deal with that threat. Work with fascists and communists, give up on other goals for a time — or even be willing to have some progress rolled back, even democracy might be on the table. If the choice is an absolute nightmare government— no human rights, open racism, the environment gets destroyed— but we avoid extinction, then it might well be worth it. You can clean up those other problems if you survive, and if you don’t survive none of those other things actually matter.

If I really truly believe that something is an existential threat to humans, I’m not going to let petty politics on other subjects get in the way of fixing it.

That is the correct response, given that you are all of: rational, consequentialist, and not convinced that success will occur regardless.

However, most people are not consequentialists, and many people are not rational.

I don't think you're completely wrong here, but I feel like pointing out that climate change is actually happening and taking place. It is a real and serious problem, and if you have lived in a coastal area long enough to see the changes they're not really deniable anymore. There really is something happening and it really is causing big problems for the environment and the future. The idea that we can simply make one intervention and "fix" the climate without any second-order consequences strikes me as a bit short-sighted to boot.

That doesn't mean there aren't an army of scammers and grifters out to use that problem for their own advantage - Goldman Sachs is not being selfless when they advocate for a complicated carbon credit scheme which would let them make millions of dollars for no work at all. Plenty of prominent climate "activists" have the carbon footprint of entire cities in the third world (private air travel being one of the biggest contributors) and do nothing except make the position they're advocating less credible. But the fact that people are using the situation to grift and profiteer doesn't mean the problem isn't real. A snake-oil salesman selling you a miracle cure isn't providing an actual treatment for your condition, but the fact that a snake oil salesman is trying to sell to you isn't an argument against your condition existing.

My point was less that 'climate change is not real' or 'climate change is not a problem' and more 'the number of climate activists who are aiming principally at counteracting or reducing the effects of climate change is quite literally zero. The number of them who are primarily concerned with some other agenda is 100% not due to rounding but in a totally literal sense. The watermelon meme is generally accurate-ish and environmentalists are usually just generic left wing activists greenwashing their agenda'.

If you disagree with me, name some counterexamples. Elon Musk is not really an activist for environmental issues, so don't start there.

I've never met a climate activist (or, just a person who sanctimoniously talks about climate change) that seems emotionally invested in the ecosystem the way I personally am. They find natural areas scary and gross and there might be rural white right-wingers there, ew.

I think environmentalism starts with picking up trash and keeping natural functional ecosystems intact. Every river, stream, creek, and brook in the Midwest has had its water sources fucked by roads.

Nah, say what you will there are a lot of stinky left hippie eco activists with dreadlocks who genuinely do spend a lot of time camping in nature, foraging for wild mushrooms, living in weird communes with other leftists in the middle of nowhere, tending to some patch of forest etc.

I work in the energy sector. I have a number of colleagues whose primary motivation for their work is combatting climate change, and not other political goals

Are they activist that go to environment rallies and protests?

No, but some are known people within the industry so it's not just randoms

If you disagree with me, name some counterexamples

Sure - me. I support some left wing policies but my stance on climate activism has little to do with those, and I'm not a communist (I'm open about my political ideology - distributism). Though in the interests of full disclosure, I think that many of the current sources of climate pollution are terrible for everyone involved and should be stopped, but for some of those cases concerns about the climate aren't the only factor. The Iraq War had a massive carbon footprint, but I'm not going to lie and claim that my opposition to it revolved around environmental concerns.

If that's not good enough, there's a local political party which takes the climate seriously and isn't interested in simply applying left-wing policies (notably being against massive amounts of immigration) - the Sustainable Australia party. I'd throw John Michael Greer onto the list as a conservative, but he isn't really a climate change activist - he thinks that it is already baked into the cake and the only thing that people can really do is make better and more sustainable choices in their personal lives.

Would you accept a rollback on trans issues, gun control, immigration, and other right-wing issues in order to get allies against climate change? Because that's the problem. Climate change is urgent when it comes to "you have to give up something" but is suddenly not so urgent when it comes to "we have to give up something".

I said that I support some leftist policies, not that I actually am left-wing. The specific issues you listed are ones that I don't actually care about - trans issues are just not something I think are particularly relevant, but I support gun rights and I'm also against immigration (because it damages labour and the environment both). So you're essentially asking me to agree to a bunch of policies I actually support - in which case the answer is hell yes.

Climate change is urgent when it comes to "you have to give up something" but is suddenly not so urgent when it comes to "we have to give up something".

This is actually one of the main reasons that the climate change movement failed - people saw that a lot of the most prominent activists wanted to preserve their own carbon consumption habits while shoving the costs onto others (especially people in the wage class). I personally walk my talk and do my best to minimise my own carbon footprint, and there's no way I could look someone in the eyes and tell them it was important if I wasn't willing to make my own sacrifices.

