site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   37124 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

14
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I caught this exchange after the previous thread had mostly closed, and I'd like to push back on the claim a little.

BinaryHobo:

I remember talk about just using the excess power to pump water up hill during the day and running it through turbines coming down at night.

Did anything ever come of that?

The_Nybbler:

The physical conditions necessary to make hydro storage practical aren't common.

(How do we do the fancy quotes with user, timestamp, and maybe a link? It'd be useful here.)

It's true that hydroelectric power sources, as in dams, have saturated the supply of naturally-occurring American sites. You need a river in a rocky valley, and there are only so many of those to go around, and once they're used up, it's very hard to create more of them.

What haven't been exhausted, and in fact what can be readily found or exploited, are height differentials in general. Hills, mountains, exhausted mines, deep valleys with no water supply, all offer significant height differentials, are naturally occurring, and can be readily built out into large-scale closed-loop pumped-hydro storage, with a closed reservoir at one extreme and a closed reservoir at the other, and a reversible turbine to generate potential energy in times of excess and power in times of deficit. Should those be exhausted, off-shore dropoffs are an enormous resource of the same, at the cost of more difficult installation and operation in every regard. And if we exhaust THOSE, water towers at sea or underground reservoirs on land can be constructed as well.

All of this, of course, is dumb and America should just take the leash off nuclear, as argued here. (I've not read it yet, but I expect it to make the points I would inline here.) That we haven't yet is a shame and a testament to our collective idiocy and Puritan hangover.

(How do we do the fancy quotes with user, timestamp, and maybe a link? It'd be useful here.)

Like on old-style forums? That functionality doesn't exist here, I think, you'd have to do it the hard way.

And yeah, I don't imagine there's really that hard a limit on potential pumping sites and all that, but as you say, it's kind of stupid chasing after this when we have literal Cold War-era technology for delivering gobs of power.

I think thermal energy storage in tanks of molten salt or other high heat capacity fluid makes a lot more sense than a complicated hydraulic setup and would also have a much smaller footprint. A pump system would have many more potential failure points and intermediate losses and be vulnerable to changing weather conditions (if you aren't building a massive dome over it like some lunar colony).

It makes no sense to pump excess power uphill and then run it it downhill because the act of elevating water also consumes energy.

  • -18

Demand for electricity varies throughout the day. People are willing to pay more for a kWh during rush hour than at 2 AM.

For example, suppose the 2 AM discount is 50%. That means that if you can spend 1.5 kWh at 2 AM to get 1 kWh at rush hour, you will earn 33.3% more than if you had just sold that energy at 2 AM.

So would any other form of storage. The question is how much.

Personally, I doubt that it's worth the cost to use this technique. But scaling up renewables would require some sort of buffer.

Pumped storage has been a thing for almost a century now. I leaned about it in science class as a child.

good for you

  • -24

This was low effort and antagonistic. If you were a new user it would just be a warning, but you have been around long enough to know the rules. 1 day ban.

boo -- parent was also antagonistic and condescending. I don't personally care for bans in this situation, but if you're going to mod that comment you should be doing the whole chain while you're at it.

boo -- parent was also antagonistic and condescending. I don't personally care for bans in this situation, but if you're going to mod that comment you should be doing the whole chain while you're at it.

Good point. In isolation the comment looked not good, but not bad. But the followup comment made it clear they were trying to throw an insult.

Pumped storage has been a thing for almost a century now. I leaned about it in science class as a child.

@Hyperion this comment of yours was not very good. The first sentence seems fine, but maybe lacking context for why you are bringing up the point. The second sentence could come across as antagonistic.

You do understand that energy demands fluctuate throughout the day and spending energy when it's available and cheap to have it when it is in demand and expensive is important? I was taught that as a child.

Your followup comment made it clear you comparing greyenlightenment's knowledge to that of a child. Which is antagonistic. One day ban for you as well, since you have also been here long enough to know better.

TYFYS

You do understand that energy demands fluctuate throughout the day and spending energy when it's available and cheap to have it when it is in demand and expensive is important? I was taught that as a child.

I learned algebra as a child. so what. people learn different things at different ages.

  • -10

Grid load balancing is pretty fundamental to energy policy. Even ordinary people are bombarded by messaging telling them not to run appliances in the middle of the day.

Where? I have never been told that once in my life*, let alone been bombarded with it.

*not even as a child, since that's apparently important.

I've never heard this message directly, but I recall being told of the message in reference to preventing blackouts in other parts of the USA than where I live, I think California during the summer (air conditioning would stress the grid). More generally, during the past 10 years, with electric vehicles being big in the public consciousness, I recall conversations about how EVs wouldn't stress the power grid much, explicitly because they can be charged at night for the day's use, and the energy needs at night tend to be much lower than during the day (since people tend to sleep, and sleeping people tend to use less electricity), thus providing slack in the energy grid which is meant to function during much higher load times in the day. I've also heard it in reference to renewable energy and its advantages and disadvantages, such as how solar energy tends to produce energy when it's sunny which also tends to correlate with when there are greater energy needs, versus wind energy which tends to produce energy when it's windy, which for whatever reason tends to correlate with night when there are lesser energy needs.

Perhaps it's overselling it to say laymen are "bombarded" with such messaging, particularly specifically about not running one's own appliances during the day, but from my experience, the importance of load balancing for keeping the power grid functioning well is pretty well emphasized in the public messaging.

