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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The Craigslist Revolution: a real-world application of torture vs. dust specks OR How I learned to stop worrying and create one billion dollars out of nothing - Less Wrong
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Comments (219)
If this is where the putative money is going, I'm not interested in talking about it here.
Are there any charities out there which could productively use $10M to get us closer to liquid-fluoride thorium reactors, say? The IEC fusion folks could use $10M.
A list of the 100 most interesting projects with organizational frameworks already in existence that could start scaling up with $10M might be worth compiling in and of itself.
You don't care about $1 billion for tuberculosis control? TB may not be an existential risk, but it's still a really big, important problem, and it's one that could easily get a lot worse if universally antibiotic resistant strains start becoming common. If the Dark Lords of the Matrix offered me the choice between "tomorrow someone invents a fusion power plant that actually works, is easily built and maintained, and generates electricity energy at a lower cost than burning fossil fuels does" and "all TB bacteria spontaneously die", it's hard to say which would actually generate more utility.
I would take the TB cure but you are not thinking on the margins. People are already worried about TB, funding is already going there.
The only way this will work is if we trigger feelings that already exist. We cannot create new worries and feelings in the time it takes them to read a Facebook group name. We need something that will already have enough momentum to make them click the button.
I could be misunderstanding your point.
So...the thing that most needs to be done is hard. Gosh, reality isn't allowed to do that to us, is it?
True, but It's still not nearly enough, though. In the short run, the Stop TB Partnership (GiveWell's #2 charity) can productively use about $20 million more to supply drugs to eligible countries.
I would take the fusion plant; an energy technology that is cheaper than fossil fuels in all major ways is basically a license to print money. Most literally it is a license to print money -- you could sell the patent for more than a billion dollars and then cure even more tuberculosis.
Note that I said "someone" - meaning someone other than me - does the inventing. And the alternative is "The TB bacteria immediately becomes extinct - nobody ever gets TB again, and everyone who has it is immediately cured."
Point taken, I misread your scenario.
Probably. But would the general public find IEC (or SIAI) compelling? I'm thinking not.
For a something like this, we need something that will appeal to the average person (at least the average Facebook/Craigslist user), and I think human development projects are more likely to do that than research projects or existential risk projects.
Convincing the general public that these causes are worthwhile sounds like a worthwhile make a desperate effort level project.
Or we can just ignore expected utlity, and attempt to satisfy our desire for warm fuzzies.
Then all versions of this project that I'm interested in won't work. Still seems worth a try.
I guess I'm astounded by the degree to which people seem to value "succeeding at what we set out to do" over "trying to do something important".
Probably. But maybe, also, people have different views (not necessarily correct) of the threshold of importance.
Can the SIAI absorb a billion dollars over five years, if it happened that we could get people behind it?
Nope, not even close, but Michael Vassar might be able to think of something else interesting to do with a billion dollars.
Buy Iceland and build a volcanic lair there.
With a GDP of >15 billion, I think you'll need more than 1 to buy it.
At $200 mil annual there are basically no worthwhile charities that could effectively absorb the entire thing. A good option then is to split the revenue among multiple charities. This probably means a lot to human development (education, health, econ) but some of it could go to someone working on fusion power- the Internet is pretty into alternative energy type stuff. 1 million isn't one billion but it is still worth the effort.
Anyway, I think some of the more likely existential risks are significantly reduced by a better governed Africa and a better governed Africa is a lot easier with a middle class and when 15% of the population isn't HIV+ or dying from tuberculosis.
Care to expand?
Poorly governed states in social and economic turmoil create environments conducive to global terrorism and the black markets that provide weapons capable of serious destruction (which right now means nukes and chemical but in the future could mean nanotech or genetically engineered pathogens). A misgoverned sub-Saharan Africa is also the most like origin point for a naturally occurring pathogen because of the diseases they already have that could mutate to spread faster, the sanitation situation and the fact that few African governments are competent enough to pull off a quarantine.
The absence of rule of law, democratic checks on the military, continual conflict and overall incompetence also increases the chances lab error or misuse of high tech weaponry as technology become more accessible while social, economic and political conditions do not improve.
In general, areas of chaos become more and more dangerous to surrounding regions as technology improves.
I just had a fun idea: take this premise, and the demonstrated difficulty of improving Africa, and the idea that the development vs. likeliness-to-screw-everybody-over-with-WMDs curve would be an inverted U, and calculate the point at which it would be better to cut off all aid & begin bombing Africa into (or within) the Stone Age.
The version of this that I would put forward seriously is that the Westphalian concept of inviolable national sovereignty is a convenience to the rich and complacent inhabitants of successful nations, but a huge detriment to the inhabitants of failed states, condemning them to endless slavery at the hands of incompetent dictators who need fear no invasion as they weaken and starve their captive countries. Africa might benefit enormously from being conquered by almost anyone, including China.
Probably the best thing that could be done for the poor of the world would be to greatly relax or eliminate immigration restrictions in developed nations. Of course that would be a little too much caring for the vast majority of citizens in the developed world. Far easier to salve your conscience with the occasional donation to charity than to actually have to live near these poor people!
True, but only up to a point. If you were to move everyone into a developed country ASAP, the "memetic overload" can destroy the very institutions that make those countries successful.
Yes, I know this sounds suspicously simliar to something a lot of racists say, but it's still true: if you add 100 random mouthbreathers to a five-man successful Silicon Valley startup, you don't get a 2000% improvement in productivity and a 5-fold gain in wages for the newcomers. Rather, you destroy the operation.