Can you name public figures? It seems like there's some mostly-not-environmentalist figures who have concern about climate change, but no environmentalists who support nuclear power, hydropower, other reasonable carbon solutions.

I'm going to have a tough time naming public figures because the forces (in the non-conspiratorial sense) that make figures public aren't actually big fans of people who are talking seriously about these issues - public cognitive bandwidth is reserved for more important figures like Baby Gronk, The Rizzler and the Hawk Tuah girl. I've seen a lot of environmentalists and green activists support things like hydro, geothermal and wind as well - but those power sources have limits which mean they can't be scaled up to the level required to support modern first world lifestyles. There's nothing wrong with hydropower per se, but there are only so many places you can actually build a dam and get a decent return on your investment. Geothermal, if appropriately developed, might even be able to supply 10% of our energy needs in the future - which is great, but not an actual answer to the dilemma we're facing.

But that said, you have several large obstacles in the way of convincing environmentalists to support nuclear. Nuclear power as it is currently available to us does not provide enough energy returned on energy invested for it to be a viable option even without the costs of dealing with waste. France's nuclear power system was only viable because they bought Uranium at a 97% discount due to their exploitation of Africa, and even their system has had to be nationalised due to going bankrupt. Hypothetical nuclear reactors which generate electricity too cheap to meter have been 20 years in the future since the 1960s, but are still yet to materialise. When they do appear and generate enough electricity to pay for their own creation without a galaxy of government subsidies, I will be extremely happy and advocate building them all over the globe as soon as possible - but they haven't appeared, despite people promising that they will for half a century.

Nuclear power as it is currently available to us does not provide enough energy returned on energy invested for it to be a viable option even without the costs of dealing with waste.

Compared to what? As far as I know it easily beats under reasonable operating assumptions almost everything except for fossil fuels. Are you talking about energy return on investment or financial return on investment? The cost of uranium that France paid has nothing to do with EROI. But in any case, the cost of uranium is, at this time, a miniscule cost of nuclear plant operation. The current high cost of nuclear plant operation has much more to do with deliberate regulatory sabotage than the inherent cost of the technology. There are, as we speak, newer, safer, more efficient reactors that have been designed and even passed through the arduous DOE approval process such as the AP1000 - not hypothetical in the least - but the high cost of legal construction delays and regulatory uncertainty makes commitment to construction very difficult and until very recently the DOE has been extremely reluctant to approve almost any experimental or prototype reactors, often on the grounds that the technology was not proven and so the risks could not be quantified - an obviously self-fulfilling state of affairs. They are being deployed in other more pragmatic countries. That said, I personally thing the prevailing LWR uranium cycle is terribly inefficient and a technological dead end, but it still generates an incredible amount of power.

That has started to change and in addition to the small modular reactors that are nearing market availability, serious followup to the molten salt reactor research that was done in the 1960's may finally be moving forward. However, I don't anticipate this will change many peoples' minds about whether they oppose nuclear power - it will just change the reasons. And sadly, the U.S. is playing from far behind other countries, especially China, in terms of building and testing experimental and prototype reactors. I don't doubt that many other countries will be deploying Chinese reactors, which we will of course refuse to do out of sheer pig-headedness and because we still have lots of fossil fuels to consume, and all the while people will be claiming that nuclear power just isn't practical enough.

Compared to what?

Compared to the energy needs of continuing current western lifestyles and patterns of consumption into the future, which is the only comparison that actually matters. Current nuclear technology, even with rosy assumptions, isn't capable of doing it. I would love to be proven wrong, with an example of a profitable nuclear power system with an EROEI that can support a modern first world economy, but I don't think that can happen. The reason I bring up profitability and cost is that they are ultimately a reflection of viability, and probably our most accurate one (which is why France's cheap uranium is relevant). I'll also freely grant that nuclear power does have some use-cases - it is fantastic for submarines and aircraft carriers for one, but it has yet to be demonstrated that it can be a viable energy base for a modern first-world economy. I can believe that regulatory burdens contribute to making nuclear power less productive, but I think at least some of those regulatory burdens are actually good (your nuclear plant should not be dumping radioactive waste in the local primary school playground etc), and I don't believe they are enough of a burden that removing them would make nuclear that much better of an option.

That has started to change and in addition to the small modular reactors that are nearing market availability, serious followup to the molten salt reactor research that was done in the 1960's may finally be moving forward.

I'll believe it when I see it. This is explicitly what I was talking about when I mentioned hypothetical reactors. They have been "nearing" market availability for several decades now, and I can remember being excited for those liquid molten salt reactors ten years ago myself. Maybe you're right and this time is different, but I'll need a bit more evidence than the same claims of imminent cheap and sustainable energy that have been made for longer than I have been alive. That said, if you're right and those future nuclear reactors actually do just solve all the energy problems we're facing then I'll be extremely happy and update my flair on here to reflect that I was wrong (and keep it that way forever).

