I don't think world can prepare for nuclear war or pandemic that's dealer than COVID-19. Our systems will break down and hopefully people will figure out how to move forward.
It's not a new idea, right? People are bad at valuing far-off very-bad risks compared to inconsequential but tangible near-term risks. And bad at valuing broadly distributed hardships versus concentrated individual pain.
It's exactly why we can't solve climate change, right?
It’s one reason we’ve had trouble solving climate change (I wouldn’t go so far as to say we can’t).
Two more reasons:
1. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons, where many actors, at the individual, corporate, and national level, have incentives to worsen the problem even if nearly everyone would benefit if they all behaved differently.
2. The climate is a complex system, so it’s hard to educate the public about how it works, and easy for bad faith actors or pseudoscientific cranks to obfuscate the discussion.
3. It is also easy for bad faith actors to exploit the response for their own benefit, undermining the nascent response directly, and undermining it indirectly by undermining those who argue for change with integrity
If you're interested in existential risks check out effective altruism. It's a philanthropic movement whose idea is to maximize the amount of good we can do with our resources. Much of the research is focused on x-risks. I've come to the conclusion that non-profit is the only sector that can tackle x-risks because it's not profitable and there's no political will, which pretty much leaves ea researchers as the only people looking at the area.
Note that some popular effective altruists have a little bit of tunnel vision when it comes to X-risks, which leads them to overfund X-risk-due-to-AI over something like, say, X-risk-due-to-asteroids. (X-risk-due-to-nanotech is being suitably supported by not funding nanotech.)
Plus, some people working on the AI X-risk problem are doing it for nothing, which means the state of funding is a bit weird.
> tunnel vision when it comes to X-risks, which leads them to overfund X-risk-due-to-AI over something like, say, X-risk-due-to-asteroids.
Risks from natural events like asteroids are actually quite well understood and we have tight bounds that they aren't that risky per century. The natural risks cause area probably deserves more funding on a global level, but EAs are definitely thinking about it. It's literally the first section in 80k's intro article about X-risks: https://80000hours.org/articles/extinction-risk/
This is a significant issue, any company that set aside resources to protect against a pandemic after the Spanish Flu would have been operating with increased costs for a full 100 years. Yet when the virus hit and companies struggled, I saw plenty of comments saying these companies deserved to fail. I’m all for capitalism and the benefits of market forces, but that’s ludicrous. I’m not saying they should all be bailed out either, companies come and go to be honest, but what we do need to do is ensure our vital interests and the infrastructure we depend on is secure and that’s going to take a pragmatic approach.
The global cost of the virus is astronomical, but protecting ourselves effectively against a new virus doesn’t have to be crippling. The same is true of many other credible risks the article covers. Such preparations could even offer additional useful benefits. It’s just going to take vision and pragmatism I’m not sure our political leaders have in them these days.
>...vital interests and the infrastructure we depend on is secure and that’s going to take a pragmatic approach.
I argue for letting these businesses fail, even if vital, because, it seems, the powers that be have forgotten to take care of them, regulate them, and not get captured by private interests, for decades now. Infrastructure across the the country is literally crumbling. Major dams have failed this year. I fully expect to suffer much more before those with the power to delegate resources where needed will find the will too.
Moral hazard. Why would anyone waste money planning for something that could make the business fail, when they know there will be trillions in bailouts?
We'll solve the problem eventually, I guess, when it becomes clear that there's no money left for bailouts.
Money will never run out. Government will just print more money resulting in inflation and other problems. Most of the currencies are free floating and are not backed up by something tangible like gold.
Oh, sure, money itself may conjured such that it never runs out, but the ability of the government to tap the economy's output is definitely finite.
If you start just conjuring money to bridge the gap, you're basically robbing whoever holds money (or other financial instruments denominated in your currency). These parties then work very hard to stop holding money. When that process is done, you're back where you started, only with less trust, higher transaction costs, and elevated risk burdens depressing output across the economy.
The ability of money to timeshift resources is magical when it works: I can forego goods and services now, save more money, and then purchase more goods and services later.
However, this has limits. It doesn't work for large scale shortages like the oil shocks of the seventies. If everybody had saved money beforehand, there still wouldn't be more oil available in total. When the oil price doubles, you'll only be able to buy half as much with your savings.
What are the preparations that a company would have needed to do in the last 100 years to protect themselves in the event of a new pandemic? Wouldn't they need a plan to restructure to cut costs or find new revenue, and be able to cover cash flow in the n months it takes to do that restructuring? Is it that crazy to expect that from a large profitable company with long-term goals? Consider that it's common "financial advice" for individuals to be able to cover n months of living expenses in the event of an emergency, and that is often much more infeasible for an individual than it ought to be for a large profitable company.
>any company that set aside resources to protect against a pandemic after the Spanish Flu would have been operating with increased costs for a full 100 years
It's not so much setting aside money for a certain very rare event, it's realizing that there are a LOT of low-probability events that are close to catastrophic and the chance of encountering one of these events is quite high in aggregate even if the chance of a specific event in the pool is low.
> and the chance of encountering one of these events is quite high
Indeed, and there are a lot of overlapping disaster preparedness steps that make sense no matter what the triggering event happened to be, so it makes sense to establish, e.g.: robust command and control infrastructure that doesn't rely on primary infrastructure, including communications and chains of command; stockpiles of strategic durable goods like medical equipment, rations, batteries, etc.
Unfortunately, long term, people tend to abandon them. US had many stockpiles before that it no longer does, because they were all sold off as "unneeded".
the unstated prerequisite is for regulation to stipulate a minimum reserve so that the competitive field remains level, otherwise the dynamics would lead to risk ignorers eventually crowding out the disadvantaged risk mitigators. for business risks, i'd support a reserve requirement of 12 months, which phases in as a fledgling company reaches sustainability.
but, a pandemic is not an idiosyncratic risk of individuals or firms, but rather a broad systemic risk, and as such, should be bourne by society as a whole, not each individual and business separately.
Let me understand this: you want a business to have enough capital to pay its expenses for 12 months on zero revenue?
Holy Jesus; that's massive.
Capital is not free. Typical costs of capital today are about 8% (1). You're proposing, essentially, an 8% tax — not on a firm's profits, but on a firm's expenses. I don't want you to think, "oh, that will push a few firms into failure, rendering their entire business unviable." I want you to think, "it will spare a few firms." I also shudder to think of what happens to firm formation in the face of the steep, steep barriers to entry this raises.
You propose a very, very expensive way to build resilience. You're right, though, that the costs would be borne by all of society. Maybe it's worth it? But it's a hell of an ask, and I'm skeptical.
it's not that incredible. most going concerns already have the working capital, current assets, and receivables to hold out 3-6 months.
and the cost of capital isn't the right rate to be applying here. a better estimate is the spread between the cost of debt and their short-term securities rate (like the interest rate on current assets), which could even be negative (that is, making money). certain businesses can even be financed via their receivables alone.
damodaran is a good reference. his book was the basis of my finance and valuation classes. but it's dense and not easy to implement without going all in. it really taught me that finance and valuation are arguments, not analytical solutions.
Capitalism doesn't seem to really incentivize "vision and pragmatism" at any level of government these days. Social media and entertainment-journalism have compressed attention cycles so much that planning for next year or next administration might as well be lumped in with planning for the next global catastrophe 100 years from now in terms of payoff and optics.
The "It's the companies fault for not being prepared" line originated as a satirical jab at the "personal responsibility" rhetoric the right has used for decades to systematically dismantle any semblance of a social safety net in the United States.
Which usually involves stopping, or at least short-circuiting the short-term profit motive. But governments have a lot of power and wield a lot of money. The public purse is a nice prize for corrupt corporations to target, and chipping away at regulations that keep this machine pointed the right direction for the long term is all the rage across a whole side of the political spectrum.
And even better his concept of building anti-fragile systems. We can model things, predict things, etc - but in the end everything is more complex than we can know so as to appear random. We can’t predict what will happen but we can build systems that are anti-fragile, or robust at the minimum.
Not quite. Elon's strategies involve finding product/market fit in the short term for technologies that will be critical in the long term. But the companies themselves are on a knifes edge of survival. For example, if a meteor struck tomorrow, neither Tesla or SpaceX would have any advantage over their competitors. And if anything, because he runs his companies so close to the edge, his companies are uniquely susceptible to external catastrophic events.
The recent conversation between Tom Bilyeu and Daniel Schmachtenberger is a great primer on this topic. Tom inquires about existential risk from a pragmatic, entrepreneurial point of view.
This Economist article only scratches the surface of the risk of accelerating technology development. Schmachtenberger provides a framework for thought and much deeper insights in this direction.
And yet, one of the largest risks is that our modern society simply assumes that none of those will ever happen.
