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That looks like a very strange list which ranges from utopian suggestions ("improve political systems") to something we already tried ("build underground bomb shelters") to something we don't know how to do ("store information about building a stable political system") to just silly things ("legislating for individuals to be held more accountable for large-scale catastrophic errors").
In response to
Improving long-run civilisational robustness
In my defense: 1. Utopian political changes like futarchy, seasteading and world-government are often seriously proposed as GCR reducers. They ought to be listed if only to be ruled out. 2. Well one's library at least ought to include some prescient historical case studies of political collapses and revolutions, and studies of primitive tribes. 3. Requiring people to insure dual use synbio labs against widespread loss of life is also a serious policy proposal.
I grant that it's an eclectic and unprioritised list, but that's an assessment of the field (which is only in its earliest stages) moreso than an indictment of my characterisation of it, right?
In response to
Improving long-run civilisational robustness
- Improve focused surveillance of people who might commit large-scale terrorism (this is controversial because excessive surveillance itself poses some risk)
Who do you mean with "people who might commit large-scale terrorism"? Militaries of nation states?
The prototypical case would be a rogue individual but military and other security institutions also pose danger that we ought to think about targeting.
In response to
Improving long-run civilisational robustness
- Grow (or replicating) the international space station
Why?
To improve the likelihood that people can come back to Earth from space after a disaster. Presumably there would be some targeted ways to do this.
Improving long-run civilisational robustness
People trying to guard civilisation against catastrophe usually focus on one specific kind of catastrophe at a time. This can be useful for building concrete knowledge with some certainty in order for others to build on it. However, there are disadvantages to this catastrophe-specific approach:
1. Catastrophe researchers (including Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom) think that there are substantial risks from catastrophes that have not yet been anticipated. Resilience-boosting measures may mitigate risks that have not yet been investigated.
2. Thinking about resilience measures in general may suggest new mitigation ideas that were missed by the catastrophe-specific approach.
One analogy for this is that an intrusion (or hack) to a software system can arise from a combination of many minor security failures, each of which might appear innocuous in isolation. You can decrease the chance of an intrusion by adding extra security measures, even without a specific idea of what kind of hacking would be performed. Things like being being able to power down and reboot a system, storing a backup and being able to run it in a "safe" offline mode are all standard resilience measures for software systems. These measures aren't necessarily the first thing that would come to mind if you were trying to model a specific risk like a password getting stolen, or a hacker subverting administrative privileges, although they would be very useful in those cases. So mitigating risk doesn't necessarily require a precise idea of the risk to be mitigated. Sometimes it can be done instead by thinking about the principles required for proper operation of a system - in the case of its software, preservation of its clean code - and the avenues through which it is vulnerable - such as the internet.
So what would be good robustness measures for human civilisation? I have a bunch of proposals:
Disaster forecasting
Disaster research
* Build research labs to survey and study catastrophic risks (like the Future of Humanity Institute, the Open Philanthropy Project and others)
Disaster prediction
* Prediction contests (like IARPA's Aggregative Contingent Estimation "ACE" program)
* Expert aggregation and elicitation
Disaster prevention
General prevention measures
* Build a culture of prudence in groups that run risky scientific experiments
* Lobby for these mitigation measures
* Improving the foresight and clear-thinking of policymakers and other relevant decision-makers
* Build research labs to plan more risk-mitigation measures (including the Centre for Study of Existential Risk)
Preventing intentional violence
* Improve focused surveillance of people who might commit large-scale terrorism (this is controversial because excessive surveillance itself poses some risk)
* Improve cooperation between nations and large institutions
Preventing catastrophic errors
* Legislating for individuals to be held more accountable for large-scale catastrophic errors that they may make (including by requiring insurance premiums for any risky activities)
Disaster response
* Improve political systems to respond to new risks
* Improved vaccine development, quarantine and other pandemic response measures
* Building systems for disaster notification
Disaster recovery
Shelters
* Build underground bomb shelters
* Provide a sheltered place for people to live with air and water
* Provide (or store) food and farming technologies (cf Dave Denkenberger's *Feeding Everyone No Matter What*
* Store energy and energy-generators
* Store reproductive technologies (which could include IVF, artificial wombs or measures for increasing genetic diversity)
* Store information about building the above
* Store information about building a stable political system, and about mitigating future catastrophes
* Store other useful information about science and technology (e.g. reading and writing)
* Store some of the above in submarines
* (maybe) store biodiversity
Space Travel
* Grow (or replicate) the international space station
* Improve humanity's capacity to travel to the Moon and Mars
* Build sustainable settlements on the Moon and Mars
Of course, some caveats are in order.