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Whores have been around forever? Like being a sexy lady for money doesn't require much explanation. It's called 'the oldest profession' for a reason.

You’ve been warned before for sweeping generalizations and for lazy sarcasm. This is both. If you can’t make a point without putting words in your subject’s mouths, don’t.

Free Palestine

Vegan

Abolish capitalism

Limit birth rates

Your data is outdated which makes the snark in your comment uncalled for. Here's some more recent data:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-production-by-country?country=~OWID_WRL

Coal production is growing steeply again.

But even if it was only growing slightly, that's important information since your average midwit thinks coal is going away and being replaced by solar.

How good is the evidence for sulfur-based climate control? Pumping a bunch of one chemical into the atmosphere is a great way to do something, or perhaps a lot of things all at once. We know what a pre-fossil-fuel planet looks like. We can’t be as confident in geoengineering. Further research will surely mitigate this, except…

A hundred years of climate research hasn’t managed to convince everyone that the problem exists, let alone what to do about it. Science is hard, and it’s harder when there are points to be scored. There’s boundless political capital in opposing any specific solution. Get ready to be branded an ecoterrorist, an atmofascist, a sulfurry.

Given all this, who is going to take the actual steps? Not the one world government. Not a lone superpower, because nuclear weapons are the ultimate veto. If you think Russia is stressed about Ukraine, wait until they hear we’re messing with THE SUN.

There’s always the Elon Musks of the world. But there’s also Sam Bankman-Frieds, convinced their version of the utilitarian calculus says this is the best idea and literally can’t go tits up. How much do you trust them to get it right the first time?

How good is the evidence for sulfur-based climate control? Pumping a bunch of one chemical into the atmosphere is a great way to do something, or perhaps a lot of things all at once.

The science is undeveloped. We need to start small and monitor the changes and then iterate. Doing anything else is like trying to build a 3nm processor without first having gone through all the earlier generations. In a word: impossible.

Given all this, who is going to take the actual steps? Not the one world government. Not a lone superpower, because nuclear weapons are the ultimate veto. If you think Russia is stressed about Ukraine, wait until they hear we’re messing with THE SUN.

This is of course the biggest hurdle. But the first step is to get people talking about the possibility of solving this. I imagine that, in the end, actions would be performed via a treaty similar to the Paris accords. Russia would be the biggest holdout given that they stand to benefit the most from a warming climate.

Did you know that 8% of global carbon emissions come from the production of concrete, the same amount produced by all private passenger automobiles? Fantasies about electric cars solving global warming are just that.

Solving global warming is the bailey. Being more resilient when the effects of global warming occur is the motte.

While it's been a long-time frustration of mine that mass-public opinion and policy has fixated on avoiding global warming rather than dealing with the consequences of it happening, and non-trivial parts of the environmental policy structure has been lobbiest-donor feedback loops married with protectionism greenwashing, there is a point to be made that many of the major investments in the name of the green movement may be better at enduring global warming than avoiding it... and that is a point in and of itself.

On a technical / engineering level, many of the savior-technologies just will not pan out in terms of meeting the need of avoiding global warming. Just in terms of the volume of raw materials and rare earths needed to produce the amount of electric vehicles / solar panels / etc., there won't be enough produced by the various tipping points. Many things are not only locked in, but have been for functionally decades.

However, one of the anciliary arguments for / justifications of green technology is aggregate resiliency. Renewables are not reliable enough to cover the energy demands of industrial economics, but they can greatly reduce the amounts of hydrocarbons required to sustain less-intense economic levels. Brownouts are bad, but they're not impossible to muddle through either, and are much better than black outs. Installed solar panel farms aren't going to suddenly stop working if there's a mass embargo or blackade of major naval trade routes. Distributed production grids may / may not be safer from targetted cyber attacks than singular centralized power plants. Maybe not everyone can get an EV-powered cybertruck... but not everyone in a nation needs a vehicle for the state to survive in times of energy-import duress.

When you start to frame it in these terms, a lot of investments that are 'stupid' in economic/global warming evasion terms can start to make a bit more sense in a 'how do we endure global disruption' sense. No one is quite clear what that will mean in practice, but if you subscribe that there is a time limit, then there are advantages to getting invested early as possible. Things may be inefficient now, but there may be far greater demand and competition for critical inputs later. Getting supply chains established now may help secure them for later. Transitioning away from fossil fuels sooner may provide critical diplomatic leverage later when/if global opinion moves sharply against the last ones still using it when popular patience is untenable.

I would never go as far as to say 'this is all according to plan,' and there's a lot of greed and incompetence and ideology mixed in to that sort of coalition of interests, but you can believe both that global warming is a thing and that it is unavoidable, and that green-tech investments are a way to endure it. This isn't 'fixing' the problem, but it is a form of dealing with it.

