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thomblake comments on 2011 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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It doesn't astonish me. It's not a terribly important issue for everyday life; it's basically a political issue.
I think I answered somewhere around 70%; while I've read a bit about it, there are plenty of dissenters and the proposition was a bit vague.
The claim that changing the makeup of the atmosphere in some way will affect climate in some way is trivially true; a more specific claim requires detailed study.
I would say that it's considerably more important for everyday life for most people than knowing whether tomatoes have genes.
Climate change may not represent a major human existential risk, but while the discussion has become highly politicized, the question of whether humans are causing large scale changes in global climate is by no means simply a political question.
If the Blues believe that asteroid strikes represent a credible threat to our civilization, and the Greens believe they don't, the question of how great a danger asteroid strikes actually pose will remain a scientific matter with direct bearing on survival.
What I think you should be arguing here (and what on one level I think you where implicitly arguing), is that in a sufficiently high trust society one should spend more resources on educating people about global warming than tomatoes having genes if one wants to help them.
It is for their own good, but not their personal good. Like a vaccine shot that has a high rate of nasty side effects but helps keep an infectious disease at bay. If you care about them, it can be rational to take the shot yourself if that's an effective signal to them that you aren't trying to fool them. By default they will be modelling you like one of them and interpret your actions accordingly. Likewise if you just happen to be better enough at deceit than they will fail detecting it, you can still use that signal to help them, even if take a fake shot.
Humans are often predictably irrational. The arational processes that maintain the high trust equilibrium can be used to let you take withdrawals of cooperative behaviour from the bank when the rational incentives just aren't there. What game theory is good for in this case is realizing how much you are withdrawing, since a rational game theory savvy agent is a pretty good benchmark for some cost analysis. You naturally need to think about the cost to quickly gauge if the level of trust is high enough in a society and further more if you burden it in this way, is the equilibrium still stable in the midterm?
If its not, teach them about tomatoes.
I disagree actually.
For most people neither global warming nor tomatoes having genes matters much. But if I had to choose, I'd say knowing a thing or two about basic biology has some impact on how you make your choices with regards to say healthcare or how much you spend on groceries or what your future shock level is.
Global warming, even if it does have a big impact on your life will not be much affected by you knowing anything about it. Pretty much anything an individual could do against it has a very small impact on how global warming will turn out. Saving 50$ a month or a small improvement in the odds of choosing the better treatment has a pretty measurable impact on him.
Taking global warming as a major threat for now (full disclosure: I think global warming, is not a threat to human survival though it may contribute to societal collapse in a worst case scenario), it is quite obviously a tragedy of the commons problem.
There is no incentive for an individual to do anything about it or even know anything about it, except to conform to a "low carbon footprint is high status" meme in order to derive benefit in his social life and feeling morally superior to others.
Wait a sec. Global warming can be important for everyday life without it being important that any given individual know about it for everyday life. In the same way that matters of politics have tremendous bearing on our lives, yet the average person might rationally be ignorant about politics since he can't have any real effect on politics. I think that's the spirit in which thomblake means it's a political matter. For most of us, the earth will get warmer or it won't, and it doesn't affect how much we are willing to pay for tomatoes at the grocery store (and therefore it doesn't change our decision rule for how to buy tomatoes), although it may effect how much tomatoes cost.
(It's a bit silly, but on the other hand I imagine one could have their preferences for tomatoes depend on whether tomatoes had "genes" or not.)
This is a bit like the distinction between microeconomics and macroeconomics. Macroeconomics is the stuff of front page newspaper articles about the economy, really very important stuff. But if you had to take just one economics class, I would recommend micro, because it gives you a way of thinking about choices in your daily life, as opposed to stuff you can't have any real effect on.
You don't have much influence on an election if you vote, but the system stops working if everyone acts only according to the expected value of their individual contribution.
This is isomorphic to the tragedy of the commons, like the 'rationalists' who lose the war against the barbarians because none of them wants to fight.
Exactly, it IS the tragedy of the commons, but that supports my point, not yours. It may be good for society if people are more informed about global warming, but society isn't what makes decisions. Individuals make decisions, and it's not in the average individual's interest to expend valuable resources learning more about global warming if it's going to have no real effect on the quality of their own life.
Whether you think it's an individual's "job" or not to do what's socially optimal, is completely besides the point here. The fact is they don't. I happen to think that's pretty reasonable, but it doesn't matter how we wish people would behave, in order to predict how they will behave.
Let me try to be clear, since you might be wondering why someone (not me) downvoted you: You started by noting your shock that people aren't that informed about global warming. I said we shouldn't necessarily be surprised that they aren't that informed about global warming. You responded that we're suffering from the tragedy of the commons, or the tragedy of the rationalists versus the barbarians. I respond that I agree with what you say but not with what you seem to think it means. When we unearth a tragedy of the commons, we don't go, "Aha! These people have fallen into a trap and if they saw the light, they would know to avoid it!" Casting light on the tragedy of the commons does not make it optimal for individuals to avoid it.
Casting light on the commons is a way of explaining why people would be behaving in such a socially suboptimal way, not a way of bolstering our shock over their behavior.