Now now; if you're going to be in Hanson mode, at least credit him when you're not being original: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/12/microlending-fails.html
Is it too dangerous to the heat/light level of the discussion to ask what Iraq tells us about how that would go?
I said conquered, not trashed by a bunch of Westphalians who weren't planning on owning the place afterward.
The Global economy would tailspin and the existential risk situation would get a lot worse as a result.
Also, this would probably be a place where I'd depart from utilitarianism, even if it would work.
Clever, if horrific, idea though.
I think you badly overestimate how important Africa is. Even assuming resources cannot be extracted while also bombing the place, Africa isn't that important.
The continental GDP is just 2.7 trillion. Several percent of that is foreign aid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Africa) and their exports to the rest of the world are small enough that their balance of payments (with the rest of the world) is negative by billions (http://www.africaneconomicoutlook.org/en/data-statistics/).
Now, if Africa disappeared or was suddenly destroyed, I would expect the global financial markets to drop considerably; but they are so skittish they drop at the fall of a hat. The long-term economic impact wouldn't be so bad outside of commodities like Coltan. Certainly not so bad as some grey goo getting loose.
(I'd count things like AIDS as further debits to Africa, but obviously that's a sunk cost as far as this suggestion is concerned.)
I'm willing to continue participating in this discussion but it is pretty difficult without you specifying more exactly what the proposal is. To begin with, where exactly are you bombing? Are Egypt and Morocco included? South Africa? Are you paving the continent with H-Bombs or targeting infrastructure with conventional weapons? What kind of population is left after the attack? What kind of industries will be left behind? Will there be restrictions against doing business on the continent to keep them from redeveloping? Will refugees be allowed to emigrate?
Some considerations: if you attack majority Muslim countries you're instantly creating billions of terrorists, especially if you target Egypt and leave it open to Israeli expansion. If you use nukes there are huge environmental implications for the Middle East, India and if you leave it, Northern Africa. The fallout would be bad enough that these countries may well declare war. Meanwhile, the use of nuclear weapons would be seriously objected to by large majorities in the Western world and would radicalize large segments of the West particularly since, at least in the US, the attack would be seen as having racist motivations- in the eyes of a lot of people this would basically be genocide. Even with minimum possible radicalization you're still going to have to do something with all the African immigrants and children of African immigrants (include, you know, a former President of the United States). Also, China is going to be pissed at what you did to their future satellite states. Whoever does the bombing probably gets trade sanctions placed on them by the rest of the world.
Using conventional weapons and doing less damage probably decreases the chances of broader international conflict in the short term and lessens radicalization in the West. But bombing economies back to the stone age doesn't make the people who live there cavemen. You've still got a huge population furious at the West with nothing to lose- and those people can set bombs off about as well as anyone else. Meanwhile, you've created a power vacuum in one of the most resource rich areas on Earth which is fine until Great powers start competing over it. You start the colonization process all over again, this time with weapons that can destroy the world. Plus a buttload of resources sunk into the resulting conflict and rebuilding Africa's infrastructure so those resources can be extracted. Of course, this isn't something Africans are likely to forget so as soon as the continent is redeveloped you're dealing with terrorism again. I suppose you can prohibit doing business on the continent but then you've just created a black market again...
Not to mention, in general, you're just shaking up the status quo which means some countries will see this as an opportunity to increase their share of international power while status quo powers won't realize they no longer hold all the cards-- its these kind of knowledge asymmetries that lead to international conflicts historically. From an abstract perspective you're just seriously destabilizing the system and rarely does anything good come from that.
There a high moral cost to beginning bombing Africa. It would create opposition in the Western world that would likely increase the chance of homegrown terrorism.
There is no moral cost by definition; at the point at which we would want to start bombing, the immoral thing is to not bomb. We've bombed many countries for far less than existential threats (arguably, every US bombing campaign back to WWII).
Further, I think you drastically overestimate the chances of homegrown terrorism. Vietnam was long ago. Reports like millions of Iraqi refugees or hundreds of thousands of excess Iraqi deaths merely spark muted partisan arguments about whether the Lancet's statistics are right or not. It's a long way to Tipperary.
The UK had homegrown terrorism that it probably wouldn't have had without the Iraq and Afghanistan war.
Additionally mosts of the deaths in Iraq are in the West considered to be collateral damage. The Western reaction would be different when we would believe that the death toll is intentional and is supposed to bomb Iraq into the stone age.
I think this is voted down unfairly. I read this not as a genuine plea to nuke Africa, but as a Robin Hanson-esque caution against motivated thinking. We'd like aid to Africa to be the Right Thing, and if we're made uncomfortable by the idea that existential risk trumps that, why, here's a good reason why aid to Africa is justified on existential risk grounds! So this is a sort of antidote: if that were your real reason, you'd greet gwern's alternative solution with a great deal more equanimity than you do.
EDIT: I'm obviously super-persuasive, since it's gone from downvoted to upvoted since my comment :-)
Oh, of course not. At least, not until I've crunched some numbers.
Quite right. It's fun to use logical arguments to wind up in a uncomfortable place.
Obviously, if you get the same number of up-votes as the original paradox/comment! ;_;
Normally I like fun ideas, but a lot of scenarios where Africa is bombed to the Stone Age (to prevent terrorism!!!) involve World War III.
What makes you think this scenario either is caused by or causes WWIII?
A lot of scenarios in which your blood is shed involve you being murdered; but also a lot of other such scenarios involve a cancer being removed and saving your life.
That list is a great idea. But why exactly shouldn't we talk about human development projects?