It's true that at some point, petroleum will become so rare that it will no longer be affordable. (Although it's hard to imagine right now when the price of oil is ridiculously low and giant discoveries are being made constantly). I agree that, over the next 100 years or so, we will have to decarbonize from sheer necessity. But we're jumping the gun a bit now and we'll be able to do it in the future much more effectively. And entire classes of green technology might simply be leapfrogged in the future. Imagine building out your copper telephone network in the 1990s.

Thinking of the far future, I do think we should leave some easy petroleum in the ground for future generations. When our society inevitably collapses, it will be very hard for humans to mount a comeback since we have extracted all the easy resources.

Your rebuttal is approaching this as a purely economic issue, but the previous argument was a national security access issue.

The point is not that petroleum will become so rare that it will no longer be affordable- the point is that petroleum may still be available at the source, but not available to you, because the geopolitical situation has changed to such a degree that it can no longer get from the ground to your shores.

This could be a matter of non-ecological changes, like how the Ukraine War has greatly disrupted the Russia-European natural gas connections. It could be a matter of supply chain monopolization, such as how the Chinese have used economic coercion in the past- and how the US and/or China might try to shape resource trade flows in a war over Taiwan. It could be because of an organized embargo (the OPEC embargo against the US in the Cold War), or a functional blockade (North Korea nuclear sanctions). It could just disrupted by returns to historical norms of piracy (Horn of Africa) or maritime harassment (Houthis in the Red Sea). It could even be a consequence of civil war (the recent Libyan oil production shutdown). It could come in the form of new and hard to resist technologies, such as relatively cheap drones shutting down major infrastructure (Russia-Ukraine war), threatening naval commerce (Russia-Ukraine), cyberattacks against critical infrastructure (Russia-Ukraine), destruction of underwater import infrastructure (Russia-Ukraine), targeted destruction of export infrastructure (Russia-Ukraine), targeted destruction of centralized power grid infrastructure (Russia-Ukraine)...

Access to external resources is not just a matter of money and the existence of the product, and the fragmentation of the world security order means many of the geo-political obstacles to energy imports is going to get worse, not better.

But geopolitical turmoil can also be in response to, or a consequence of, weather and climate factors. Haiti has been a mess for a long time, but the current situation of gang control of the capital can track to the 2010 Haiti earthquake that broke the state's (relative) monopoly of violence. Egypt and Ethiopia were conceivably near war over the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam's construction and being filled- interstate conflict involving the controlling power of the Suez Canal could well reflare depending on water inflows shaped by drought conditions and rate of evaporation at upstream reservoirs. Hurricane Mitch in 1998 killed nearly 7000 Hondurans and caused regional catastrophic flooding, and was a direct contributor to a regional migration exodus event. This doesn't even approach how climate volatility of these types can feed into the above geopolitical tensions: the Arab Spring's triggering event was in the context of high bread prices, tensions between upstream and downstream states over water ways, social responses to migration driving government policies and changes in political status quos with less experienced leaders with different foreign sympathies, and so on. Even when climate isn't a direct cause, it can be a contributing cause that makes other instigating factors

You are arguing in terms of jumping the gun because of a frame of reference over the next 100 years or so, but you are living in a world where you not only face potential major economic input disruptions in the next 10 years, but in some cases for some countries have already occurred.

To go to your hypothetical of building out a copper telephone network in the 90s- this is only a self-evident bad idea if you assume the historical conclusion, that the later 90s and 2000s would be a relatively peaceful, open, globally-interconnected era in which not only would better alternatives exist, but they could be resourced and people wouldn't be deliberatly trying to break them. The moral of the example would reverse itself if the available choice were instead a copper telephone network or no network at all because of global instability limiting factors.

When our society inevitably collapses, it will be very hard for humans to mount a comeback since we have extracted all the easy resources.

On the one hand, energy resources have been extracted. On the other, there's an enormous amount of refined metal laying around on the surface.

It will be interesting to see all the uses the successors find for our garbage.

After the fall of Rome, the population of the city fell to 10,000 people. People used the ancient buildings as quarries from which to build their new dwellings. Even as late as 1500 AD there was ample construction material available. St. Peters was built using marble from the Colosseum, melted down bronze from the Pantheon, and stone from the tomb of Hadrian.

In Nimes, France, the entire population of the town moved into what was formerly the gladiatorial arena.

In 5000 AD or whatever, bands of savages will live inside the few high rises that still stand.

I liked traveling around the Yucatán in Mexico and seeing that in small villages with lesser known pyramids people had just taken the stone from the pyramids in the town center and repurposed it to build fences and mundane daily things.

There was a set of TV specials, 'life after people', which could shed some light I suspect, at least on 'what decays when(and what we should expect the environment to change into in certain ways)'.