In a tragedy of the commons, it's in everybody's best interests for everybody to conserve resources. If you're running TDT in a population with similar agents, you want to conserve, and if you're in a population of insufficiently similar agents, you want an enforced policy of conservation. The rationalist in a war with the barbarians might not want to fight, but because they don't want to lose even more, they will fight if they think that enough other people are running a similar decision algorithm, and they will support a social policy that forces them and everyone else to fight. If they think that their side can beat the barbarians with a minimal commitment of their forces, they won't choose either of these things.
And this is why xv15 is right and Desrtopa is wrong. Orther people do not run TDT or anything similar. Individuals who cooperate with such a population are fools.
TDT is NOT a magic excuse for cooperation. It calls for cooperation in cases when CDT does not only when highly specific criteria are met.
At the Paris meetup Yvain proposed that voting might be rational for TDT-ish reasons, to which I replied that if you have voted for losing candidates at past elections, that means not enough voters are correlated with you. Though now that I think of it, maybe the increased TDT-ish impact of your decision could outweigh the usual arguments against voting, because they weren't very strong to begin with.
But sometimes it works out anyway. Lots of people can be fools. And lots of people can dislike those who aren't fools.
People often think "well if everyone did X sufficiently unpleasant thing would happen, therefore I won't do it". They also implicitly believe, though they may not state "most people are like me in this regard". They will also say with their facial expressions and actions though not words "people who argue against this are mean and selfish".
In other words I just described a high trust society. I'm actually pretty sure if you live in Switzerland you could successfully cooperate with the Swiss on global warming for example. Too bad global warming isn't just a Swiss problem.
Compliance with norms so as to avoid punishment is a whole different issue. And obviously if you willfully defy the will of the tribe when you know that the punishment exceeds the benefit to yourself then you are the fool and the compliant guy is not.
Of course they will. That's why we invented lying! I'm in agreement with all you've been saying about hypocrisy in the surrounding context.
I agree. Desrtopa is taking Eliezer's barbarians post too far for a number of reasons.
1) Eliezer's decision theory is at the least controversial which means many people here may not agree with it.
2) Even if they agree with it, it doesn't mean they have attained rationality in Eliezer's sense.
3) Even if they have attained this sort of rationality, we are but a small community, and the rest of the world is still not going to cooperate with us. Our attempts to cooperate with them will be impotent.
Desrtopa: Just because it upholds an ideal of rationality that supports cooperation, does not mean we have attained that ideal. Again, the question is not what you'd like to be true, but about what's actually true. If you're still shocked by people's low confidence in global warming, it's time to consider the possibility that your model of the world -- one in which people are running around executing TDT -- is wrong.
Those are all good reasons but as far as I can tell Desrtopa would probably give the right answer if questioned about any of those. He seems to be aware of how people actually behave (not remotely TDTish) but this gets overridden by a flashing neon light saying "Rah Cooperation!".
There are plenty of ways in which I personally avoid cooperation for my own benefit. But in general I think that a personal policy of not informing oneself at even a basic level about tragedies of commons where the information is readily available is not beneficial, because humans have a sufficiently developed propensity for resolving tragedies of commons to give at least the most basic information marginal benefit.
He may be mistaken about how high trust the society he lives in is. This is something it is actually surprisingly easy to be wrong about, since our intuitions aren't built for a society of hundreds of millions living across an entire continent, our minds don't understand that our friends, family and co-workers are not a representative sample of the actual "tribe" we are living in.
In which case you want an enforced policy conforming to the norm. A rational shepherd in a communal grazing field may not believe that if he doesn't let his flock overgraze, other shepherds won't either, but he'll want a policy punishing or otherwise preventing overgrazers.
Yes, and this means that individuals with the ability to influence or enforce policy about global warming can potentially benefit somewhat from knowing about global warming. For the rest of the people (nearly everyone) knowledge about global warming is of no practical benefit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change_on_humans
Also, it's already having a fairly substantial effect on polar communities in the US, Canada and Russia, making it difficult to obtain enough food. Many of them are impoverished in the context of the national economy and still whaling-dependant in large part for enough food to survive. Any disruption is a direct threat to food availability.
I'm not sure how that's a response to what I said. Electing a president who opts to start a nuclear war would obviously be a political issue, and might have even worse effects on humans.
You said it's not an important issue for everyday life.
Things that significantly impact health (how often are you exposed to pathogens and how severe are they?), weather (makes a big difference even for an urban-living person with access to climate-controlled dwelling like me in the Midwest), the availability of food and water (which you need for not dying), and the stability of where you live (loss of which compromises all the others and requires you to try to find somewhere else and see what happens there) seem like the very definition of important to everyday life.
What I meant was that knowing stuff about the issue isn't important for everyday life. While the availability of food and water is good to know about, what environmental conditions caused it is less important unless I'm a farmer or policy-maker.
Similarly, a nuclear war would impact health, weather, and the availability of food and water, but I am much better off worrying about whether my car needs an oil change than worrying about whether my government is going to start a nuclear war.