?

The goal here is storing energy for use later at a net loss, not harvesting energy for "free" like a dammed river reservoir that sometimes gets rained on. Inefficiency is acceptable, although to be minimized.

You use it like a rechargeable battery. The power grid is constantly having to deal with balancing the electricity produced vs the demand for electricity and this could provide a solution to that.

I wonder, is there anyone on The Motte who opposes nuclear power? Either because of concerns relating to safety, waste disposal and other "environmentalist" canards, or because it's supposedly uneconomical.

And if everyone here is pro-nuclear, why is that? Are mottizens just more rational than everyone else, or is it because of chronic contrarianism?

(How do we do the fancy quotes with user, timestamp, and maybe a link? It'd be useful here.)

Like embedding a Tweet? I don't think you can do that. But there's a "Copy link" button under every comment and you can put an @ in front of a username so that it links to their profile and they get notified.

OK, I'll bite. I'm not anti-nuclear, but hardly pro either. 20 years ago I was enthusiastic, but overall now I think that nuclear has only a modest role to play.

Nuclear never has never been particularly economically attractive -- successful programs have needed to be subsidized by states for national security reasons. The predictable costs are huge and mostly occurred before the plants even come online. The unpredictable costs of accidents, attacks, and proliferation are really hard to value, and require large states or as yet imperfect international control systems. The technologies needed for nuclear to be perform at its best (small safe thorium reactors and the associated reprocessing networks) aren't yet developed. Overall nuclear wins only if you want a to build a power source 15 years from now, to deliver stably priced energy in a stable environment for the next 70 years.

But that's not what we want. We want power sources that can be built in 1 year, that and are priced for a lifetime of 20. We need technologies that can be deployed at a local scale and are immune to political disruption.

But that's not what we want. We want power sources that can be built in 1 year, that and are priced for a lifetime of 20. We need technologies that can be deployed at a local scale and are immune to political disruption.

I'm sorry, but unicorns do not exist.

Many renewables, and some fossil fuels if you ignore fuel supply, satisfy those requirements. Pretty much everything meets them better than nuclear.

None of those are immune to political disruption, you can't ignore fuel supply, and very little grid scale anything can be built in 1 year.

Solar photovoltaic, for example, doesn't need international, state, or even regional stability to function, which nuclear does. Solar installations are trivial to build -- even the largest installation, Noor Abu Dhabi only took 23 months. Onshore wind is similar. Natural gas, AFAIK, has become very quick to construct, though the political coordination required extends across to the extraction area, as you say. The point isn't the precise details -- nothing's perfect -- but rather the huge difference in time and risk profiles with nuclear.

Solar PV also has that irritating issue of only working in the daytime; "working all the time" is one of those criteria left off your list. And they're not hard to build engineering-wise but permitting/environmental requirements mean they're still politically hard to build unless you're an Arab prince in your own country.

Wind and natural gas have worse political problems than solar.

Certainly they fit the particular criteria you mentioned better than nuclear. But I don't see why those should be the overriding criteria, especially if your preferred sources don't meet them either.

And if everyone here is pro-nuclear, why is that? Are mottizens just more rational than everyone else, or is it because of chronic contrarianism?

Remember The Motte is an intellectual offshot of a movement that finds torturing someone for fifty years to prevent 3^^^3 people from getting dust in their eye a compelling moral dilemma. Ask the average Jane on the street. She'll choose dust and not even think about it.

We're in a filter bubble that selected for people inclined to considerations like "the realistic alternative to a new nuclear plant now is coal, and coal emissions will cause Y QALYs lost to cancer, compared to Z risk of a nuclear accident causing a few thousand deaths and making a 30mi by 30mi area around the plant uninhabitable for 3000~ years". Even doing these calcuations mentally and filling in made-up statistics, I think the case for nuclear ends up looking rosy.

Most people, even most pro-nuclear people, do not think this way.

The pragmatic argument against nuclear power is just that no one seems willing to fund R&D or construction of new plants. It may be that everyone is reluctant for stupid reasons, but that's the way things stand. I'm still hopeful that some form of improved, miniaturized reactors will be developed despite these obstacles, and be available if the energy situation ever becomes desperate enough for governments to come to their senses and build them.

The pragmatic argument against nuclear power is just that no one seems willing to fund R&D or construction of new plants.

Because the regulatory barriers are insurmountable.

For literally every rich country? I know that there's some amount of conspiracy regulatory coordination that goes on between different countries, but that seems like a weak argument at the world scale.

For literally every rich country?

China is building new nuclear plants.

China is not a country rich enough to afford environmentalism. (All relevant militaries have nuclear navies for that reason as well.)

That said, China (like Ukraine before them) is also a nation whose culture favors the creation of Dyatlovs; the grand irony is that cultures competent enough to not have their reactors explode in any meaningful way are... also all cultures prosperous enough to afford not building them.

If US citizens were in any position to trust their government like they were coming out of the wartime economy... well, that's why they were able to build out nuclear as rapidly as they did in the first place. Unfortunately, there's no ascendant Germany (or China, for that matter) to salvage that depression in trust this time.

Nuclear power is strictly superior. You can do it anywhere you can stick a big turbine (so anywhere near a lot of water). Most of civilization is also near large bodies of water like rivers, lakes or seas, so it's not like there's a shortage of places to build them. Renewables need lots of sun or wind or certain kinds of rivers with big height differentials...