At the risk of producing frustrated groans from everyone, I find it hard to get too worked up about any civilisational issue with a timeline longer than 20 years because it seems extremely likely to me that we'll have superintelligent AI by the mid-2030s (that's me being conservative), and at that point all bets about capabilities and risks are off. While I'm not a committed AI doomer, it looks from every angle to me like we're in terminal-phase human civilisation. What follows could be very good or very bad for us, but whatever "it" is, it won't be subject to the same logics and power structures as our current global socioeconomic order.

I drafted a very long comment to this effect in the discussion about declining TFR and dysgenics last week which I failed to post due to user error, but I think the point applies to climate change too. Optimistically, I think it's not unlikely that ASI will get us over the line on nuclear fusion and related tech, allowing us to transition entirely away from carbon economies in fairly short order and easily offset any residual carbon footprint with direct carbon capture. Or maybe it'll allow us to conduct low-risk geoengineering at scale. Or (more pessimistically) maybe it will secretly deploy nanoengineered pathogens that will wipe out most of humanity. Either way, I don't think climate change will be a problem that we (or whichever of us are left) will be worried about in 2050.

I asked you before, what concrete actions are you taking when you strongly believe that we will have utopia/apocalypse in 10 years? Do you have any bonds with longer than 10 year maturity? Do you find it stupid to invest in any new whisky with a plan for aging it for more than 10 years? Along the line with your demographics skepticism - do you consider people stupid for having kids now, if they won't matter in 10 years? A this point I am really curious.

Sidetracking the thread a little bit, but given that OpenAI and its competitors hit a brick wall in progress recently, what keeps you optimistic about ASI? Admittedly I'm not following the field very closely, but are there any interesting breakthroughs that I've missed that you think get us closer?

EpochAI can see another 25x https://x.com/Simeon_Cps/status/1826134542857499005

Fair question, but no, I don’t think OpenAI have hit a brick wall. GPT-3 was June 2020 and GPT-4 March 2023, so even if the next leap took the same time to train up (obviously it’s not that simple) we wouldn’t expect a similar leap in performance for another couple of years. On top of that, the GPU supply chain is creating short-term bottlenecks for training runs. We might see glimpses of true next-gen performance from competitors before then, but I expect most of the buzz for the next 18 months or so to be dominated by increasingly agential models and better multimodal capabilities. There’s also the long-delayed rollout of ChatGPT’s voice upgrade, which is a bigger deal both technically and in terms of social effects than most people realise.

Zooming out, AI now benefits from a forcing economy in a way that was never true of previous AI summers. Outside of specialist applications, there wasn’t much money to be made in AI until comparatively recently, especially for generalist systems like LLMs. But in the wake of ChatGPT you have real AI revenue streams, and every nerdy 18 year old wants to study machine learning (some of them will even get jobs). While we might have a short-term AI bubble as Capex grows out of all proportion to revenue run rates, it’ll be a temporary blip. There’s still gold in them hills, and we’re only scratching the surface of what’s possible in terms of AI products even using existing tech. Most big non-tech firms are still figuring out their AI strategy and paying OpenAI and Microsoft service fees for dumb off-the-shelf products. A lot of the real commercial impact of AI in the short-term is consequently going to come from last-mile products that invest time and energy in tailoring the better open-source models to specific business use cases.

Zooming out even more… look, humans aren’t that smart. We’re the dumbest possible species capable of building an industrial civilisation. Our intelligence is limited by a bunch of very contingent factors like caloric consumption, the size of the birth canal, and the fact we’re layering a System 2 architecture onto a 600 million year old foundation. Even if these constraints didn’t apply, evolution is just not that great of a search algorithm in design space. Take eusociality in insects for example. This is an incredibly successful strategy, with roughly three quarters of insect biomass today coming from eusocial species. But evolution stumbled across eusociality pretty late, only really getting going around 150 million years ago (compared to 400 million years for insects in general). It’s not because it requires large brains, but because evolution is just a crappy blind algorithm for finding optimal equilibria and human ingenuity can do a lot better. Nor is there any reason to think that anatomically modern humans constitute some kind of upper bound on intelligence; the massive intelligence differentials just among humans provide good evidence of that.

So to summarise: OpenAI is going about as fast as we might reasonably expect, the economic fundamentals of AI development have shifted in a way that is likely to accelerate long-term pace, and the goal we’re reaching for isn’t even that hard.

dumbest possible species capable of building an industrial civilisation.

Is there any good theory basis for this claim? It seems to me just as likely that "intelligence" is more like large-scale Bayesian inference, and that for a given quantity of sensory input the possible predictive performance is quite bounded, and potentially even grows logarithmically such that billions of times more input data may only marginally improve the output.

But I will admit I'm somewhat spit balling here and not familiar with the existing literature.

The “dumbest possible species” claim is mostly a soundbite and truism, but the basic idea would be (1) that we see increasing encephalisation (especially in the neocortex) and increasing behavioural sophistication in the Hominins all the way up to Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, and (2) a small minority of the very smartest humans in very recent history (the last 1000 years out of the 300,000 or so of our species) were required to make the necessary move from agrarian societies to industrial society. Of course they were building on indispensable social, political, and economic foundations, but if you drop the IQ of Europe by 1SD for the second millennium AD I think it’s unlikely we’d get the Industrial Revolution at all.