When I grew up in the 80's, society was built around the expectation that WW3 was pretty imminent, and while I'm quite happy that the cold war is over, modern society would most likely be better of if we stopped taking everything for granted and start preparing for things that we know will happen at some point. Like pandemics.
Some kind of shit will happen at some point. That's about the only thing that is certain. We should use the time we have until then for building a non-fragile society.
No climate forecast that I'm aware of predicts human extinction; much of Earth would still be habitable by humans even at +20 C (although that would trigger a huge mass extinction among other species). There's a big gap between "pretty bad" and "literally no survivors".
20c being habitable seems like a stretch to me, and my Google Fu only turned up mentions of Antarctica hitting 20c. Have any references for that number? Most reports I've read say a +2c will cause significant problems globally.
+2c would make plenty of inhabited areas uninhabitable, ive never seen predictions of +20c, what would that even look like?
The crop failures and localised starvation of +2c would become global at +20c.
The migration of people, something that humans are historically absolutely terrible at handling, would be on an unimaginable level. Imagine the bloodshed.
The risks involved with rapidly changing the planet's climate are huge and largely unknowable. We're running a very dangerous experiment where we can't know what all the results will be. Hence, you don't run the experiment.
Europe has struggled "pretty badly" with migrant crisis on the order of a few million people. Fairly soon, estimated climate change refugees in one of the most prosperous and advanced areas of the world is going to be at one order of magnitude more[0], i.e. about 1 person in 10 in Europe will have been fleeing death. This isn't +20C, this is within the next few decades.
At the scale of the world, we're talking about predictions of 150 million refugees by 2050[1].
Sea level rise is one thing, but climate change is also desertification, tornadoes, death of the seabed[2], melting glaciers and re-arranging of maritime currents therefore weather patterns. The decline of structures of agriculture can also lead to radicalization of people in some areas of the world (see [1] again). The collapse of food chains can also be global, and just for the US alone for example a rise of 4 degrees would cut corn production in half[3], while precipitating what is already in motion (again, just for the US as an example, migrant crises from Central and South America[3]).
Uprooting not only entire industries but entire cities, states, and lives on an order of magnitude significant for any major country of union in the world, is not something that will be easily done without significant loss of quality of life, rise in tensions and potential wars, and widespread shortages of resources.
I imagine your reference to +20C is wildly exaggerated, because there is so little research about that since predictions about compound effects become exponentially more difficult. Even just an estimate that's over a decade old of up to +5C change already presents risks to India, China, ocean life, and major cities like NYC, London and Tokyo[4]. At +3C in the world, due to differences between land and sea it is possible that on average people (who are on land) would experience rises of averages closer to +7C already.[5]
Needless to say that +20C is something else entirely, and it's likely that no possible study would do justice to the idea due to catastrophic cascades of effects. The claim that humanity would still be inhabiting Earth would probably require some redefinition of "humanity" and "inhabiting" if survival/adaptation proved to be possible, which are all far-reaching thought experiments with the extent of current knowledge.
> Fairly soon, estimated climate change refugees in one of the most prosperous and advanced areas of the world is going to be at one order of magnitude more[0], i.e. about 1 person in 10 in Europe will have been fleeing death.
I initially read this wrong and tried to find where in the report they said that 1 in 10 Europeans would be fleeing due to climate change.
The claim is that 10-20 million will be fleeing draught or extreme weather events in Africa and they will tend to flee North not South. I’m seeing a quote from a US General but not a link to an actual study.
Longer term, over the next 40 years, they have this to say;
> There is no clear global dataset on displacement by slow-onset climate extremes such as sea level rise and desertification; often this migration is classed as economic or other planned migration, failing to acknowledge fully the ‘push’ resulting from climate change impacts. This leaves the full human impact of climate change unknown and depends not only on the magnitude of the event, but also on the vulnerability of the area and the society it impacts. Communities from Alaska to Fiji and Kiribati have already been relocated, or are making plans to do so
because rising sea levels threaten their lands. Developing countries - that have contributed least to climate change - are experiencing the strongest negative impacts, with increasing frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events that pose potentially disastrous consequences for agriculture and food security.
> According to a recent study, 1.4 billion people could be forced to leave their homes by 2060 and this number could rise to two billion by 2100. This estimate is based on combined projections of population growth, submerging coastal zones, exhausted natural resources, declining net primary production, desertification and urban sprawl.
It’s not much of an analysis, but it’s rooted in something real. Coastal populations number about 600 million, maybe up to 1 billion this century. SLR (sea level rise) has been 0.4m since 1900 and estimated to be between an additional 0.4-2.5m this century. “As a result, SLR is anticipated to be one of the most expensive and irreversible future consequences of global climate change.”
I liked this Nature article for a more balanced review of the literature;
It looks at various estimates ranging from 80 million to 1.4 billion people displaced by the end of this century based on SLR and the various assumptions being made by the respective models. For example, looking at areas which lie in 100-year floodplains assuming they’re were all inhabitable, that would impact an estimated 444 million people by 2100 factoring in population growth.
> However, ...residence in the 100-year floodplain may not necessarily result in migration responses to SLR. Indeed, many low-lying areas in the 100-year floodplain, such as Asia’s densely populated ‘mega-deltas’, possess fertile soil and ample water, which is ideal for farming and fishing. Floodplains thus attract large numbers of migrants from other areas, notwithstanding the presence of coastal hazards. Simple residency in the 100-year floodplain does not, therefore, result in migration; it is only when the costs of increasing exposure to SLR hazards exceed the benefits of coastal environments that migration may occur.
If you look at just areas that would become permanently inundated, it is a much smaller land area and estimated to impact 88 million people by 2100.
SLR may be among the greatest/costliest threat of climate change, but...
+20C global average warming would correspond to roughly +40C land average warming. With polar regions seeing significantly more warming, at least +60C. That would see the coast of Antarctica averaging Death Valley's summer highs. Suffice to say, humans are not going to survive +20C global average warming.
I suppose it could lead to a Venus like atmosphere if things got really crazy. Realistically the worst case scenario would just lead to coastal areas being uninhabitable and widespread famine and unrest while the worlds farming and population gets redistributed to more habitable latitudes. I don't think it would ever wipe out EVERYONE even if it's a sizable percentage.
I agree with you. But you don't have to go quite all the way to Venus for a plausible scenario that would, probably, wipe out humanity. See page 6 of this link for a scary infographic.
There is no "redistribution to more habitable latitudes" (a breathtakingly vast understatement of human suffering) without all out war. There is no all out war without nuclear destruction at our own hand.
Intuitively it seems very difficult to see how things could go all the way towards being Venus-like if all the positive feedback mechanisms kick off. We're really, really similar to Venus, but Earth's crust wouldn't appear to have that many greenhouse chemicals stored up. (Unless geologists have failed to account for something)
But there's a long distance between Venusian hellscape (hot enough to melt lead and raining sulfuric acid) and what we have today, and most of it is pretty awful for us. "Kill everybody" isn't crazy.
If your plan involves moving the entirety of food production to areas of the globe that are currently permafrost and have no comparable ecosystems to where we are currently farming, you are going to have a bad time. You can't just bootstrap a healthy, thriving set of soil conditions, food webs, etc in a couple years. These things normally take thousands or even tens of thousands of years on geological timescales. Just look at how long it takes deciduous forests to reach their apex state: thousands of years.
Sorry, we don't even understand the 'realistic' worst case scenario. We've blown past previous estimates of temperature rise and atmospheric co2 by decades. It's a nonlinear system with many unknowns, this is why its critical we operate on the precautionary principle.
There is almost no event that will wipe out humanity with certainty. Our species could survive for millennia in hermetically sealed caves, huddled around underground breeder reactors. There is however a very real risk of wiping out our current way of life; civilization is quite brittle. That would of course mean that we no longer have the means to sustain eight billion people, and most of them would die. The latter is what most people refer to when they say that climate change is an existential risk, because there is a very real danger that our population drops massively over the next hundred years or so. And not because we finally figured out how to use contraceptives.
0.05c 2km asteroid. Grey goo. Fast UFAI takeoff (e.g. paperclip maximiser). Nuclear holocaust damaging our infrastructure enough that we don't survive the next big asteroid (speaking of which, we have no anti-asteroid infrastructure). Bioweapons causing widespread infertility, airdropped over uncontacted tribes.
> danger that our population drops massively over the next hundred years or so. And not because we finally figured out how to use contraceptives.
According to the evidence from Brazil and India, because we watch TV. According to the evidence from China, because of access to basic healthcare[1].
(I don't know of any evidence about video games, but they'd contribute too.)
[1] China's "one child policy" is blamed for the drop in fertility there, but if you look at the charts, fertility started trending down with the "barefoot doctor" campaign (someone with basic hygiene knowledge in every village). The one child policy coincides with a slight pause in the decline.