The power is very reliable, capacity factor is around 80-90% compared to renewables which struggle to reach 40%. Nuclear plants are usually only offline for maintenance and refuelling, so their off-time is fairly predictable. Renewables often produce their power when it's not needed and go offline randomly, demanding extremely expensive batteries.

Ecological damage is minuscule, in the grand scheme of things. Everyone knows about Chernobyl but few know about the 1.4 million people who were relocated to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. In Australia, the original purpose of the nascent Green movement was opposing a hydroelectric dam in Tasmania which would need to clear a lot of trees. They wanted us to burn more coal instead. Renewables use up hundreds of times more land than nuclear, wind turbines mince up many birds. They all need immense amounts of extra transmission cables which will further mar the rural skyline. Nuclear plants are so small they can be contained within large ships and even submarines. They can be built near where they're needed, for cheaper transmission.

And the waste products from nuclear power plants are trivially easy to manage! There's so little waste in terms of mass that it can be stored on-site. Because the US decided to bungle its nuclear waste dump in Yucca mountain (to the tune of tens of billions of dollars with absolutely nothing to show for the money), waste has just been left with the plants. A simple and easy solution is to put waste in a big lead-lined box and take it away, stick all the boxes in a warehouse in the desert and leave some guards to protect it, from a safe distance. An even better solution would be to actually use breeder reactors to turn that waste into electricity. U-238 can be converted into plutonium and provide power, it's possible to burn all the uranium not just the U-235.

Finally, the price of nuclear energy, without the sabotage of power-plant construction, is very low. It's only the farcical hysteria that drives up costs. They invented ridiculous standards of safety. From: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

An example was a prohibition against multiplexing, resulting in thousands of sensor wires leading to a large space called a cable spreading room. Multiplexing would have cut the number of wires by orders of magnitude while at the same time providing better safety by multiple, redundant paths. A plant that required 670,000 yards of cable in 1973 required almost double that, 1,267,000, by 1978, whereas “the cabling requirement should have been dropping precipitously” given progress at the time in digital technology.

Another example was the acceptance in 1972 of the Double-Ended-Guillotine-Break of the primary loop piping as a credible failure. In this scenario, a section of the piping instantaneously disappears. Steel cannot fail in this manner. As usual Ted Rockwell put it best, “We can’t simulate instantaneous double ended breaks because things don’t break that way.” Designing to handle this impossible casualty imposed very severe requirements on pipe whip restraints, spray shields, sizing of Emergency Core Cooling Systems, emergency diesel start up times, etc., requirements so severe that it pushed the designers into using developmental, unrobust technology. A far more reliable approach is Leak Before Break by which the designer ensures that a stable crack will penetrate the piping before larger scale failure.

A forklift at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory moved a small spent fuel cask from the storage pool to the hot cell. The cask had not been properly drained and some pool water was dribbled onto the blacktop along the way. Despite the fact that some characters had taken a midnight swim in such a pool in the days when I used to visit there and were none the worse for it, storage pool water is defined as a hazardous contaminant. It was deemed necessary therefore to dig up the entire path of the forklift, creating a trench two feet wide by a half mile long that was dubbed Toomer’s Creek, after the unfortunate worker whose job it was to ensure that the cask was fully drained.

The Bannock Paving Company was hired to repave the entire road. Bannock used slag from the local phosphate plants as aggregate in the blacktop, which had proved to be highly satisfactory in many of the roads in the Pocatello, Idaho area. After the job was complete, it was learned that the aggregate was naturally high in thorium, and was more radioactive that the material that had been dug up, marked with the dreaded radiation symbol, and hauled away for expensive, long-term burial.

Without these clownish safety requirements, nuclear energy would be cheap (like it is in South Korea), we could allocate the enormous sums invested in renewables elsewhere, reliance upon the Middle East would be lower and millions of people wouldn't have choked to death from air pollution. The death toll of nuclear energy speaks for itself, it is amongst the safest in deaths per gigawatt.

Fuel is not a problem. Breeder reactors can increase the fuel available to us by 50x, burning the U-238 that is in the majority. Thorium can also be burnt if we bothered to develop the technology. Fuel costs are only a small contributor to the cost of nuclear energy, so the price of uranium could be doubled to incentivize exploration. We could work out how to extract uranium from the ocean as well. The history of nuclear energy is littered with technologies that were just abandoned since fuel was so cheap, nobody could be bothered developing them. (Molten salt reactors are one such innovation).

The few times I've witnessed anti-nuclear people talking, to me or someone else, without being your garden "but Fukushima/Chernobyl" types, it's clear that they're operating on some level of that old meme.

"Nuclear power can't be the solution because it only produces clean energy -- it doesn't upend society and usher in my preferred utopia."

Sometimes they're watermelon activists and this utopia is communism; sometimes they're old hippie earth mother types who want us to live in harmony with Mother Gaia and ride bikes everywhere and be vegan. Regardless, this is the thread I see as common through most of them; nuclear solves the problem in a way that doesn't get them what they really want, so it must be objected to on whatever tenuous grounds possible.