Regarding the idea of Bayesian limits to intelligence, that applies well to cases where the dimensionality is fairly constrained, notably perception. The space of cognition (“possible good ideas”) by contrast is much more open-ended, and applies at multiple levels of scale and abstraction (because we need heuristics to deal with any large scale system). I don’t see any reason to think we’re even close to “topping out” in cognition, and the outsize contribution of the smartest humans compared to merely very smart humans provide some evidence in this regard.

I will admit that the emergence of AI may finally give some interesting answers and maybe closure to philosophical questions about how introspective and abstract philosophy and mathematics are. As much as (some) math claims to be proof pulled from the ontological ether, can the concept of, say, prime numbers be explained to an intelligence with no real-world sensory inputs? Does the notion of counting make sense in an absence of things to count?

OpenAI has a 100b valuation per latest funding rounds.

To me that suggests:

  1. They don’t think they can build a moat, OR

  2. The technology is plateauing.

To build on what @Incanto said:

Even without taking OpenAI's charter into account, I have no motivation to buy stock in a company that's trying for singularity. Leaving aside the question of whether I think that company is instead going to end the world (and I do), assuming for the sake of argument that they'll succeed in getting controllable superintelligence...

...what process exactly is paying me my dividends? Control of a singularity event, in a relatively-short timeframe, gives sovereignty. Yes, the law says that I can replace them if they don't pay me, but the law will have no power over them if they succeed, because singularity rapidly means they outgun the government. They can just turn around and stiff me and I've got no recourse; only direct control of the AI matters.

They also have a weird semi-charity corporate structure that may make investment riskier and bring down the valuation - but it's true that markets don't seem to be pricing in a near-term singularity.

There's more to AI than chatbots. GDM had its IMO proof solver and AlphaProteo, which, in normal times, would be potential candidates for technology of the year. The only reason they're not is that they are somewhat obvious next steps in existing research programs, coupled with lots of engineer time and compute.

I do agree with you that we may be in the plateau of the transformer S curve; we'll know more when OAI releases its next model. In the coming weeks, as they say.

I struggle with these sorts of things too. But I don't think superintelligence is a given, just yet. There's also the possibility that superintelligence happens, but it just doesn't even care about our problems. How much time do we spend worrying about ant habitats?

In the mean time, I think there's real value to geoengineering in the here and now. For relatively little, we can prevent the Earth from warming any more. Why wouldn't we want to do that?

it just doesn't even care about our problems. How much time do we spend worrying about ant habitats?

Not much, but we also don't especially trouble ourselves not to destroy them incidentally if, say, we want to build a road over them. And there's instrumental convergence to worry about - for most possible goals, you can do a lot better if you use the atoms in the apes for something else.

You'll also go through a hell of a lot of unliving atoms before using ape atoms is going to be worth the effort, unless you're already so all-powerful that it's 0 difference to you.

Yeah, the most likely reason that AI would want to KILL ALL HUMANS is that they see humans as a threat. I think this idea might come from the movie "Terminator" in which the computer becomes self aware and humans try to pull the plug, forcing the AI to fight back.

But, as we've seen, AI safety research is sloppy and compromised. When the AI becomes self-aware, no one will pull the plug.

And besides, there won't be an obvious "oh shit" moment. More likely, as AI progresses, it will entwine itself into every bit of human society, making it all but impossible to remove. Entirely dependent on AI, we will be no more threat to it, then the chimps in the zoo are to us.

Did you know that 8% of global carbon emissions come from the production of concrete,

I would assume the processes involved in producing things like steel and concrete are amenable to electrification. Most serious suggestions for how to tackle climate change come down electrifying as much as possible and generating as much clean electricity as possible. Of course for this you need a lot of nuclear energy, which is needlessly politically contentious.

I would assume the processes involved in producing things like steel and concrete are amenable to electrification.

Kinda. Right now, every ton of steel with a blast furnace requires about 3/4 ton of coal to produce. Eventually, electric arc furnace production will become greater, but it will be a multi-decade process.

When it comes to concrete, there are also improvements to be made, but the chemical process unavoidably creates carbon emissions. There is no such thing as concrete without massive emissions.

multi-decade process

I've been quite bullish on coal, but China's made amazing leaps here. I wouldn't be surprised if in 7-10 years they're off of met coal entirely. It is really shocking how quickly they've been erecting EAFs. India, the US etc. are different issues, also recycling vs. new steel.

I've been quite bullish on coal, but China's made amazing leaps here. I wouldn't be surprised if in 7-10 years they're off of met coal entirely.

That's incredible. I hope it happens.

