Many thanks to all those whose conversations have contributed to forming these ideas.

Will the singleton save us?

For most of the large existential risks that we deal with here, the situation would be improved with a single world government (a singleton), or at least greater global coordination. The risk of nuclear war would fade, pandemics would be met with a comprehensive global strategy rather than a mess of national priorities. Workable regulations for the technology risks - such as synthetic biology or AI – become at least conceivable. All in all, a great improvement in safety...

...with one important exception. A stable tyrannical one-world government, empowered by future mass surveillance, is itself an existential risk (it might not destroy humanity, but it would “permanently and drastically curtail its potential”). So to decide whether to oppose or advocate for more global coordination, we need to see how likely such a despotic government could be.

This is the kind of research I would love to do if I had the time to develop the relevant domain skills. In the meantime, I’ll just take all my thoughts on the subject and form them into a “proto-research project plan”, in the hopes that someone could make use of them in a real research project. Please contact me if you would want to do research on this, and would fancy a chat.

Defining “acceptable”

Before we can talk about the likelihood of a good outcome, we need to define what a good outcome actually is. For this analysis, I will take the definition that:

• A singleton regime is acceptable, if it is at least as good as any developed democratic government of today.

I often hear people speak of democracy as the next, or the final, inevitable stage of human social development.  Its inevitability is usually justified not by describing power relations that result in democracy being a stable attractor, but in terms of morality - democracy is more "enlightened".  I don't see any inevitability to it - China and the Soviet Union manage(d) to maintain large, technologically-advanced nations for a long time without it - but suppose, for the sake of argument, that democracy is the inevitable next stage of human progress.

The May 18 2012 issue of Science has an article on p. 844, "Ancestral hierarchy and conflict", by Christopher Boehm, which, among other things, describes the changes over time of equality among male hominids.  If we add its timeline to recent human history, then here is the history of democracy over time in the evolutionary line leading to humans:

1. Pre-human male hominids, we infer from observing bonobos and chimpanzees, were dominated by one alpha male per group, who got the best food and most of the females.
2. Then, in the human lineage, hunter-gatherers developed larger social groups, and the ability to form stronger coalitions against the alpha; and they became more egalitarian.
3. Then, human social groups even became larger, and it became possible for a central alpha-male chieftain to control a large area; and the groups became less egalitarian.
4. Then, they became even larger, so that they were too large for a central authority to administer efficiently; and decentralized market-based methods of production led to democracy.  (Or so goes one story.)

There are two points to observe in this data:

• There is no linear relationship between social complexity, and equality.  Steadily-increasing social complexity lead to more equality, then less, then more.
• Enlightenment has nothing to do with it - if any theory makes sense, it is that social equality tunes itself to the level that provides maximal social competitive fitness.  Even if we agree that democracy is the most-enlightened political system, this realization says nothing about what the future holds.

I do believe "progress" is a meaningful term.  But there isn't some cosmic niceness built into the universe that makes everything improve monotonically along every dimension at once.

Ecology

An article in a recent issue of Science (Elisa Thebault & Colin Fontaine, "Stability of ecological communities and the architecture of mutualistic and trophic networks", Science 329, Aug 13 2010, p. 853-856; free summary here) studies 2 kinds of ecological networks: trophic (predator-prey) and mutualistic (in this case, pollinators and flowers).  They looked at the effects of 2 properties of networks: modularity (meaning the presence of small, highly-connected subsets that have few external connections) and nestedness (meaning the likelihood that species X has the same sort of interaction with multiple other species).  (It's unfortunate that they never define modularity or nestedness formally; but this informal definition is still useful.  I'm going to call nestedness "sharing", since they do not state that their definition implies nesting one network inside another.)  They looked at the impact of different degrees of modularity and nestedness, in trophic vs. mutualistic networks, on persistence (fraction of species still alive at equilibrium) and resilience (1/time to return to equilibrium after a perturbation).  They used both simulated networks, and data from real-world ecological networks.

What they found is that, in trophic networks, modularity is good (increases persistence and resilience) and sharing is bad; while in mutualistic networks, modularity is bad and sharing is good.  Also, in trophic networks, species go extinct so as to make the network more modular and less sharing; in mutualistic networks, the opposite occurs.

The commonsense explanation is that, if species X is exploiting species Y (trophic), the interaction decreases the health of species Y; and so having more exploiters of Y is bad for both X and Y.  OTOH, if species X benefits from species Y, X will get a secondhand benefit from any mutually-beneficial relationships that Y has; if Y also benefits from X (mutualistic), then neither X nor Y will adapt to prevent Z from also having a mutualistic relationship with Y.  (The theory does not address a mixture of trophic and mutualistic interactions in a single network.)

2 weeks ago, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force came out with new recommendations on breast cancer screening, including, "The USPSTF recommends against routine screening mammography in women aged 40 to 49 years."

The report says that you need to screen 1904 women for breast cancer to save one woman's life.  (It doesn't say whether this means to screen 1904 women once, or once per year.)  They decided that saving that one woman's life was outweighted by the "anxiety and breast cancer worry, as well as repeated visits and unwarranted imaging and biopsies" to the other 1903.  The report strangely does not state a false positive rate for the test, but this page says that "It is estimated that a woman who has yearly mammograms between ages 40 and 49 has about a 30 percent chance of having a false-positive mammogram at some point in that decade and about a 7 percent to 8 percent chance of having a breast biopsy within the 10-year period."  The report also does not describe the pain from a biopsy.  This page on breast biopsies says, "Except for a minor sting from the injected anesthesia, patients usually feel no pain before or during a procedure. After a procedure, some patients may experience some soreness and pain. Usually, an over-the-counter drug is sufficient to alleviate the discomfort."

So, if we assume biannual mammograms, the conclusion is that the worry and inconvenience to 286 women who have false positives, and 71 women who receive biopsies, is worth more than one woman's life.  If we suppose that a false positive causes one week of anxiety, that's a little over 5 years of anxiety, plus less than one year of soreness.