The issue seems to be perception of risk rather than actual risk. Of the famous nuclear disasters, Three Mile Island didn't kill anyone, nor did the radiation from Fukushima. That leaves Chernobyl as the only incident resulting in deaths and the permanent evacuation of the vicinity. That's a pretty good record compared to something like coal mining, which kills thousands of people every year, yet people in those towns often vigorously defend the industry and the jobs it brings their communities, something you don't see with nuclear power.

There were probably people who really, really liked living in Chernobyl.

Incredibly minor nitpick: the major population center was Pripyat, not Chernobyl (which had less than a third the population, at the time).

To more seriously engage you in opposition, the Chernobyl disaster was (more or less) the first of its kind and singularly unique as well, in terms of nuclear powerplants disastrously failing. Three Mile Island is also a weakly cautionary tale in the sense of uninhabitability, which cuts down on the total number of your negative examples.

Admittedly it's a volatile technology whose use holds a potential for truly devastating outcomes, but there's no reason to think we've more or less accounted for the common failure modes. Human error remains the most pernicious (and universal) of potential flaws in the use of nuclear energy but I, personally, believe that the potential negative outcomes of nuclear power are so mollified by current safety advances that I would be comfortable living within ~5 miles of a nuclear powerplant. I say this as someone who does not fall into your outlined demographics.

I used to see the cooling towers of the Limerick-Linfield NPP on the way home every day. Biggest issue was that every time I'd see it I'd hear "The Simpsons" theme in my head.

As for "major disasters" with nuclear power plants, there's actually only been one which wiped out anyone's hometown, that being Chernobyl. TMI didn't wipe out anything and Fukushima happened in the middle of a much larger disaster.

This is shoehorning of NIMBYist sentiment. Do you suppose the harm of coal or even «renewables» is only personal, and doesn't enshittify the environment and cultural signs around it? Your nice bucolic ancestral village soiled with dust coal (radioactive one, in fact) or surrounded by acres and acres (I've seen fields, Neo, vast fields) of soulless solar panels and noisy wind turbines will lose much of its sentimental value anyway, like a traditional home covered in garish plastic siding.

I would support not building major infrastructure near residential spaces when at all affordable, regardless of safety. There are plenty of mostly uninhabited 10-mile radiuses out there, or at least radiuses very few people would object to vacating if provided some compensation; you don't need a nuclear power plant near your grandma's gingerbread house any more than you need Springfield at the foot of Mr. Burns' power plant. These things don't employ a ton of people.

(And, yes, new reactor designs are vastly more safe than that 3 or 4/500 level 6+ disasters over 70 years figure suggests).

you don't need a nuclear power plant near your bucolic ancestral village any more than you need Springfield at the foot of Mr. Burns' power plant. These things don't employ a ton of people.

Nuclear power plants generally need access to water; water attracts people for other reasons, so it's pretty hard to site them all away from people.

Offshore then.

Are mottizens just more rational than everyone else, or is it because of chronic contrarianism?

As a pro-nuclear «chronic contrarian»: we can't be relied upon to distinguish the latter from the former. But I'd say it's the diminished vulnerability to threat models that appear poorly substantiated. We don't put much stock in «something may happen» stories.

For the same reason many here tend to pooh-pooh «the coof», Trump's «attempt at fascist insurrection», the danger of Russia or China, AGI risk, climate change, whatever, even school shooting and violence. On the other hand, we are highly suspicious of risk narratives that seem to justify reduction of freedom in all senses – from direct political ones to basic freedoms of exploring space and enjoying material abundance; degrowth ideology doesn't appeal to us at all. Inasmuch as there are conservatives and reactionaries here who profess to respect Chesterton's fences and the precautionary principle, it's not consistent but restricted to domains where change and action is heavily enemy-coded and in some ways still Puritan, statist and restrictive (e.g. CRT programming in schools).

Put another way, we aren't very contrarian. We're just non-neurotic males with a typical masculine attitude toward minor risks and risky-seeming things. The broader society and its consensus is… less like this.

Case in point:

It’s also enraged a bloc of stoutly anti-nuclear countries that includes Germany and Austria. Seven of them wrote a joint letter earlier this month warning that including nuclear-generated hydrogen could “jeopardize the achievement of … climate targets” and reduce ambitions on renewables.

“The attempt to declare nuclear energy as sustainable and renewable must be resolutely opposed,” Austrian Energy Minister Leonore Gewessler said after the deal.

Nuclear is quite bad if 1) you focus on tail risk of disasters (Chernobyl, Three Mile, Fukushima…) or mistaken estimates for base level harmfulness (such as consequences of waste leaks) and/or 2) evaluate nuclear by its cost per unit of output in the context of prohibitively expensive safety measures predicated upon its danger (assessments, plant designs and, again, secure waste storage over millenia). Put in the proper quantitative context, it's less dangerous per unit of power than most other energy sources. But there's no way to make coal or solar seem so spooky to a layman. I mean –wind, sun, it's all so nice, living in harmony with nature, what could go wrong! So what if we'll need to restrain our capitalist greed and consume a little less, give some rest to our mother Earth! Indeed, it'd be a positive if we got rid of capitalism even without any ecological benefit, some could say that's the whole point. Also, the precariousness of nature also means one can feel morally superior on account of normie unambitious urbanite life choices.

The optics accessible to midwits are just bad, built into every facet of culture from fiction tropes about evil power sources to signs on trash containers; whatever your nerdy arguments, generations of shallow artists competing for NGO grants (with the intent to suffocate, debase and diminish humanity under the guise of rational planning) have conscientiously labored to make it this way.