That said, I used to own coal stocks. I follow some coal people on Twitter and they never mention this. This would seem to doom most met coal producers as a zero, but companies are actually trying to diversify out of thermal coal and into met because it is perceived as having a longer shelf life.

I'm happy to believe that coal company CEOs are morons...

Oh no, they are smart. Especially e.g. Glencore.

But China currently has 150m tons of EAF capacity, with about 3 years of average construction time. (But they don't fully utilize the EAFs...) They have 900m of other capacity vs. the US at 200m total. I'm not sure if they will make a full transition or become comfortable with say 4-600m tons of total capacity (since cheap infrastructure's been largely built out for the coming decades), but both seem feasible. They don't have such plans, but I'm quite shocked how many EAFs they've erected since Covid. Previously, I thought it was impossible for met coal demand to decrease, but exited after really engaging with this.

That said, India's the main driver for met coal demand (especially higher grade like Warrior's) and they consume a lot of coal. Potentially, China could dump "green" steel into India at some point, bur if India engages in protectionism, well... There are also issues with scrap.

It's also quite interesting to see China using nat gas for heavy vehicles (trucks, construction equipment) while investing heavily in hydrogen. That's caused a 10% decrease in demand already. I suspect that in a few years, they'll be able to put up a (local) price ceiling around $80boe.

For now on the concrete side. We have new processes in the works. At the end of the day, new technology is the only feasible solution.

What processes? There are proposals to reduce carbon emissions in concrete production but as far as I know it can't be eliminated.

Iirc the CO2 from concrete comes largely from the production of lime from calcium carbonate, which is hard to eliminate without new processes.

There have been various attempts to produce carbon-light concrete (or some similar replacement) but as far as I'm aware they are all decidedly inferior as a construction material.

Part of the problem with climate change is that reducing emissions gets harder and harder the farther you go: there's low-hanging fruit like coal-fired power generation which basically has no downsides to eliminating, but every element after that becomes more difficult. You need concrete and steel to build the hydro dams and nuclear reactors and train lines you want. You need oil to produce food and clothes and electric cars. Plastic is universal because it is universally useful. Our entire modern existence and quality of life is rooted from fossil fuels and so it's very difficult to pull out the bottom Jenga piece without the tower falling over.

there's low-hanging fruit like coal-fired power generation which basically has no downsides to eliminating

Well, except for the fact that people don't like to shiver in the dark and every other method of generating baseload power is also opposed by environmentalists (and the renewables tend to get opposed as soon as they appear to become practical)

There’s a whole cadre of risk averse people who have been putting a damper on all discussion of geoengineering for decades now.

But I think that we will roughly follow the path that’s laid out in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future: we hold off on geoengineering right up until some large scale tragedies happen which are clearly as a result of climate change and then use that as a watershed moment to start spraying stuff in the atmosphere to try and defend ourselves.

The risk reward logic for whoever might start doing it doesn’t work out until there is some terrible event to point to. We prefer the status quo and need a big attention grabbing event to justify any type of big actions that deviate from it.

Of course, once we do start doing it, it’s unlikely we’ll scale up carbon capture technology to truly make that much of a difference IMO, so it’ll just be a game of doing this forever or else deal with the termination shock.

A rational approach would be different than this but our psychology makes a waiting-around-and-then-rushed-panicky-reaction strategy more likely.

we hold off on geoengineering right up until some large scale tragedies happen which are clearly as a result of climate change

I'm not sure what that would be exactly. These disasters would seem to be decades or centuries in the future. Over time, deaths due to natural disasters have become much reduced. Our capacity to deal with weather has increased faster than the climate warming. And in many areas, colder temperatures are still a bigger threat to human survival than warm ones.

To put things in perspective, 500,000 people died from the Bhola Cyclone in 1970. It's nearly inconceivable that we'd experience a weather-related disaster of that magnitude today.

In the book it’s a heat event greater than survivable wet bulb temperatures in India. Once the grid goes down, 20 million people die over the span of a few days.

India reacts by unilaterally deciding to begin solar geoengineering and declares any attempts to stop it as an act of war.

I don’t know how likely an outcome like this is. (The death number is definitely pretty crazy).

But who knows. We are just at the beginning of climate change after all.

One paper that does raise my eyebrows quite a bit is this, estimating that by around 2070 1-3 billion people will be subject to hot climate conditions currently only experienced by 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface (currently represented by just a few parts of the Sahara).

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1910114117

At best that really messes with the economy in those places and the pressure to emigrate skyrockets.

I think humans usually surprise me by our ability to deal with extreme heat. But also, tolerance to any environmental stressor is a threshold function, things can look okay while stresses mount until suddenly at certain threshold we see more dramatic impacts. (Example, rising floodwaters are not a big deal right until the moment the water rises to the level of your front door, then costs/damages suddenly rise dramatically).

