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ete comments on Roadmap: Plan of Action to Prevent Human Extinction Risks - Less Wrong Discussion

13 Post author: turchin 01 June 2015 09:58AM

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Comment author: ete 01 June 2015 11:49:51PM 0 points [-]

Comprehensive, I think it has the makings of a good resource, though it needs some polish. I'd imagine this would be much more useful to someone new to the ideas presented if it linked out to a bunch of papers/pages for expansion from most bulletpoints.

One thing I'd like to see added is spreading the memes of reason/evidence-based consequentialist decision making (particularly large-scale and future included) at all levels. It may be entirely accepted here, but the vast majority of humans don't actually think that way. It's kind of a pre-requisite for getting much momentum behind the other, more direct, goals you've laid out.

  • Make it less and less acceptable to be partisan/tribal in a moloch-fueling way in the public sphere (starting with our corner of it, spreading opportunistically).
  • Grow EA, so there's funding for high-impact causes like some of the projects listed, and caring about solving problems is normalized.
  • Pick up potentially high-impact people with training and give them a support network of people who have an explicit goal to fix the world, like CFAR does, to create the kind of people to staff the projects.

In a few places, particularly in A1, you drift into general "things that would be good/cool", rather than appearing to stay focused on things applicable to countering an extinction risk. Maybe there is a link that I'm missing, but other than bringing more resources I'm not sure what risk "Planetary mining" for example helps counter.

I'd advise against giving dates. AI timelines in particular could plausibly be much quicker or much slower than your suggestions, and it'd have massive knock-on effects. False confidence on specifics is not a good impression to give, maybe generalize them a bit?

"Negotiation with the simulators or prey for help"

pray?

Comment author: ete 02 June 2015 01:04:58PM 0 points [-]

I'm curious about why this was downvoted?

Comment author: OrphanWilde 02 June 2015 01:23:02PM 1 point [-]

One person downvoted it, which means it could be anything from "I don't like spelling corrections" to "I disagree about not giving dates".

In general, if only one person downvotes, it is best not to ask. I don't see anything worth downvoting in your post myself, although I wouldn't upvote it, because it reads to me more like an attempt at compressing many applause lights into one comment without paying attention to any one than an attempt at genuine suggestions for improvement. (It's a little -too- Less Wrongian.)