Not much to do about it now but remind them of the human cost of their actions, meticulously calculated.

The broader society and its consensus is… less like this.

Well, yeah; they don't currently perceive the barbarians are at the gates.

And unfortunately for those [men] whom the existence of barbarians is a time-tested way to extract payment and investment from broader society in exchange for security guarantees (and has been since the dawn of humankind), they're correct; this is why the entire society must rationalize its newly-enabled refusal to pay them.

Hence, degrowth as religion; men staying in one's parents' household until they're dead would in a normally-functioning society be hideously perverse, but it's certainly a clear reminder of the human cost of the actions of their social cohort (and probably the rational thing to do in a society like this).

Yes, investing in growth is objectively the right thing to do, and will make the society even stronger in the long run, but why do that when you can just hoard your gains until death takes them from you?

For the same reason many here tend to pooh-pooh «the coof», Trump's «attempt at fascist insurrection», the danger of Russia or China, AGI risk

Do people on the Motte not take AGI risk seriously? I thought I was the only one here who thought it was overblown.

Most people here seem to take it very seriously although metacontrarians exist.

For me, AI risk is completely different to all nearly other x-risks including asteroids, nuclear war, climate change, etc... Because the risk from AI cannot be quantified. I ask myself, what would a superintelligence do? I have no fucking clue. And neither does anyone else. People saying, "I'm not worried about X, I'm worried about Y" are missing the point. While it's fun to speculate about X or Y, it is impossible to predict what a superintelligence will do. It's a true unknown unknown. AI risk is nearly unique in that way.

No, the whole point of what you believe is «metacontrarianism» is that it's entirely possible to predict what a superintelligence will do, when we know what it has been trained for and how exactly it's been trained. Terry Tao is a mathematical superintelligence compared to an average human. What will he do? Write stuff, mainly about mathematics. GPT-4 is a superintelligence in the realm of predicting the next token. What will it do? Predict next token superhumanly well. AlphaZero is a tabletop game superintelligence. What will it do? Win at tabletop games. And so it goes.

Intelligence, even general intelligence, even general superintelligence, is not that unlike physical strength as the capacity to exert force: on its own, as a quantity, it's a directionless, harmless capability to process information. Instrumental convergence for intelligence, as commonly understood by LWers, is illiterate bullshit.

What I admit we should fear is superagency, however it is implemented; and indeed it can be powered by an ASI. But that's, well, a bit of an orthogonal concern and should be discussed explicitly.

I'm sure you know about mesaoptimizers. Care to explain why that doesn't apply to your thesis?

That said, I'm not particularly married to any one particular flavor of AI risk. I'm taking the Uncle Vito approach. The AI naysayers have been consistently wrong for the last 5 years, whereas the doomers keep being proven correct.

I know what people have written about mesa-optimizers. They've also written about the Walugi effect. I am not sure I «know» what mesa-optimizers with respect to ML are. The onus is on those theorists to mechanistically define them and rigorously show that they exist. For now, all evidence that I've seen has been either Goodhart/overfitting effects well-known in ML, or seeing-Jesus-in-a-toast tier things like Waluigi.

To be less glib, and granting the premise of mesa-optimizers existing, please see Plakhov section here. In short: we do not need to know internal computations and cogitations of a model to know that the regularization will still mangle and shred any complex subroutine that does not dedicate itself to furthering the objective.

And it's not like horny-humans-versus-evolution example, because «evolution» is actually just a label for some historical pattern that individual humans can frivolously refuse to humor with their life choices; in model training, the pressure to comply with the objective bears on any mesa-optimizer in its own alleged «lifetime», directly (and not via social shaming or other not-necessarily-compelling proxy mechanisms) . Imagine if you received a positive or negative kick to the reward system conditional on your actions having increased/decreased your ultimate procreation success: this isn't anywhere near so easy to cheat as what we do with our sex drive or other motivations. Evolution allows for mesa-optimizers, but gradient descent is far more ruthless.

…Even that would be something of a category error. Models or sub-models don't really receive rewards or punishments, this is another misleading metaphor that is, in itself, predicated upon our clunky mesa-optimizing biological mechanisms. They're altered based on the error signal; results of their behavior and their «evolution» happen on the same ontological plane, unlike our dopaminergic spaghetti one can hijack with drugs or self-deception. « Reinforcement learning should be viewed through the lens of selection, not the lens of incentivisation».

Humans have a pervasive agency-detection bias. When so much depends on whether an agent really is there, it must be suppressed harshly.

The AI naysayers have consistently been wrong for the last 5 years, where the doomers keep being proven correct.

I beg to differ.

The doomers have been wrong for decades, and keep getting more wrong; the AI naysayers are merely wrong in another way. Yudkowsky's whole paradigm has failed, in large part because he's been an AI naysayer in all senses that current AI has succeeded. Who is being proven correct? People Yud, in his obstinate ignorance, had been mocking and still mocks, AI optimists and builders, pioneers of DL.