They can't even decide if we need to wear masks or not and everything is politicised anyway, I still remember the reactions when Trump tried to stop flights from China and Europe. So how can we prepare for something we don't even know will happen and how? Sometimes you just need to think while moving and incorporating feedback as things happen.
The world should act better about catastrophic and existential risks.
We think fine. We think when things get serious we'll act. Then things get serious -- like billions of people locked down, plastic in our bloodstreams, would-be leaders exacerbating problems, etc -- and we don't act how we thought we would.
The problem is our behavior. Thinking is relevant, but behavior is the issue.
I'm reading that as: in a world of scarce resources, there is always going to something higher priority to deal with than extremely low risk catastrophic/existential events.
Well said, but I believe the “thinking” problem is because we are not generally wired to think in a statistical sense. We can assess the severity fairly well, but we have all kinds of cognitive biases that get in the way of accurate probability assessments. [1]
Rephrase it as "very high probability of human-induced climate change" and the probability stays the same, but the impact of taking action changes completely.
If the change is human induced and on a very short timeframe (ie since the industrial revolution), then action on a similar scale should be possible to mitigate the impact.
That’s a frequently used formula for security, and it’s dumb there too, manipulated to explain away problems or get money.
Impact is more like “perceived impact to me” and risk is over a timeline that matters to the assessor of risk.
War hawks see nuclear war as medium probability, low impact. Most people see climate change as something impactful in a timeframe they don’t give a shit about, and terrorism is medium or high impact with medium or high probability in a timeframe that matters to them.
Sorry you feel that it’s dumb, because it’s not so much a formula as the basic concept (in words) of a expected value, which is perhaps the most fundamental concept in statistics, ML, decision theory, game theory, economics, medical decision and more. As I mentioned, the application of this concept gets much spicier (and more useful) once you start accounting for random variables, priors, model assumptions, etc. There are centuries of academic and practical thought devoted to these topics.
The “definition” of risk that I gave is a useful heuristic, even for my cat. He seems to calculate the probability of being caught on the kitchen counters, conditional on the number of people home and the time of day. He knows that he may get spritzed for violations and can balance this against the reward (simply chillin’ = stern warning; eviscerating a briefly undefended loaf of fresh challah = direct barrage from the water bottle). Clearly, this shrewd exploitation of Lady Luck is a learned behavior. (Whether is consciously strategic behavior or just serendipitously adaptive cat programming is actually immaterial in the game theoretic sense—mixed strategy Nash equilibria that result from evolutionary dynamics are equivalent to those that arise from strategic deduction).
> In a standard rational decision-making framework, if: cost of action < risk, then: take action.
Yes, but cost of action includes opportunity cost of not doing all the alternative actions for which you now suddenly don’t have the time.
Which makes rational decision making incredibly hard!
Example: focus all the effort on preventing climate change by reducing CO2 right now, or work on improving GDP for entire world so we have enough money and tech to mitigate the downsides?
The first sentence of the link I posted accounts for opportunity cost: “An optimal decision is a decision that leads to at least as good a known or expected outcome as all other available decision options.”
And there is much, much more than opportunity cost that makes decision theory difficult. However, the basic definition of expected value (e.g. both risk and reward)—and decision making on the basis of it (e.g. cost-benefit analysis)—is so universally useful that I believe every living creature relies on this concept in some way or another (even if things are decided for them via evolutionary fitness—which we probably shouldn’t let happen to us as a civilization).
As for your question, I reject the premise that there exists a binary choice between “focus all the effort on...reducing CO2 right now” vs. having “enough money and tech to mitigate the downsides” (an idea I’d also reject as frankly absurd—how will money and tech address a 50% species extinction rate?). Speaking of which, there are many classes of things that defy the concept of market value or utility—like the existence of species—which is where this framework can fall down. We can’t recognize their value as infinite without reaching absurdities (like I dunno, destroying everything else in the universe to preserve toucans or something). But preserving the future inhabitability of the planet for humans and other living beings is clearly of such high aggregate value that it is rational to devote significant effort towards mitigation (beginning with the actions that have the highest benefit/cost ratio).
By the way, I highly recommend the book “Beyond Growth” by Herman Daly as an introduction to ecological economics and the failure of GDP as a measure of progress.
I think something else is being said. Along the lines of our priorities and concerns can be highjacked as a means to a different end. Which is almost certainly happening.
Money is effectively priority, or at least control over the priorities of others. How do we ensure a greater return on investment for doing things that are actually in the public interest, so that people with money choose to use it in order to make people do actions that prioritize that?
Funny, I think it's exactly the other way around -- people wring their hands about things that don't matter ("plastic in our bloodstreams") but tend to act appropriately. Don't panic. Carry on.
Treating a threat as existential is often enormously costly, and we reliably overestimate threats. Ignoring them is a good first response, if not always a good second one. Being a week or a month late to the current pandemic is less costly than locking down for SARS, mad cow, bird flu, swine flu, ...
Not to mention the times when we did overreact. The latest TSA budget is $8.24 billion dollars, or 824 lives per year (at a cost of $10 million per life), or 2.17 One World Trade Centers per year, or (verging into polemic) one 9/11 every four years.
Isn't the lesson that we tend to overreact? Sure, maybe it'll be a pandemic, and let's not completely discount the idea, but why not just lock the plane's cabin doors and see if it gets worse?
I think the tendency is slightly more complicated than that. I People tend to under react to a certain point and then tend to overreact past that point. The problem is that this inflection point is rarely informed by any sort of rational thought.
>Treating a threat as existential is often enormously costly, and we reliably overestimate threats. Ignoring them is a good first response, if not always a good second one.
For the general public, ignoring and carrying on is a great response. We live in a world that capitalizes on specialists. The problem with COVID-19 was multiple failures by the people whose jobs were to care about pandemics. And we don't need massive budgets to prevent pandemics. Just epidemiologists and doctors on the lookout. Small teams working with hotspot countries.
It's not the average citizen's fault we got here. It's the fault of the institutions tasked with protecting us, who only had to hire a small team of experts every two decades to write up short proposals of what to do in unusual but eventually guaranteed emergencies. From what I've seen, the majority of Western countries were making up their pandemic response on the fly. And it's a virus that spreads like the annual flu, so not even a "black swan" method of infection.
As far as I know most countries already do that more often than you ask for. Everyone had a strong response to the 2009 pandemic, with plans, PPE stockpiles and such. The virus turned out very mild, which lead to heeding to the advice of epidemiologists to be politically costly. But in the USA pandemic preparedness was only effectively disassembled with the 2017 update.
As an employee of a state department of health, I can honestly say we were blindsided and had no plan. At most, our plan was "Do what the CDC says." Even if the CDC had been on top of things, much more could've been done and planned.
Well sure, but all this is a somewhat-conscious decision by politicians: "basing on experience, doing the pandemic preparations as advised by epidemiologists is more expensive than absorbing a pandemic not prepared (even if that somehow happens during our term)".
This is the only thing I fault my own government for. They reacted, and reasonably well but two weeks too late thinking it might blow over. Respect the exponential function or you'll end up paying for it.
Models are the best we have. And if we compare the UK with countries that reacted faster then it seems likely that a lot of deaths could have been prevented.
If you compare the UK to places that didn't lock down and have had very few deaths you can conclude the opposite. That's why you shouldn't cherry pick your data points.
Many people created models of the spread of Covid. Some of these models worked very well and others were terribly inaccurate. We should use the models that work and not those that have lost all credibility.
That's stupid. Over the long shot, "being a week or a month late to the current pandemic" will be completely disastrous. We're lucky that the current pandemic kills mainly old people (more or less, let's gloss over permanently disabled people), but are you denying that it's just a matter of time until some virus comes along that lies in the sweet spot of infectiousness, mortality and/or permanent damage to the body?
It explores this idea, that we like to think that we would be heroes if things got tough... even though we don't do anything heroic in our normal, cushy lives.
We seem to think we would some how be better people if things are hard, when in reality it is often the opposite. This pandemic has really driven home this point.
To quote the article:
> Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. We are smart enough to get by, responsible enough to raise a couple of kids, thrifty to sock away for a vacation, and industrious enough to keep the lights on. We like our cars. We love a good cheeseburger. We'd die without air-conditioning. In the great mass of humanity that's ever lived, we are distinguished only by our creature comforts, and we are, on the whole, mediocre.
That mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook--but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.
The problem is not the mechanism of capital distribution, it's the incentives.
Effectively, government (through taxation and public works) is the mechanism of capital (re-)distribution that is not (or should not be) profit driven.
> The problem is not the mechanism of capital distribution, it's the incentives.
...which is exactly capitalism: 1) private companies are required to maximize (short term) profit as their first priority.
2) the billionaire class can heavily influence policy through regulatory capture
There's a great SlateStarCodex essay on this called "Studies on Slack", where this tradeoff of investing resources in preparation for low-likelihood catastrophic events is examined.