In the book it’s a heat event greater than survivable wet bulb temperatures in India. Once the grid goes down, 20 million people die over the span of a few days. India reacts by unilaterally deciding to begin solar geoengineering and declares any attempts to stop it as an act of war.

Seems like a reasonable premise.

Any study of Earth history IMO has to come to the conclusion that the planet’s climate is sort of a wild beast,

Definitely true. The Earth's surface temperature increased by like 5° Celsius over 1000 years at the end of the last ice age. So it is capable for fairly large swings. And, of course, if it wasn't for human emissions, we would eventually fall into another ice age which would cover much of the Northern Hemisphere in glaciers hundreds of meters thick.

The Earth's temperature fell drastically over the last 5 million years, with deepening glaciations. A snowball Earth might have been our future as plants continued to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#/media/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.svg

So it is imperative for humans to take action to control the climate, setting it to the ideal temperature.

We should start today with small, limited actions to prevent increases in global temperatures. As time goes on and the effects are well-studied and understood we can increase our actions to set the global thermostat. The ideal temperature is probably close to our current temperature, or maybe that of 20 or 30 years ago. I doubt we'd want to go much colder that that.

setting it to the ideal temperature

What is this, though? I agree that we should strive for the capability to set the global thermostat to whatever we want, but there are genuinely diverging interests here. Maybe Burkina Faso wants a year round balmy weather for its tourist industry; maybe Muscovites want to wear shorts in January.

It's still better to have that control than not, and probably there's some clever market design where countries can bid to set the thermostat.

We should start today with small, limited actions to prevent increases in global temperatures.

Like what?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_fertilization

I am not suggesting these are fully mature technologies or that they would provide a silver bullet. But we can't wait and study forever. We need to try and iterate at small scales and gradually ramp it up.

I am going to do the Yudkowskian thing and ask you to map out in your head what would actually happen if someone began developing and deploying biosphere-level sun-blocking technology, remembering what tends to go down in real history books.

I’m not necessarily against geoengineering, but there are in fact reasons not to go down that path until we need to.

This is a fully generalized argument for never doing anything ever.

Am I capable of mapping out all future worlds in my head? Of course not. Nobody is.

Should we start pushing in the direction of geoengineering? Absolutely. The first step is not to solve every problem in your head before you even start. It's to convince other people that the course of action is the correct one. We need to run before we can walk.

We have been using that tech by burning dirty bunker fuel high in sulfur and also injecting clouds into the upper atmo with contrails. We just need to ramp that kind of thing up a bit. No need for building a sun shade/super laser mirror weapon at the lagrange point.

We've also been experimenting with dumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in ever increasing amounts for hundreds of years. Are we only allowed to increase the temp or something?

Any study of Earth history IMO has to come to the conclusion that the planet’s climate is sort of a wild beast,

Just to note I took that part out of my original comment because I felt I was starting to ramble.

But yes, I do see that as the biggest danger. Earth history seems to suggest that extreme swings in the planetary climate have not been uncommon occurrences. Thus it’s pretty imperative to reduce the pressure with which we are poking the beast, IMO.

(Geo engineering may be the most responsible thing to do given that, but reducing greenhouse gas injection is also important).

We had a similar discussion as part of this thread a few months ago. I'm still not sure exactly how much it would cost, but it could be as little at $5B ongoing annual cost to mitigate current warming levels. I think this is assuming you have fully amortized the capital expenditures for the geoengineering project, that you can use hydrogen balloon dispersion, and that you can use calcite for your particulate.

For comparison FY2024 US DOE: Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy proposed appropriation was just shy of $4B.

I think the problem is people are willing to pay infinite costs to prevent a bad thing from happening as long as the wordcels can manipulate the language in the correct way. This shouldn't make sense from a rational economist point of view because the bad thing can be modelled as a cost so you should be able to reverse the situation and think about paying a cost (the bad thing) to provide a benefit (avoiding the infinite cost). This is where the wordcels come in to make sure people only look at the problem from one direction and always look at it from the correct frame. I'm not exactly sure what is going on but I don't think most people are rationally looking at the costs and benefits but rather doing something else like making decisions on vibes.

Climatologists are mostly unwilling to consider these proposals. So all the official papers written by government orgs, NGOs, or University groups don't even consider this proposal. Even if many of them are aware of it, and they are definitely aware. People have known about this option for a few decades.

Its sometimes hard to know when a particular academic subject has gone over the edge from being disinterested scientists to mind-captured ideologues. (its certainly obvious when they are way over the line like in sociology, but I mean the crossover is hard to spot). I think this is maybe the clearest sign that climatology has gone over that edge.

Honestly, geoengineering proposals are awesome. And even a scientist with 1% mad scientist personality would want to study it. Luckily the public won't remain ignorant forever, and they'll just route around the climatologists: https://time.com/6314541/overshoot-commission-calls-for-climate-geoengineering-research/

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