You are simply viewing this through the warped lens of Lesswrongian propaganda, with the false dichotomy of AI skepticism and AI doom. The central position both those groups seek to push out of the mainstream is AI optimism, and the case for it is obvious: less labor, more abundance, and everything good we've come to expect from scientific progress since the Enlightenment, delivered as if from a firehose. We are literally deploying those naive Golden Age Sci-Fi retrofuturist dreams that tech-literate nerds loved to poke holes in, like a kitchen robot that is dim-witted yet can converse in a human tongue and seems to have personality. It's supposed to be cool.

Even these doomers are, of course, ex-optimists: they intended to build their own AGI by 2010s, and now that they've made no progress while others have struck gold, they're going to podcasts, pivoting to policy advice, attempting to character-assassinate those more talented others, and calling them derogatory names like «stupid murder monkeys fighting to eat the poison banana».

Business as usual. We're discussing a similar thing with respect to nuclear power in this very thread. Some folks lose it when a technical solution makes their supposedly necessary illiberal political demands obsolete, and begin producing FUD.

Good point about mesaoptimizers and the difference between evolution and gradient descent.

The onus is on those theorists to mechanistically define them and rigorously show that they exist."

Here's where I disagree. As someone once said, "he who rules is he who sets the null hypothesis". I claim that the onus is on AI researchers to show that their technology is safe. I don't have much faith in glib pronouncements that AI is totally understood and safe.

Nuclear power, on the other hand, is well understood, has bounded downside, and is a mature technology. It's not going to destroy the human race. We can disprove the FUD against it. But in 1945, I might have felt differently.

More comments

Do people on the Motte not take AGI risk seriously?

I don't; I'm more afraid of the economic enclosure potential that will likely result, to say nothing of the power these tools will bestow upon the State. The last 60 years have been bad for civil rights and that was just the result of normal economic centralization; this, by contrast, is advanced centralization.

I know that I take it seriously, but I don't take it seriously because I think I'm going to be turned into a heap of paperclips or atomized by a T-1000. I take it seriously because I see something else coming, a paradigm shift in propaganda and narrative control powered by LLM's, image/video generators and AI-assisted search engines (I'll confess that I may be a little too unironically Kaczynski-pilled). I don't see how the future I envision is any less apocalyptic than the one our loveable quokkas fear, however.

Did you not see the AI threads the last week? There are plenty of us anti doomers here.

The few times I've talked to educated anti-nuclear folks, they've made it clear that they didn't understand the basics of nuclear waste or the dangers of radiation.

76% of Americans support nuclear and support is higher among men and among conservatives, both over represented on the motte/

Are mottizens just more rational than everyone else, or is it because of chronic contrarianism?

Being pro-nuclear is hardly a contrarian position. At least according to this poll 76 % of Americans are pro-nuclear. Of course it's not like everyone here is American, but even then in Finland, for example, nuclear energy is currently very much the mainstream view, in essence accepted by all parties (even if some of them do so a bit uncomfortably).

If 76% of the population meaningfully favor nuclear power, why is it such a problem to build nuclear plants?

An excellent summary is given here .

Tldr, largely copypasta:

  • The American Nuclear Regulatory Commission uses a model of damage to humans by radiation called Linear No Threshold, in which no amount of exposure to radiation is safe. This contradicts casual observation (we live with and robustly tolerate background radiation), observed cellular mechanisms (detection and repair of small DNA errors is routine), and a small number of human longitudinal studies and animal studies.

  • American nuclear reactor operators are as a consequence required to minimize the risk of even innocuous, low-level radiation releases, which makes cost reductions as a result of the usual learning curve and technological advancement impossible.

  • Culturally, there is little education on the risks of small and medium-scale nuclear incidents, and so public opinion is by default against radiation leaks out of proportion to the actual risk. The book being summarized contrasts this with airline accidents, which kill hundreds and are handled as a risk to be minimized, not eliminated.

  • The NRC is incentivized to run the approvals process as long as possible, since it collects fees from license applicants, rather than number of nuclear power plants under oversight or number of GW-hrs generated by nuclear power per year. This naturally drives up the costs of site licensing and design approvals.

  • There are many avenues for anti-nuclear activists to cause delays in the construction of a nuclear power plant, causing massive uncertainty in construction schedules and costs.

  • A model reactor must be licensed before construction begins, but model reactors are often invaluable in experimentally finding failure modes to be accommodated, but all possible failure modes must be addressed before even a model reactor is approved for construction.

  • Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima incidents have accumulated massive cultural scar tissue opposing more nuclear power plant construction.

Tldr of tldr: ignorant public, regulatory incentives, uncertainty in capex and opex spend.

Because a determined minority is often capable of overriding the passive support of the majority.

is there anyone on The Motte who opposes nuclear power?

I don't, but I can make a compelling steelman case against it I think.

Nuclear energy as it exists requires huge powerplants and a deeply integrated industry to scale. Which means very high levels of complexity at every level. You need many well educated and actually competent engineers to setup, maintain, and teardown every part of a large system.

This is uniquely combined with another drawback, which is that the risks are black swans. Bad handling of nuclear can, as demonstrated in Ukraine, have vast and long lasting consequences.

Only the State, or an industrial complex deeply tied with it can realistically enact a nuclear power program, and any such program will necessarily be in the hands of large institutions and not individuals. Which is already problematic to any sort of libertarian: large abundant energy coming from a centralized source inevitably leads to higher levels of control. Not to mention that institutions of this size are seldom considered to be wise custodians.