Pandemic insurance is available for businesses - it is a cost that will, by definition, not likely pay back. But if an event occurs it will pay out as expected.
Human behavior is such that only about 12% of Californians in at-risk areas purchase earthquake insurance - even though many significant earthquakes have occurred in living memory.
The short version is that this guy was selling exactly that kind of insurance, but way too many companies waited until "next year" to actually go through with buying it. Perhaps things will be different now.
Unfortunately, pandemic insurance is unlikely to work in the real world.
A pandemic by definition affects the entire globe, meaning that if pandemic insurance needs to pay out, it will have to pay out for all policy holders, all at once.
Given that the business model of insurance companies is to spread risk across all policy holders, it is impossible for insurance companies to payout all policies all at once.
Not to mention the fact that pricing pandemic insurance is going to be very hard. Insurance companies generally don't like to take risks... they like things that are highly predictable and can be modeled. The percentage of people aged 40 who will die in a given year is predictable. So are the chances of car accidents by 17 year old female drivers. When the next pandemic will come is anyone's guess though. And lacking a decent way to model a risk like this, the insurance company will inevitably need to charge a high premium to make this a worthwhile product. Meanwhile, consumers will balk at the high premium and not buy the coverage.
It does work in the real world. It is a risk that is covered by insurers and reinsurers as well as capital market investors. The World Bank’s pandemic bond paid-out in response to the Covid-19 event as it was designed to (that bond was criticized for its effectiveness, but had nothing to do with the actual cover it provided and its mechanics).
‘Excess’ or ‘Extreme’ mortality risk is a risk that life insurers accumulate and naturally seek reinsurance for. There is a market for it.
I've heard people argue that a lot of the older housing stock in the Bay Area isn't worth insuring because the property value dwarfs the value of the home.
There’s way too much “we need to start...” bullshit these days, and mostly spearheaded by the same group of ~500 businesses and media corps[1]; as if any of these fucking mega corporations give a shit about any of us.
When everything you believe in starts aligning perfectly with the corporations that have been screwing you for decades (tax havens, monopolizing the industries your parents worked in, sending all our jobs over seas to underaged slaves, dumping toxins into our rivers, etc.), it’s time to rethink your thinking.
Huh? Please tell me which one of these "~500 businesses and media corps" is at work here and what exactly they are saying "we need to start..." doing that is, in actuality, screwing us. Else your diatribe has zero relevance.
Your post is an example of tactical nihilism. Suddenly, you've forgotten about every corporation that has reprehensible politics that you dislike? Suddenly, every media organization is truthful, every sponsor an altruist?
Honestly, how have you not seen these "we need to start doing X" posts? They rain down from the heavens on a weekly basis. "It's time to stop doing X, and do Y". "Here's why Z is problematic." It's literally corporate moralizing, sprinkled with doomsday predictions and rationalizations for hating the enemy du jour. It gets so very tiresome.
Again, huh? There is simply no relevance of the rant to the article; it has nothing to do with politics or "tactical nihilism." It appears several other posters also fail to find the relevance.
Not really. A world as complex as ours needs to be starting new initiatives all the time. Basically every convenience you take for granted (electricity, indoor plumbing, grocery stores) was because society said "we need to start". In places where they were slow to do that, it's generally less available and lower quality or they have to rely on technology from the places and people that took initiative.
"we need..." is a persuasion technique. It tries to sell an idea by (a) trying to incorporate you into it the argument before you even agreed (the "we" part) and (b) pushing on through a sense of false urgency (the "need" part).
"We need" is never ever an argument on itself. And it can be easily countered with: Who is this "we" you're talking about because I surely haven't agreed yet if I go along in your story. And the "need" isn't a shared need unless I'm willing to agree that it is a shared need between you and me.
"We need" forces the other to think past the problem and move directly towards "solutions". As if the problem exists outside of our own experience and should be considered as a problem. "We need" never explains why a set of facts is considered a problem in the first place. It just puts the focus on solutions, maybe even solutions that detract from what truly ought to be done.
The same is true when posing "society" as this homogeneous group that declares in unisono "we need to start". This couldn't be farther from the truth. "Society" is just a complex network of individuals, tribes, factions, parties,... with ever evolving shared and conflicting interests. Anything a society seemingly "agreed" upon is more emergent behaviour then deliberate action.
"society" sure didn't consciously decide "we need to start using technology or believing experience x, y or z." On the contrary. There are plenty of examples of beliefs being disparaged, vilified, questioned,... to the point where their proponents were burned on the stake. Or technologies and their inventors being ridiculed or banned because nobody was interested, or it was unclear which problem they truly solved.
Humanity survived just fine without electricity, indoor plumbing, grocery stores, digital technology and so on for hundreds of thousands of years. Ask any elderly person if they felt unhappy 60 or 70 years ago because they weren't able to consult Wikipedia via digital devices. They will simply answer "Well, we just went to the library. And that worked out perfectly for us. There simply wasn't an alternative and we didn't lament the lack of an alternative."
Stating that society agreed to "we need to start" would putting the horse before the cart.
I typed out a much longer response but this will do:
I think you are not following my argument or the OP. Neither supposes that "we need" is a standalone argument. OP provides specific examples for why "we need" to do these things.
"We" doesn't mean literally every human. Do you think people are actually being misled by this? It just means something like "society at large".
"We" need plumbing. This doesn't mean you can't individually live alone in the woods without plumbing.
"Need" doesn't mean you "must" have something. You don't "need" water if you're suicidal.
"Need" is just shorthand for "sustains our current way of life". If you want to see the downfall of civilization, you don't "need" agriculture. If you don't care about people on dialysis or the millions/billions of others that would die without power, then you don't "need" electricity or internal combustion engines.
You're allowed to have these opposing views.
The "we need" arguments assume that most people want to maintain or improve standards of living.
If you want to decrease standards of living, that's a fine opinion to have (although weird). More importantly, if you don't care about society, why bother arguing this at all? Why post on HN? No one is stopping you from living a pre-plumbing, pre-agricultural life if that's what you want.
"Society" of course tries to sustain itself. If society wants to keep existing in its current form, it does need to do many things (indoor plumbing, running water, electricity, or as the OP talks about, preparing for certain dangerous situations).
"We need" is both a social construct and a rhetorical device. No more, no less. I'm all fine when "we need" is used as a conclusion to a careful and thoughtful debate in which we both, equally, established a common need and a common wish to address that need knowing we're both deeply invested. I'm wary of hearing "we need to..." at the opening of every argument over and over again without showing how invested the person making the argument is in solving the issue.
If everything is turned into a priority, then nothing becomes a priority. Both time and the willingness to pay attention are in short demand.
We need to invest in an equitable society, economies of scale, reduce greenhouse gasses, invest in green technology, prepare for the next pandemic, vote for sensible politics (whatever those may be), invest in education, in the military, in getting to the Moon and establishing viable economies there, getting someone on Mars, invest in global network of satellites across the world, invest in developing nations, overhaul global supply lines and create less dependencies, find a better cure for cancer, invest in cybersecurity, invest in solutions to safeguard rights such as free speech and privacy, reduce fossil fuel dependency, invest in new industries and markets, and so on and so on and so on.
Here's how the vast majority of people reason, then. There are only 24 hours in a day. And life is rather short with just a few precious decades. How can I spend those valuable hours and my own talents in a healthy balance between taking care of myself and my loved ones, and deriving a due sense of personal satisfaction, meaningfulness and purpose?
There are 7.8 billion different answers to that question reflecting different and often very conflicting beliefs, wants, needs, dreams, desires and hopes.
"We need" at the start of every argument dismisses the reality that humanity or society is made up of individual humans, each of which is a unique universe of thoughts and feelings in their own right.
"We need" is a wonky substitute for a far more honest "I - personally - feel strongly about this issue, this is how invested I am in the issue, and I'm curious as to how you're feeling about this."
Worst case, "we need" is simply you projecting a personal fleeting desire to the entirety of humanity. "We need to go to Mars". I'm sure some people feel strongly about that. Maybe you do in this very instance, but will you still actively be thinking about how humanity could get there in an hour or two? Or have you moved on by then, forgetting that you even posted a fleeting thought on social media in the first place? Moreover, you just placed this massive issue - the urgency to get boots on Mars, or the preparation for the next pandemic - at my doorstep, how am I as an individual supposed to even contribute towards solving that problem while including the entirety of humanity or society?
"we need preparing for a pandemic" or "we need to invest in dialysis for people who need it for their survival". Sure, but that's your personal sentiment. But it's not an argument. How are you, as an individual acting on that sentiment? Who are you voting on? Are you making donations? Are you a researcher? Are you running for office yourself? Or are you endorsing politicians who will be making decisions? Or have you invested millions in factories that might one day supply vaccines, hopefully? What are you doing to show the way forward beyond a moot online demonstration of a due sense of self awareness?
"We should have had a (non-false) sense of urgency about this last year?" Who is this we? Why are you involving me into this? I read the news and social media like the next person and I'm an individual with limited time and resources. I'm not an elected decision maker. I'm certainly not privy to intelligence reports. And when I voted for decision makers that ran for office, a ...
Preparing for expected catastrophes is not a fleeting desire. It's basically the opposite. There are entire industries built up around this (FEMA, insurance, flood control systems, the CDC, banking reserve ratios, backup servers, many safety rules and systems). Saying we need to adjust these efforts to reflect the real world cost-benefit trade offs is common sense. You can disagree with the particular calculus they're doing (e.g. by thinking a pandemic is so unlikely that we shouldn't prepare very much), but I don't see a sound argument to say "we don't need to prepare at all for these costly events".
>If everything is turned into a priority, then nothing becomes a priority. Both time and the willingness to pay attention are in short demand.
I don't think people are turning everything into a priority. But if some ill-defined group is trying to do this, it wouldn't change the fact that certain things are a priority if we want to maintain our way of life. Disaster management is one of them.
I'm sure a bunch of people think irrelevant things happening on Instagram are a priority. But that doesn't change the fact that preserving infrastructure is a priority for maintaining our way of life.
As I said, if you don't care about maintaining our way of life, then of course you won't care about what we need to do to preserve that way of life.
>Here's how the vast majority of people reason, then. There are only 24 hours in a day. And life is rather short with just a few precious decades. How can I spend those valuable hours and my own talents in a healthy balance between taking care of myself and my loved ones, and deriving a due sense of personal satisfaction, meaningfulness and purpose?
I think I see the disconnect. No one is saying that the fry cook at McDonalds needs to align global resources better to deal with potential catastrophe. You are reading "we" too literally. (Rather, you are just misunderstanding the word "we". "We" doesn't mean an has never meant every human. We really just means a group of which the speaker is part. It need not include you.)
"We need to better prepare for certain catastrophes" means that politicians and other key actors (say businesses, insurers, bureaucrats, researchers, engineers that have relevant assets, skills, experiences, etc.) need to think better about these and non-key actors (say voters, consumers) need to shift attention, money, votes, etc. to supporting those key actors in this goal. If you are okay with disruptions like pandemics, then you can disagree with this. I think most people would prefer to avoid these disruptions though, given the comparatively low cost for doing so.
>at my doorstep, how am I as an individual supposed to even contribute towards solving that problem while including the entirety of humanity or society?
Support politicians that endorse science and logic, for example. Wear a mask as another example.
I don't think anyone is asking you to do anything that "includes the entirety of humanity or society". We are saying make the choices you can make and support the politicians and businesses that deal with these problems proactively.
>But it's not an argument.
No one is saying "we need to prepare for a pandemic" as a standalone argument. But the argument is not complicated. A pandemic could disrupt our way of life greatly by "harm X" (lets say decrease in quality adjusted life years or GDP). It has a chance of occur of "probability Y". Y here is close to 100% as we know. The cost of preparing systems to mitigate the risks to "harm level Z" is "cost Q". As long as harm X times probability Y is really big (which as we see, it is) and cost Q is less than harm level Z, then it is rational to invest Q resources into mitigation.
You can disagree with whatever numbers we might pick for X Y Z Q, but to say we shouldn't perform the calculus is ...
I was at a mega corp store yesterday to buy some basic necessities. While paying the bill, I was asked to donate money for Covid-19. They do this nearly all year, asking for donations for something or the other.
Why should I trust this mega corp with just one dollar? How do I even know what they are doing with this money? The mega corps have repeatedly shown they care about nothing but profits. Isn't it hypocritical to ask for money from common man to fix problems that they created in the first place (like pollution)? I'd rather trust Doctors without borders than these people.
But the thing that annoys me the most - if they really cared that much, why can't they donate a dollar (or whatever amount) from their profit every time I shop there? Instead of pestering shoppers many of whom live paycheck to paycheck?
Yes, we need to do much much more. But the leadership for it (both in thought and action) is not these multi billion dollar corporations and their cronies (especially the media). They are largely the reason we are here in the first place - causing pollution, wage stagnation, privacy violation etc
The reason they ask you to donate is to gather pricing data: If you're willing to donate, it means they can raise the price of the goods without hurting the demand curve.
They actually do donate the money; they're not trying to keep your dollar. It's difficult to acquire this data via other means, so they don't mind paying it out properly.
I don't like megacorps either but I don't see which part of the OP you disagree with.
>Isn't it hypocritical to ask for money from common man to fix problems that they created in the first place (like pollution)?
No. I think a better word is "unseemly". I don't think it's hypocritical for a company or person to use carbon and then buy carbon offsets or donate to the rain forest or something.
Even if it were hypocritical I would still rather have a polluting corporation that fought pollution than a polluting corporation that didn't.
>if they really cared that much, why can't they donate a dollar (or whatever amount) from their profit every time I shop there?
Many of them do just that. I don't think corporate giving is the solution to society's problems but it is a real thing that happens and can make a difference for some people.
Corporations of course do things for marketing and PR reasons. If one of you things is to encourage you to donate or to donate themselves then I don't see the problem (although I am annoyed having to press a bunch of buttons to pay).
Corporations are bad, but that doesn't distract from two very distinct facts:
1. We let corporations do this to us. The cult of profit over all else is why all of those things you mention are an issue. As long as we keep removing regulations, laws and things that were put into place to stop companies from doing this shit, what can we honestly expect?
2. There are many things we've done which are not the result of corporations but rather our own narcissistic drive for fake freedoms above all else. The people refusing to wear masks for example or practice basic preventative measures against pandemics are not doing so because of businesses and media corps telling them to stop. They're doing so because of pervasive behavior which has infected the national debate and is peddled by elected officials. This won't change until people stand face to face with the results of their actions and unfortunately in a pandemic that means mass death.
Our general reaction to the coronavirus convinced me that we're lucky it's not far, far deadlier. Because if we had to stare down a virus that would threaten our extinction, we'd choose extinction.
> spearheaded by the same group of ~500 businesses and media corps
The Economist may be quite friendly to capitalism, but they're independently owned (mostly by wealthy families, plus some staff, per [0]).
Regardless, your premise seems entirely strange to me. I hear "we need to start..." from individuals, mostly on the political left outside of the mainstream. Nike and Exxon Mobil never tell me to change things.
266 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadIt's exactly why we can't solve climate change, right?
Two more reasons:
1. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons, where many actors, at the individual, corporate, and national level, have incentives to worsen the problem even if nearly everyone would benefit if they all behaved differently.
2. The climate is a complex system, so it’s hard to educate the public about how it works, and easy for bad faith actors or pseudoscientific cranks to obfuscate the discussion.
Plus, some people working on the AI X-risk problem are doing it for nothing, which means the state of funding is a bit weird.
Risks from natural events like asteroids are actually quite well understood and we have tight bounds that they aren't that risky per century. The natural risks cause area probably deserves more funding on a global level, but EAs are definitely thinking about it. It's literally the first section in 80k's intro article about X-risks: https://80000hours.org/articles/extinction-risk/
The global cost of the virus is astronomical, but protecting ourselves effectively against a new virus doesn’t have to be crippling. The same is true of many other credible risks the article covers. Such preparations could even offer additional useful benefits. It’s just going to take vision and pragmatism I’m not sure our political leaders have in them these days.
I argue for letting these businesses fail, even if vital, because, it seems, the powers that be have forgotten to take care of them, regulate them, and not get captured by private interests, for decades now. Infrastructure across the the country is literally crumbling. Major dams have failed this year. I fully expect to suffer much more before those with the power to delegate resources where needed will find the will too.
We'll solve the problem eventually, I guess, when it becomes clear that there's no money left for bailouts.
If you start just conjuring money to bridge the gap, you're basically robbing whoever holds money (or other financial instruments denominated in your currency). These parties then work very hard to stop holding money. When that process is done, you're back where you started, only with less trust, higher transaction costs, and elevated risk burdens depressing output across the economy.
1970 gas shortages 2000 dotcom bubble burst 2008 housing crisis
All missed opportunities to change broken institutional structures and to do things differently.
However, this has limits. It doesn't work for large scale shortages like the oil shocks of the seventies. If everybody had saved money beforehand, there still wouldn't be more oil available in total. When the oil price doubles, you'll only be able to buy half as much with your savings.
It's not so much setting aside money for a certain very rare event, it's realizing that there are a LOT of low-probability events that are close to catastrophic and the chance of encountering one of these events is quite high in aggregate even if the chance of a specific event in the pool is low.
Indeed, and there are a lot of overlapping disaster preparedness steps that make sense no matter what the triggering event happened to be, so it makes sense to establish, e.g.: robust command and control infrastructure that doesn't rely on primary infrastructure, including communications and chains of command; stockpiles of strategic durable goods like medical equipment, rations, batteries, etc.
but, a pandemic is not an idiosyncratic risk of individuals or firms, but rather a broad systemic risk, and as such, should be bourne by society as a whole, not each individual and business separately.
Holy Jesus; that's massive.
Capital is not free. Typical costs of capital today are about 8% (1). You're proposing, essentially, an 8% tax — not on a firm's profits, but on a firm's expenses. I don't want you to think, "oh, that will push a few firms into failure, rendering their entire business unviable." I want you to think, "it will spare a few firms." I also shudder to think of what happens to firm formation in the face of the steep, steep barriers to entry this raises.
You propose a very, very expensive way to build resilience. You're right, though, that the costs would be borne by all of society. Maybe it's worth it? But it's a hell of an ask, and I'm skeptical.
(1) if you have better figures than http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/... then I'm all for 'em
and the cost of capital isn't the right rate to be applying here. a better estimate is the spread between the cost of debt and their short-term securities rate (like the interest rate on current assets), which could even be negative (that is, making money). certain businesses can even be financed via their receivables alone.
damodaran is a good reference. his book was the basis of my finance and valuation classes. but it's dense and not easy to implement without going all in. it really taught me that finance and valuation are arguments, not analytical solutions.
"Plans and early-warning systems are always a good idea"
Yes, we know, but how do achieve anything when people are deep in denial and reading conspiracy theories on Facebook is considered "news"?
You have to consider that the current pandemic is relatively tractable compared to the climate crisis, and we're failing miserably even at that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23659120
The probability any one very rare event is low. Preparing for it helps mitigate risks for many other issues however.
This Economist article only scratches the surface of the risk of accelerating technology development. Schmachtenberger provides a framework for thought and much deeper insights in this direction.
https://impacttheory.libsyn.com/conversations-with-tom-danie...
[0] https://youtu.be/_b4qKv1Ctv8
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk
* https://www.existential-risk.org/
When I grew up in the 80's, society was built around the expectation that WW3 was pretty imminent, and while I'm quite happy that the cold war is over, modern society would most likely be better of if we stopped taking everything for granted and start preparing for things that we know will happen at some point. Like pandemics.
Some kind of shit will happen at some point. That's about the only thing that is certain. We should use the time we have until then for building a non-fragile society.
Neither of those are existential risks: they're incredibly unlikely to wipe us out. The kind of high impact risks the article is about are much worse.
The crop failures and localised starvation of +2c would become global at +20c.
The migration of people, something that humans are historically absolutely terrible at handling, would be on an unimaginable level. Imagine the bloodshed.
Uprooting not only entire industries but entire cities, states, and lives on an order of magnitude significant for any major country of union in the world, is not something that will be easily done without significant loss of quality of life, rise in tensions and potential wars, and widespread shortages of resources.
I imagine your reference to +20C is wildly exaggerated, because there is so little research about that since predictions about compound effects become exponentially more difficult. Even just an estimate that's over a decade old of up to +5C change already presents risks to India, China, ocean life, and major cities like NYC, London and Tokyo[4]. At +3C in the world, due to differences between land and sea it is possible that on average people (who are on land) would experience rises of averages closer to +7C already.[5]
Needless to say that +20C is something else entirely, and it's likely that no possible study would do justice to the idea due to catastrophic cascades of effects. The claim that humanity would still be inhabiting Earth would probably require some redefinition of "humanity" and "inhabiting" if survival/adaptation proved to be possible, which are all far-reaching thought experiments with the extent of current knowledge.
[0] https://helprefugees.org/news/climate-change-refugee-crisis/
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-climate-crisis-migrat...
[2] https://phys.org/news/2018-04-climate-ocean-food-chains-fish...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/06/us-mex...
[4] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11089-the-impacts-of-...
[5] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52543589
I initially read this wrong and tried to find where in the report they said that 1 in 10 Europeans would be fleeing due to climate change.
The claim is that 10-20 million will be fleeing draught or extreme weather events in Africa and they will tend to flee North not South. I’m seeing a quote from a US General but not a link to an actual study.
Longer term, over the next 40 years, they have this to say;
> There is no clear global dataset on displacement by slow-onset climate extremes such as sea level rise and desertification; often this migration is classed as economic or other planned migration, failing to acknowledge fully the ‘push’ resulting from climate change impacts. This leaves the full human impact of climate change unknown and depends not only on the magnitude of the event, but also on the vulnerability of the area and the society it impacts. Communities from Alaska to Fiji and Kiribati have already been relocated, or are making plans to do so because rising sea levels threaten their lands. Developing countries - that have contributed least to climate change - are experiencing the strongest negative impacts, with increasing frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events that pose potentially disastrous consequences for agriculture and food security.
> According to a recent study, 1.4 billion people could be forced to leave their homes by 2060 and this number could rise to two billion by 2100. This estimate is based on combined projections of population growth, submerging coastal zones, exhausted natural resources, declining net primary production, desertification and urban sprawl.
The study they are referencing is this one;
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2017/06/rising-seas-could-r...
It’s not much of an analysis, but it’s rooted in something real. Coastal populations number about 600 million, maybe up to 1 billion this century. SLR (sea level rise) has been 0.4m since 1900 and estimated to be between an additional 0.4-2.5m this century. “As a result, SLR is anticipated to be one of the most expensive and irreversible future consequences of global climate change.”
I liked this Nature article for a more balanced review of the literature;
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-019-0002-9
It looks at various estimates ranging from 80 million to 1.4 billion people displaced by the end of this century based on SLR and the various assumptions being made by the respective models. For example, looking at areas which lie in 100-year floodplains assuming they’re were all inhabitable, that would impact an estimated 444 million people by 2100 factoring in population growth.
> However, ...residence in the 100-year floodplain may not necessarily result in migration responses to SLR. Indeed, many low-lying areas in the 100-year floodplain, such as Asia’s densely populated ‘mega-deltas’, possess fertile soil and ample water, which is ideal for farming and fishing. Floodplains thus attract large numbers of migrants from other areas, notwithstanding the presence of coastal hazards. Simple residency in the 100-year floodplain does not, therefore, result in migration; it is only when the costs of increasing exposure to SLR hazards exceed the benefits of coastal environments that migration may occur.
If you look at just areas that would become permanently inundated, it is a much smaller land area and estimated to impact 88 million people by 2100.
SLR may be among the greatest/costliest threat of climate change, but...
I suppose it could lead to a Venus like atmosphere if things got really crazy. Realistically the worst case scenario would just lead to coastal areas being uninhabitable and widespread famine and unrest while the worlds farming and population gets redistributed to more habitable latitudes. I don't think it would ever wipe out EVERYONE even if it's a sizable percentage.
http://burro.case.edu/Academics/USNA229/impactfromthedeep.pd...
Of course direct emissions won't get there alone, but runaway feedbacks could.
But there's a long distance between Venusian hellscape (hot enough to melt lead and raining sulfuric acid) and what we have today, and most of it is pretty awful for us. "Kill everybody" isn't crazy.
According to the evidence from Brazil and India, because we watch TV. According to the evidence from China, because of access to basic healthcare[1].
(I don't know of any evidence about video games, but they'd contribute too.)
[1] China's "one child policy" is blamed for the drop in fertility there, but if you look at the charts, fertility started trending down with the "barefoot doctor" campaign (someone with basic hygiene knowledge in every village). The one child policy coincides with a slight pause in the decline.
We think fine. We think when things get serious we'll act. Then things get serious -- like billions of people locked down, plastic in our bloodstreams, would-be leaders exacerbating problems, etc -- and we don't act how we thought we would.
The problem is our behavior. Thinking is relevant, but behavior is the issue.
- climate change: very high probability * very high impact
- terrorism: low/med probability * low/med impact
- thermonuclear war: low-ish(?) probability * extremely high impact
- superhuman AGI: ??? probability * ??? impact (likely very high impact, but + or - is uncertain)
In a standard rational decision-making framework, if: cost of action < risk, then: take action.
[Edit: Of course this is all a gross simplification. See more here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_decision]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
There is a 100% probability. It has been happening since there was a climate. The question is how much can we really affect it or even if we should.
If the change is human induced and on a very short timeframe (ie since the industrial revolution), then action on a similar scale should be possible to mitigate the impact.
Impact is more like “perceived impact to me” and risk is over a timeline that matters to the assessor of risk.
War hawks see nuclear war as medium probability, low impact. Most people see climate change as something impactful in a timeframe they don’t give a shit about, and terrorism is medium or high impact with medium or high probability in a timeframe that matters to them.
This implies that the best solution to terrorism is to abolish national news, in order to diminish its impact.
Think about how OJ Simpson ushered in our era of shit news.
The “definition” of risk that I gave is a useful heuristic, even for my cat. He seems to calculate the probability of being caught on the kitchen counters, conditional on the number of people home and the time of day. He knows that he may get spritzed for violations and can balance this against the reward (simply chillin’ = stern warning; eviscerating a briefly undefended loaf of fresh challah = direct barrage from the water bottle). Clearly, this shrewd exploitation of Lady Luck is a learned behavior. (Whether is consciously strategic behavior or just serendipitously adaptive cat programming is actually immaterial in the game theoretic sense—mixed strategy Nash equilibria that result from evolutionary dynamics are equivalent to those that arise from strategic deduction).
Anyways, you’re right that the original motivation for probability theory and expected value was to “get money” (via gambling): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_points
Your cat is honest.
Humans take great leaps to dial in the answer they want!
Yes, but cost of action includes opportunity cost of not doing all the alternative actions for which you now suddenly don’t have the time.
Which makes rational decision making incredibly hard!
Example: focus all the effort on preventing climate change by reducing CO2 right now, or work on improving GDP for entire world so we have enough money and tech to mitigate the downsides?
And there is much, much more than opportunity cost that makes decision theory difficult. However, the basic definition of expected value (e.g. both risk and reward)—and decision making on the basis of it (e.g. cost-benefit analysis)—is so universally useful that I believe every living creature relies on this concept in some way or another (even if things are decided for them via evolutionary fitness—which we probably shouldn’t let happen to us as a civilization).
As for your question, I reject the premise that there exists a binary choice between “focus all the effort on...reducing CO2 right now” vs. having “enough money and tech to mitigate the downsides” (an idea I’d also reject as frankly absurd—how will money and tech address a 50% species extinction rate?). Speaking of which, there are many classes of things that defy the concept of market value or utility—like the existence of species—which is where this framework can fall down. We can’t recognize their value as infinite without reaching absurdities (like I dunno, destroying everything else in the universe to preserve toucans or something). But preserving the future inhabitability of the planet for humans and other living beings is clearly of such high aggregate value that it is rational to devote significant effort towards mitigation (beginning with the actions that have the highest benefit/cost ratio).
By the way, I highly recommend the book “Beyond Growth” by Herman Daly as an introduction to ecological economics and the failure of GDP as a measure of progress.
Daniel Kahneman argues otherwise.
Treating a threat as existential is often enormously costly, and we reliably overestimate threats. Ignoring them is a good first response, if not always a good second one. Being a week or a month late to the current pandemic is less costly than locking down for SARS, mad cow, bird flu, swine flu, ...
Not to mention the times when we did overreact. The latest TSA budget is $8.24 billion dollars, or 824 lives per year (at a cost of $10 million per life), or 2.17 One World Trade Centers per year, or (verging into polemic) one 9/11 every four years.
Isn't the lesson that we tend to overreact? Sure, maybe it'll be a pandemic, and let's not completely discount the idea, but why not just lock the plane's cabin doors and see if it gets worse?
For the general public, ignoring and carrying on is a great response. We live in a world that capitalizes on specialists. The problem with COVID-19 was multiple failures by the people whose jobs were to care about pandemics. And we don't need massive budgets to prevent pandemics. Just epidemiologists and doctors on the lookout. Small teams working with hotspot countries.
It's not the average citizen's fault we got here. It's the fault of the institutions tasked with protecting us, who only had to hire a small team of experts every two decades to write up short proposals of what to do in unusual but eventually guaranteed emergencies. From what I've seen, the majority of Western countries were making up their pandemic response on the fly. And it's a virus that spreads like the annual flu, so not even a "black swan" method of infection.
As far as I know most countries already do that more often than you ask for. Everyone had a strong response to the 2009 pandemic, with plans, PPE stockpiles and such. The virus turned out very mild, which lead to heeding to the advice of epidemiologists to be politically costly. But in the USA pandemic preparedness was only effectively disassembled with the 2017 update.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/10/uk-coronavirus...
Many people created models of the spread of Covid. Some of these models worked very well and others were terribly inaccurate. We should use the models that work and not those that have lost all credibility.
It explores this idea, that we like to think that we would be heroes if things got tough... even though we don't do anything heroic in our normal, cushy lives.
We seem to think we would some how be better people if things are hard, when in reality it is often the opposite. This pandemic has really driven home this point.
To quote the article:
> Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. We are smart enough to get by, responsible enough to raise a couple of kids, thrifty to sock away for a vacation, and industrious enough to keep the lights on. We like our cars. We love a good cheeseburger. We'd die without air-conditioning. In the great mass of humanity that's ever lived, we are distinguished only by our creature comforts, and we are, on the whole, mediocre.
That mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook--but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.
https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...
Capitalism prioritizes profits over people's lives.
If it were profitable to stockpile resources to protect life and/or property, in advance of foreseeable adverse events, we would be more prepared.
Precisely because it is not profitable, we are not.
Effectively, government (through taxation and public works) is the mechanism of capital (re-)distribution that is not (or should not be) profit driven.
...which is exactly capitalism: 1) private companies are required to maximize (short term) profit as their first priority. 2) the billionaire class can heavily influence policy through regulatory capture
Here is a link to the full article on LessWrong - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GZSzMqr8hAB2dR8pk/studies-on...
Pandemic insurance is available for businesses - it is a cost that will, by definition, not likely pay back. But if an event occurs it will pay out as expected.
Human behavior is such that only about 12% of Californians in at-risk areas purchase earthquake insurance - even though many significant earthquakes have occurred in living memory.
The short version is that this guy was selling exactly that kind of insurance, but way too many companies waited until "next year" to actually go through with buying it. Perhaps things will be different now.
‘Excess’ or ‘Extreme’ mortality risk is a risk that life insurers accumulate and naturally seek reinsurance for. There is a market for it.
There’s way too much “we need to start...” bullshit these days, and mostly spearheaded by the same group of ~500 businesses and media corps[1]; as if any of these fucking mega corporations give a shit about any of us.
When everything you believe in starts aligning perfectly with the corporations that have been screwing you for decades (tax havens, monopolizing the industries your parents worked in, sending all our jobs over seas to underaged slaves, dumping toxins into our rivers, etc.), it’s time to rethink your thinking.
1. took me all of three seconds to find an example for the publisher in question, in what looks like The Economist running pseudo-critic defense for Nike’s sweatshops, etc.: https://www.economist.com/business/1999/02/25/sweatshop-wars
Honestly, how have you not seen these "we need to start doing X" posts? They rain down from the heavens on a weekly basis. "It's time to stop doing X, and do Y". "Here's why Z is problematic." It's literally corporate moralizing, sprinkled with doomsday predictions and rationalizations for hating the enemy du jour. It gets so very tiresome.
1. Topic A is done by evil X.
2. No it's not.
3. Why are you trying to distract from the evil of X?
Great word, I have to write that down.
Less certainty, more inquiry.
"There’s way too much “we need to start...” bullshit these days, and mostly spearheaded by the same group of ~500 businesses and media corps"
There's no apparent connection that I can see.
I don't see the relevance of your rant.
Not really. A world as complex as ours needs to be starting new initiatives all the time. Basically every convenience you take for granted (electricity, indoor plumbing, grocery stores) was because society said "we need to start". In places where they were slow to do that, it's generally less available and lower quality or they have to rely on technology from the places and people that took initiative.
We need to be starting much much more, not less.
"We need" is never ever an argument on itself. And it can be easily countered with: Who is this "we" you're talking about because I surely haven't agreed yet if I go along in your story. And the "need" isn't a shared need unless I'm willing to agree that it is a shared need between you and me.
"We need" forces the other to think past the problem and move directly towards "solutions". As if the problem exists outside of our own experience and should be considered as a problem. "We need" never explains why a set of facts is considered a problem in the first place. It just puts the focus on solutions, maybe even solutions that detract from what truly ought to be done.
The same is true when posing "society" as this homogeneous group that declares in unisono "we need to start". This couldn't be farther from the truth. "Society" is just a complex network of individuals, tribes, factions, parties,... with ever evolving shared and conflicting interests. Anything a society seemingly "agreed" upon is more emergent behaviour then deliberate action.
"society" sure didn't consciously decide "we need to start using technology or believing experience x, y or z." On the contrary. There are plenty of examples of beliefs being disparaged, vilified, questioned,... to the point where their proponents were burned on the stake. Or technologies and their inventors being ridiculed or banned because nobody was interested, or it was unclear which problem they truly solved.
Humanity survived just fine without electricity, indoor plumbing, grocery stores, digital technology and so on for hundreds of thousands of years. Ask any elderly person if they felt unhappy 60 or 70 years ago because they weren't able to consult Wikipedia via digital devices. They will simply answer "Well, we just went to the library. And that worked out perfectly for us. There simply wasn't an alternative and we didn't lament the lack of an alternative."
Stating that society agreed to "we need to start" would putting the horse before the cart.
I think you are not following my argument or the OP. Neither supposes that "we need" is a standalone argument. OP provides specific examples for why "we need" to do these things.
