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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30011 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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The equivalents in 1975 were saying that the Cold War would inevitably end in nuclear annihilation. This was a terminally unhelpful position

IMO this is a fair comparison, although the Cold War MAD scenarios were explicitly designed to cause annihilation. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, probably the premier Cold War doomerism group, is practically a laughing stock these days because they kept shouting impending doom even during the relatively peaceful era of 1998-2014, finding reasons (often climate change, which is IMO not likely apocalyptic and is outside their nominal purview) to move the clock towards doom. Do you think they honestly believe that we're closer to doomsday than at any point since 1947? We supposedly met that mark again in 2018 and then moved closer in 2020 and again in 2023.

There are all sorts of self-serving incentives for groups concerned with the apocalypse to exaggerate their concerns: it certainly keeps them in the news and relevant and drives fundraising to pay their salaries. But it also leads to dishonest metrics and eventually becomes hard to take seriously. Honestly, the continued failure of AI doomerists to describe reasonable concerns and acknowledge the actual probabilities at play has made me stop taking them seriously as of late: the fundamental argument is basically Pascal's wager, which is already heavily tinged with the idea of unverifiable religious belief, so I think actually selling it requires a specific analysis of the potential concerns rather than broad strokes analysis. Otherwise we might as well allow religious radicals to demand swordpoint conversions under the guise of preventing God The One Who Operates The Simulator from turning the universe off.

As a counterexample, I think the scientists arguing for funding for near-Earth asteroid surveys and funding asteroid impactor experiments are quite reasonable in their proclamations of concern for existential risk to the species: there's a foreseeable risk, but we can look for specific possible collisions and perform small-scale experiments on actually doing something. The folks working on preventing pandemics aren't quite as well positioned but have at least described a reasonable set of concerns to look into: why can't the AI-risk folks do this?

As a counterexample, I think the scientists arguing for funding for near-Earth asteroid surveys and funding asteroid impactor experiments are quite reasonable in their proclamations of concern for existential risk to the species: there's a foreseeable risk, but we can look for specific possible collisions and perform small-scale experiments on actually doing something.

This is a good point. The scientists can point to both prehistoric examples of multiple mass extinction events as well as fairly regular near-misses (for varying definitions of "near") and say "Hey, we should spend some modest resources to investigate if and how we might divert this sort of cataclysm". It's refreshingly free of any sort of "You must immediately change your goals and lifestyle to align with my preferences or you are personally dooming humanity!" moralistic bullshit.

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