Moreover, consider for a moment that societies collapse. That societies can never maintain complexity forever. Is it a good idea to hinge our entire civilization on a system so complex that a lot of nations couldn't be trusted with its operation today? Is it reasonable to even believe that if collapse happens, the complex system will be shut down in proper order?

To want for nuclear is to swear eternal vigilance against the Dyatlovs of the world. And that might be a cost too high for some.

Moreover, consider for a moment that societies collapse.

You were already reminding me of this sketch, and then this sentence made it perfect.

I'm very faintly anti-nuclear because we need to import uranium from pretty far away and it makes us dependent on exporters, but I freely grant that this may be the least of many evils and actually looking at the numbers may convert me.

The search for uranium ore intensified during the Cold War. In East Germany an extensive uranium mining industry was established. Uranium was mined from 1947 to 1990 from mines in Saxony and Thuringia by the SDAG Wismut. It was mostly used by the Soviet Union to build nuclear fission weapons, also as fuel for nuclear power plants. In West Germany more limited mining took place at Ellweiler, Rheinland-Pfalz (1959–1964), and Menzenschwand, Baden-Württemberg (1961–1991).[29]

All uranium mines were closed after German reunification for environmental reasons. Some areas were heavily contaminated and clean-up is still not finished. Total production in East Germany was 230,400 t of uranium, making it the third largest producer in history behind the US and Canada. Minor production still takes place at the Königstein mine southeast of Dresden from cleaning of mine water. This production has been 38 t of uranium in 2007.[30]

Edit: And as the other person said, if nuclear fuel can't be produced domestically, only a small amount needs to be imported due to its immense energy density. I recall a comment, probably on Reddit, from someone who lived close to both a coal powerplant and a nuclear powerplant. He noted how trainloads of coal were arriving constantly, while the nuclear plant only received minimal traffic.

It's probably worth noting that that 38 t U was probably not from active mining. The link in the wiki is dead, but the current Red Book has a note for the recent entries were from mine water treatment and "In 2018, conversion work of the water treatment facility at the Königstein mine halted uranium production." None of the reserves in Western Europe are viable at current prices. In practice any Uranium used in Western Europe would probably be imported.

I think all the processing facilities in Germany have also been shut down, so processed ore would have to be imported from France, which itself sources Uranium from Canada, Gabon, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Namibia and Niger. I think the French nuclear industry has an explicit goal of diversifying the locations it sources from.

None of the reserves in Western Europe are viable at current prices. In practice any Uranium used in Western Europe would probably be imported.

Of course you’d want to buy cheapest product you can get, but that is orthogonal to the concern /u/Southkraut raised, which is whether this would make you dependent on foreign sources of uranium. If you could mine your own uranium, at even twice the cost, you are not really depend on imports, and the final energy price will not even go up all that much.

The issue isn’t the logistics of shipping it. The issue is that it makes you vulnerable to blockades, embargos, trade disputes, and the “international community”.

Germany isn’t vulnerable to any of that, though.

Germany has lost every war it ever fought as a direct result of being shut out of resource access through those methods, and the French lost their fair share of wars to this too (Napoleon).

I think it's fair to call that a strategic weakness.

They don't have natural gas, they don't have oil, they don't have good coal so they have trouble making steel, they don't have alloying elements so the metal (including steel) they are able to make is not the best quality. They have no large mountains for hydroelectric generation so their only indigenous source of electricity is coal. Food production is not their strong suit either (hence the need for Haber-Bosch, and really, why its inventors were German in the first place). Sure, they might have a highly educated and motivated society, but without any material/materiel to work with they're at the mercy of those who do.

This is also why the EU is a massive deal for Germany, because a politically-united Europe (under German economic control) means a Germany less constrained by American-English and/or French resistance to pursue its own policy goals. The "Fourth Reich" snark is not entirely untrue.

Not right this second, but if the geopolitical situation shifts things could get quite uncomfortable. They aren't in a strategic location like the UK or the USA, and they don't have strong economic ties to resource-rich former colonies like France.

Neat. I did not know about German uranium mining until now.

Based on user name you are German? Eyeballing a map, Western Europe might be the most Uranium scarce populated region. I'm not sure Western Europe has an energy option that doesn't require importing materials, or finished products requiring rare materials. The main advantage of of uranium would be relatively high energy density making up for some of the more logistically challenging freight issues. In North America, Canada has substantial reserves. The most complete reference for Uranium resources is the "Red Book", but you need to be a bit careful in interpreting the entries.

Large engineering projects involving water seem uniformly to be extremely difficult and politically fraught.

A US Energy.Gov analysis for this class of problems ("Long Duration Energy Storage") is here, with a tl;dr summary at here, with the even more tl;dr that on top of the various technical problems with large-scale expansion, there's the more immediate issue that even moderate-scale projects have been found hard and largely not tried, or 'tried' in the sense that they might get out of the planning stage in the late 2040s.

Thanks much, I'll review.

It’s basically impossible to make a closed loop hydro system with practical capacity. You need constant water replenishment. You’ll be losing 10-30 cm of water per month to evaporation and seepage, depending on weather and soil condition. Without plentiful source of water, this is not viable.

And if we exhaust THOSE, water towers at sea

This one is extremely impractical, which you’d see if you even did a back of a napkin estimate. The fact that you mention this implies that you did zero legwork to verify if your ideas have even modicum of practicality.

