Reading Notes

Nobody is Perfect - Everything Is Commensurable

  • The toxoplasma of rage does have one benefit - it makes people uncomfortable, which is one prerequisite for getting them to change
  • Activist vs. passivist politics
    • Scott takes a passivist approach to politics
    • Repulsed by protests - doesn’t like the thought of people gathering specifically to demonize and vilify an other
    • Others are too sensitive for activist politics - the notion that failing to take action to prevent a bad thing makes that bad thing your fault is psychologically triggering for many
  • So do we deny the obligation to help?
    • After all few of us impose a non-negligible marginal cost on the poor
    • However, there does seem to be a deep-seated human desire to express gratitude and help the less fortunate
  • Why do we privilege political action when we consider ways of improving the world?
    • Compare attending a protest to donating to charity - charity is two or three orders of magnitude more efficient at improving peoples’ lives
  • How much should we give?
    • 10% is a reasonable Schelling point
    • Donations don’t have to be entirely in terms of money - volunteer time works as well
  • If everybody gave 10% of their income to charities, Moloch would die a swift death
    • Moloch is the spirit of people responding to perverse incentives
    • Giving to charity is an unincentivized action - anathema to Moloch
  • Giving what you can individually to charity allows you to do good even when you find political action and mass movements to be uncomfortable or disturbing

How We Talk About What Donations Will Achieve

  • Separating charities and interventions allows charities to plug gaps in large scale interventions
  • Example:
    • AMF only purchases bed nets and does some regional distribution
    • Relies on local partners to do individual distribution and need-assessment
    • SCI doesn’t actually perform deworming treatment - only provides technical support and purchases medicine
  • Separating charities from overall interventions allows charities to specialize and become more efficient
  • We should evaluate charities not by their individual efficiency, but by the efficiency of the overall intervention that they are a part of

The Long-Term Significance of Reducing Global Catastrophic Risk

  • Global catastrophic risks can permanently negatively affect the trajectory of civilization, even when they don’t lead to total extinction of humanity
  • Why should we focus on catastrophic risks that may cause large numbers of deaths without causing humanity to die out?
    • The probability of extinction-level events is small, compared to the probability of events that may cause hundreds of millions of deaths
    • If a large number of people are wiped out, there is a possibility that civilization will not recover, or will recover in a way that stunts humanity’s long-term potential
    • The combination of the above two factors means that threats that wipe out a significant fraction of humanity without causing extinction pose some of the same risks as extinction-level threats
  • Basic framework and terms:
    • 2 possible frameworks:
      • Minimize expected deaths
      • Maximize long term potential of humanity
    • This article will be using the latter framework
    • 2 levels of catastrophic risk
      • Level 1: deaths of hundreds of millions or some billions
      • Level 2: Complete extinction of humanity
    • 2 schools of thought:
      • Level-2 focus: efforts at minimizing global catastrophic risk should focus on level 2 events exclusively
      • Dual focus: level 1 and level 2 events pose similar levels of threat to the long term development of humanity
    • Why dual focus: there is some non-zero probability that civilization will not recover from a level 1 event
  • Global catastrophes are more likely than extinctions
    • Possible catastrophes:
      • Pandemic
      • Nuclear war
      • Climate change
      • Geoengineering
      • AI
    • In all of these scenarios (except maybe AI) a level 1 catastrophe seems more likely than full extinction
  • General reasons to think that a global disruption might affect the distant future
    • The world has had unusually positive civilizational progress over the last few hundred years
    • There is little consensus about the mechanisms underlying civilizational progress
      • Is the Industrial Revolution inevitable?
    • There is essentially no precedent for a level 1 catastrophe
      • The closest thing is the Black Death in Europe, and that occurred before the Industrial Revolution
  • Specific mechanisms by which a catastrophe could affect the distant future
    • Disruption of sustained scientific progress
      • Scientific progress requires
        • Scientists
        • People willing to learn science
        • People willing to turn scientific discoveries into inventions
        • Institutional support for the above
      • A disruption of any of the factors necessary for scientific progress could lead to the following failures:
        • Risky stall:
          • A stall in scientific progress makes humanity vulnerable to an extinction level catastrophic risk
        • Resource depletion and environmental degradation
          • Humanity runs out of some essential resource or degrades its environment too much due to insufficient scientific advancement
        • Permanent stagnation
          • Maybe we lose science forever and are just stuck at some particular level of development
    • Disruption of sustained social progress
      • Negative cultural trajectory - closed authoritarian societies gain some kind of permanent edge over open societies
        • Would probably lead to a reduced rate of scientific progress
      • Increased inter-state violence
      • Irrevocable technological mistakes
        • Weaponized AI
        • Biological weapons
  • Potential offsetting factors
    • Could a level 1 catastrophe make humanity more resilient against level 2 catastrophes?
    • Probably not
      • Reactions to level-1 catastrophes are probably over-specific to that catastrophe
      • Overall, industrialization has been a net positive for humanity, even taking into account environmental degradation
      • A level 1 catastrophe seems as likely to set back preparations for dealing with critical technological junctures as it is to allow more time for preparations
  • Conclusions and strategic implications
    • Events with hundreds of millions dead are much more likely than extinction events
    • These events could derail civilizational progress
    • There is essentially no precedent for events of this scale
    • Therefore a dual approach to X-Risk is warranted

Cosmopolitanism

  • Cosmopolitanism is a moral stance that gives the interests of other nationalities a weight equal to people of one’s own nationality
  • Pretty much unanimous support for cosmopolitanism among EAs
  • However, most other people do not believe in cosmopolitanism
  • “Anti-foreign/anti-immigrant” doesn’t carry nearly the same level of stigma as “racist”
  • Analyzing policy with a cosmopolitan lens can be enlightening
    • Allows EAs to find allies in places that they may not expect
  • What does cosmopolitanism say about policy?
    • Countries should give more moral weight to the citizens of other countries, especially when waging war
    • Cosmopolitan civilian test for proportionality in war - would civilian casualties be considered proportionate if the civilians were of a different nationality?
  • EA should be more open and explicit about cosmopolitanism