"We" doesn't mean literally every human. Do you think people are actually being misled by this? It just means something like "society at large".
"We" need plumbing. This doesn't mean you can't individually live alone in the woods without plumbing.
"Need" doesn't mean you "must" have something. You don't "need" water if you're suicidal.
"Need" is just shorthand for "sustains our current way of life". If you want to see the downfall of civilization, you don't "need" agriculture. If you don't care about people on dialysis or the millions/billions of others that would die without power, then you don't "need" electricity or internal combustion engines.
You're allowed to have these opposing views.
The "we need" arguments assume that most people want to maintain or improve standards of living.
If you want to decrease standards of living, that's a fine opinion to have (although weird). More importantly, if you don't care about society, why bother arguing this at all? Why post on HN? No one is stopping you from living a pre-plumbing, pre-agricultural life if that's what you want.
"Society" of course tries to sustain itself. If society wants to keep existing in its current form, it does need to do many things (indoor plumbing, running water, electricity, or as the OP talks about, preparing for certain dangerous situations).
If everything is turned into a priority, then nothing becomes a priority. Both time and the willingness to pay attention are in short demand.
We need to invest in an equitable society, economies of scale, reduce greenhouse gasses, invest in green technology, prepare for the next pandemic, vote for sensible politics (whatever those may be), invest in education, in the military, in getting to the Moon and establishing viable economies there, getting someone on Mars, invest in global network of satellites across the world, invest in developing nations, overhaul global supply lines and create less dependencies, find a better cure for cancer, invest in cybersecurity, invest in solutions to safeguard rights such as free speech and privacy, reduce fossil fuel dependency, invest in new industries and markets, and so on and so on and so on.
Here's how the vast majority of people reason, then. There are only 24 hours in a day. And life is rather short with just a few precious decades. How can I spend those valuable hours and my own talents in a healthy balance between taking care of myself and my loved ones, and deriving a due sense of personal satisfaction, meaningfulness and purpose?
There are 7.8 billion different answers to that question reflecting different and often very conflicting beliefs, wants, needs, dreams, desires and hopes.
"We need" at the start of every argument dismisses the reality that humanity or society is made up of individual humans, each of which is a unique universe of thoughts and feelings in their own right.
"We need" is a wonky substitute for a far more honest "I - personally - feel strongly about this issue, this is how invested I am in the issue, and I'm curious as to how you're feeling about this."
Worst case, "we need" is simply you projecting a personal fleeting desire to the entirety of humanity. "We need to go to Mars". I'm sure some people feel strongly about that. Maybe you do in this very instance, but will you still actively be thinking about how humanity could get there in an hour or two? Or have you moved on by then, forgetting that you even posted a fleeting thought on social media in the first place? Moreover, you just placed this massive issue - the urgency to get boots on Mars, or the preparation for the next pandemic - at my doorstep, how am I as an individual supposed to even contribute towards solving that problem while including the entirety of humanity or society?
"we need preparing for a pandemic" or "we need to invest in dialysis for people who need it for their survival". Sure, but that's your personal sentiment. But it's not an argument. How are you, as an individual acting on that sentiment? Who are you voting on? Are you making donations? Are you a researcher? Are you running for office yourself? Or are you endorsing politicians who will be making decisions? Or have you invested millions in factories that might one day supply vaccines, hopefully? What are you doing to show the way forward beyond a moot online demonstration of a due sense of self awareness?
"We should have had a (non-false) sense of urgency about this last year?" Who is this we? Why are you involving me into this? I read the news and social media like the next person and I'm an individual with limited time and resources. I'm not an elected decision maker. I'm certainly not privy to intelligence reports. And when I voted for decision makers that ran for office, a ...
>If everything is turned into a priority, then nothing becomes a priority. Both time and the willingness to pay attention are in short demand.
I don't think people are turning everything into a priority. But if some ill-defined group is trying to do this, it wouldn't change the fact that certain things are a priority if we want to maintain our way of life. Disaster management is one of them.
I'm sure a bunch of people think irrelevant things happening on Instagram are a priority. But that doesn't change the fact that preserving infrastructure is a priority for maintaining our way of life.
As I said, if you don't care about maintaining our way of life, then of course you won't care about what we need to do to preserve that way of life.
>Here's how the vast majority of people reason, then. There are only 24 hours in a day. And life is rather short with just a few precious decades. How can I spend those valuable hours and my own talents in a healthy balance between taking care of myself and my loved ones, and deriving a due sense of personal satisfaction, meaningfulness and purpose?
I think I see the disconnect. No one is saying that the fry cook at McDonalds needs to align global resources better to deal with potential catastrophe. You are reading "we" too literally. (Rather, you are just misunderstanding the word "we". "We" doesn't mean an has never meant every human. We really just means a group of which the speaker is part. It need not include you.)
"We need to better prepare for certain catastrophes" means that politicians and other key actors (say businesses, insurers, bureaucrats, researchers, engineers that have relevant assets, skills, experiences, etc.) need to think better about these and non-key actors (say voters, consumers) need to shift attention, money, votes, etc. to supporting those key actors in this goal. If you are okay with disruptions like pandemics, then you can disagree with this. I think most people would prefer to avoid these disruptions though, given the comparatively low cost for doing so.
>at my doorstep, how am I as an individual supposed to even contribute towards solving that problem while including the entirety of humanity or society?
Support politicians that endorse science and logic, for example. Wear a mask as another example.
I don't think anyone is asking you to do anything that "includes the entirety of humanity or society". We are saying make the choices you can make and support the politicians and businesses that deal with these problems proactively.
>But it's not an argument.
No one is saying "we need to prepare for a pandemic" as a standalone argument. But the argument is not complicated. A pandemic could disrupt our way of life greatly by "harm X" (lets say decrease in quality adjusted life years or GDP). It has a chance of occur of "probability Y". Y here is close to 100% as we know. The cost of preparing systems to mitigate the risks to "harm level Z" is "cost Q". As long as harm X times probability Y is really big (which as we see, it is) and cost Q is less than harm level Z, then it is rational to invest Q resources into mitigation.
You can disagree with whatever numbers we might pick for X Y Z Q, but to say we shouldn't perform the calculus is ...
Why should I trust this mega corp with just one dollar? How do I even know what they are doing with this money? The mega corps have repeatedly shown they care about nothing but profits. Isn't it hypocritical to ask for money from common man to fix problems that they created in the first place (like pollution)? I'd rather trust Doctors without borders than these people.
But the thing that annoys me the most - if they really cared that much, why can't they donate a dollar (or whatever amount) from their profit every time I shop there? Instead of pestering shoppers many of whom live paycheck to paycheck?
Yes, we need to do much much more. But the leadership for it (both in thought and action) is not these multi billion dollar corporations and their cronies (especially the media). They are largely the reason we are here in the first place - causing pollution, wage stagnation, privacy violation etc
They actually do donate the money; they're not trying to keep your dollar. It's difficult to acquire this data via other means, so they don't mind paying it out properly.
I don't like megacorps either but I don't see which part of the OP you disagree with.
>Isn't it hypocritical to ask for money from common man to fix problems that they created in the first place (like pollution)?
No. I think a better word is "unseemly". I don't think it's hypocritical for a company or person to use carbon and then buy carbon offsets or donate to the rain forest or something.
Even if it were hypocritical I would still rather have a polluting corporation that fought pollution than a polluting corporation that didn't.
>if they really cared that much, why can't they donate a dollar (or whatever amount) from their profit every time I shop there?
Many of them do just that. I don't think corporate giving is the solution to society's problems but it is a real thing that happens and can make a difference for some people.
Corporations of course do things for marketing and PR reasons. If one of you things is to encourage you to donate or to donate themselves then I don't see the problem (although I am annoyed having to press a bunch of buttons to pay).
1. We let corporations do this to us. The cult of profit over all else is why all of those things you mention are an issue. As long as we keep removing regulations, laws and things that were put into place to stop companies from doing this shit, what can we honestly expect?
2. There are many things we've done which are not the result of corporations but rather our own narcissistic drive for fake freedoms above all else. The people refusing to wear masks for example or practice basic preventative measures against pandemics are not doing so because of businesses and media corps telling them to stop. They're doing so because of pervasive behavior which has infected the national debate and is peddled by elected officials. This won't change until people stand face to face with the results of their actions and unfortunately in a pandemic that means mass death.
Our general reaction to the coronavirus convinced me that we're lucky it's not far, far deadlier. Because if we had to stare down a virus that would threaten our extinction, we'd choose extinction.
The Economist may be quite friendly to capitalism, but they're independently owned (mostly by wealthy families, plus some staff, per [0]).
Regardless, your premise seems entirely strange to me. I hear "we need to start..." from individuals, mostly on the political left outside of the mainstream. Nike and Exxon Mobil never tell me to change things.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist_Group