Even absent the replenishment concerns, the amount of height and/or volume for gravitational storage just isn't practical. A kilogram of hydrocarbon fuel has ~40MJ of contained energy. To store the same amount of gravitational potential energy in a kilo of (water, but really anything) requires lifting it 4000km.

I'm not familiar with the state of the art in biochemistry, but the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels would plausibly make them excellent storage if we could produce them (from non-fossil sources) with even moderate efficiency. Not to mention the existing infrastructure. That said, that is a nontrivial synthesis problem.

Gravity storage with water as a medium is actually quite practical, and there are plenty of operational sites already, some with GWhs worth of capacity. You don’t have to lift 1 kg of water 4000 kms, you can instead lift 40 000 kg of water by 1000 meters.

This is practical and done in production, the problem is that you need a lot of water, and a lot of space to store this water in two separate reservoirs, which also need substantial difference in altitude. Because of this, it simply doesn’t scale: good sites are already mostly used, and we can’t build many more.

Synthetic hydrocarbons would make excellent store of energy, being very dense and already integrated in existing economy. The problem with those, though, is that the round-trip efficiency is really bad.

We already can do something similar to this by producing hydrogen gas from water. Hydrogen has an energy density of about 33MJ/kg, which is comparable to hydrocarbons, and production is relatively trivial. The problem comes in converting it back to usable energy, which requires complicated fuel cells that are relatively expensive, which is, I believe, the biggest reason why the simpler but inferior EVs got the edge on hydrogen as the "green" vehicle solution.

Hydrogen isn't currently a panacea: it's difficult to store long term: it isn't very dense at room temperature and liquefies at a difficultly-low temperature. It also likes to leak really easily.

I don't know that it can be made practical for vehicular applications, but if you're thinking about fixed energy storage infrastructure it's probably worth considering.

Converting it to methane, if you could do so scalably and efficiently, would make the longer-term storage problem (months) much easier.

This one is extremely impractical, which you’d see if you even did a back of a napkin estimate.

Source. They've tested successfully, physically, to 1/10 scale. I haven't gone and found the paper, I'll admit; I'll give it a shot ASAP so we can argue productively.

In the meantime, if the napkin math is so easy, share it with the class?

I haven't gone and found the paper, I'll admit; I'll give it a shot ASAP so we can argue productively.

I've casually found:

This is not a “water tower at sea”. This is something different, actually quite smarter. I read their paper, and it doesn’t seem as immediately impractical as “water tower at sea” would, though it is still very much impractical.

According to their own analysis, the construction cost is something like 2-3x the cost of LiIon batteries per kWh. It’s something like $8M for storage equivalent to 2 minutes of operation of a single coal power plant. To build enough storage to replace one coal power plant for base load for half a day, you would need to build 400 of these, at a cost of $3.2B dollars. Coincidentally, this is about as much as it costs to build a nuclear power plant reactor of a similar size, which will keep generating the energy after the deep sea storage solution runs out of juice in 12 hours.

I'm not seeing estimates on the price to build and maintain that per kWh. Without that, yes, you've failed to do the basic napkin math on practicality.

In terms of tail-risk, hydro is probably the most dangerous form of power around. There are dams around the world that could kill hundreds of thousands of people if they failed.

Another rarely discussed downside of hydropower is that it is extremely environmentally and socially destructive. Damming a river basically destroys its ecosystem. Dams also often flood very large areas, requiring people to evacuate and destroying anything that was there, natural or manmade.

For example, the Itaipu Dam:

When construction of the dam began, approximately 10,000 families living beside the Paraná River were displaced because of construction. (...) The world's largest waterfall by volume, the Guaíra Falls, was inundated by the newly formed Itaipu reservoir. The Brazilian government later liquidated the Guaíra Falls National Park. (...) The Guaíra Falls was an effective barrier that separated freshwater species in the upper Paraná basin (with its many endemics) from species found below it, and the two are recognized as different ecoregions.[18] After the falls disappeared, many species formerly restricted to one of these areas have been able to invade the other, causing problems typically associated with introduced species. For example, more than 30 fish species that formerly were restricted to the region below the falls have been able to invade the region above.

The construction of the Aswan Dam in Egypt flooded 5,250 km^2 and resulted in the relocation of 100,000 to 120,000 people and 22 Ancient Egyptian monuments.

For comparison, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has an area of 2,600 km^2. That is to say, the Aswan Dam rendered uninhabitable twice as much land as the Chernobyl disaster.

That's just one of many reservoirs all over the world. Looking at this list, if we exclude the reservoirs that resulted from the enlargement of pre-existing lakes and consider only the ones that are completely artificial, there are 15 reservoirs which individually rendered uninhabitable more land than the Chernobyl disaster. The total amount of land flooded by dams is many times greater than the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. I don't have the exact figures, but the number of people displaced by dams is certainly also much larger than the number of people who were evacuated from the Chernobyl area.

Don't forget that this is a normal and accepted part of building hydropower, whereas the Chernobyl disaster was a one-time event that resulted from a combination of poor Soviet design and human error. If we considered the failures of dams, we'd get a death toll much larger than any estimate for Chernobyl.

I said "practical", not "possible". Turning a given hill with neither water nor reservoirs into a useful amount of pumped storage isn't practical, even though it's "just" a matter of moving dirt, concrete, and water.

Clearly, this needs nuclear power to be feasible!

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats