Interesting Links for 08-08-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Teenage girls are being raped by several boys during their boyfriends' gang initiation

(tags:UK gangs rape )

2. The Dangerous Ideas of "Longtermism" and "Existential Risk"

(tags:morality transhumanism )

3. Genesis: an interpreted, Turing-complete Paleo-Hebrew programming language

(tags:programming Jews funny )

4. Humanities scholarship labor crisis: How the infrastructure of research is falling apart.

(tags:academia Doom research )

5. Why does the Bank of England appear to be ignoring its mandate?

(tags:economics Doom UK viaDanielDWilliam )

6. The terrible, awful, no-good morality of Thomas the Tank Engine

(tags:morality children stories )

7. How the Conservatives are going to crash the UK's most profitable export industry

(tags:uk art Education academia entertainment )

8. Tax cuts for the rich lead to higher income inequality in both the short- and medium-term with no significant effect on economic growth or unemployment

(tags:tax inequality economics )

9. Finland & Croatia Test Digital Passports

(tags:passport finland croatia )

10. Spain orders public places set air conditioning no lower than 27 degrees Celsius

(tags:spain electricity temperature weather )

Comments

[nancylebov]

#2. Seems fairly sound, though it fails to mention pushback against longtermism from within rationalism and EA.

I would think that one of the strongest arguments against longtermism is that we don't know that much about the future, so building a sounder present is more solidly based in knowledge.

Maybe there's a parallel between getting hypnotized by the future potential of the human or post-human race and getting hypnotized by "luxury space communism".

I've posted that link and my comment at astralcodexten.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-236/comment/8242094

[danieldwilliam]

I was reading the article about longtermism thinking to myself 1) discount rates and 2) the future digital posthumans are going to be awfully white if we let all the poor people from the Global South die of climate change in the 21st century.

[nancylebov]

I've seen a claim that most of EA is spending money on current problems. Longtermism exists, but it's not that influential-- this is something to check on.

I'm more concerned about what happens to people rather than demographic outcomes. One thing about the future-- Africans are having children much more than other people, so who knows?

[andrewducker]

Africa is the last area with an increasing population, but I'd expect that to change when we get increased education. And if we *don't* get increased education then I'd expect wars and famines.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-growth-by-world-region-the-annual-change-of-the-population?country=OWID_WRL~Africa~Asia~Europe~Northern+America~Latin+America+and+the+Caribbean~Oceania

[nancylebov]

If Africans are the last to have widespread education (I'm in favor of them having education), then the proportion of Africans will increase relative to everyone else.

I think that eventually, people will need to find a way to increase the reproductive rate a bit while having widespread education.

[andrewducker]

Maybe eventually, but certainly at the moment all areas have growing populations, so reducing reproductive rate is rather higher on the importance list right now.

[bens_dad]

In https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste (one of the papers cited in the longtermist article) Nick Bostrom claims:
So long as the evaluation function is aggregative (does not count one person’s welfare for less just because there are many other persons in existence who also enjoy happy lives) and is not relativized to a particular point in time (no time-discounting), the conclusion will hold.

So we aren't allowed to have a discount rate, nor to say that half of all beings now equals half of all beings at some future when there are 10^54 (that would mean that 1 of 10^54 is worth less than one of 10^10).

The Boltzmann Brain theory says that the number of mental beings spontaneously coming into existence (quantum effects?) vastly exceeds the number of mental beings created by the cosmology and biology that we currently "believe". Whilst that doesn't mean that the loss of one in 10^54 does not matter, it might mean that the 10^54 is not significant compared with the number of Boltzmann Brains.

2) Definitely. Stress and diversity are likely to be significant factors in the speed at which we reach "singularity", so longtermism has to worry about being too white.

Bostrom seems to be trying to maximize the number of happy beings, without regard to the number of unhappy beings The ratio matters more to me than the absolute numbers; I'm tempted to say the ratio at each given time not just the ratio over the life of the universe (or all universes).