To begin with, one could argue that surveilling terrorists is a measure specifically designed to reduce the risk from terrorism. But there are a number of different scenarios and methods through which a malicious actor could try to inflict major damage on civilisation, and so I still regard this as a general robustness measure, granted that there is some subjectivity to all of this. If you know absolutely nothing about the risks that you might face, and the structures in society that are to be preserved, then the exercise is futile. So some of the measures on this list will mitigate a smaller subset of risks than others, and that's just how it is, though I think the list is pretty different from the one people think of by using a risk-specific paradigm, which is the reason for the exercise.
Additionally, I'll disclaim that some of these measures are already well invested, and yet others will not be able to be done cheaply or effectively. But many seem to me to be worth thinking more about.
Additional suggestions for this list are welcome in the comments, as are proposals for their implementation.
Related readings
https://www.academia.edu/7266845/Existential_Risks_Exploring_a_Robust_Risk_Reduction_Strategy
http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.pdf
http://users.physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/pmpmta/Mahoney_extinction.pdf
http://gcrinstitute.org/aftermath
http://sethbaum.com/ac/2015_Food.html
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ma8/roadmap_plan_of_action_to_prevent_human/
Doesn't that go the wrong direction? I.e., if you have more CO2, don't you end breathing more and so having more oxygen?
I don't see how it can be about oxygen. In the paper I linked, I think they directly add relatively pure carbon dioxide. And the total concentration is 0.1%. So the concentration of oxygen in the air is not really changing.
The texas natural experiment seems like an especially convincing complement to the more artificial setting, thanks for pointing it out.
If you look into this I will leave open the offer to buy certificates after the prize. So far not many takers on the prize, this comment is currently in the lead based on the literature review, not sure if there will be takers closer to the cutoff.
(aside from the sample size)
The sample size is small, but given the effect size I don't think it even matters that much. The error seems like less than a factor of 2.
taken at face value, with reasonable estimates of how much rooms differ from day to day or week to week, CO2 levels would explain a lot or maybe most of variability in IQ tests or cognitive performance!
This looks right to me (well "a lot," I don't think "most"), I assume that something is wrong. An obvious possible culprit is their cognitive test.
It's also unlikely to be about oxygen because oxygen levels that reach the brain in a healthy person depend almost entirely on the amount of saturated haemoglobin, which is 95-100% of Hb in someone without serious lung heart or haemoglobin defects. This means that variability in O2 availability is more dependent on one's iron level (~10% SD) than breathing/air effects (<2%sd). (I disclaim that I haven't yet looked into literature about O2 chemistry and supply to the brain so may be wrong)
The CO2 hypothesis at least makes some sense because bloodstream CO2 levels vary a bit.
Gwern's evolutionary argument seems weak because we did not develop in ancestral environments where we could properly trap CO2 (our CO2 sensors mightn't need to be very sensitive), and for our ancestord it was at least somewhat more important to conserve energy from breathing and somewhat less important to be be so intelligent.
Ryan, thank you again. Your concerns are my concerns, I am grateful to you for them.
And I apologise. You have been talking to a raving lunatic, by the ICD10 diagnostic criteria as applied by my attorney and myself. See the exchange with buybuydandavis for details. I am apparently recovered now, in the opinion of one who should know.
I am painfully aware that I have reasoned myself into a place where I prove too much.
I am in the position of a philosopher who started out with a little detail, and is now claiming 'It is at least marginally possible that here is the light and the sacred cup'. Knowing that he is wrong.
I was carefully and expensively trained to speak with certainty when and only when I was certain. The Lord knows I was never very good at it.
I have used plausible reasoning where I only trust classical logic.
I am forced to seek the Grail.
But I cannot shake the suspicion that I might be right. And I know that my hopeless hardware will not let me find the reason why I am wrong.
1 - It has never been the case previously that almost all unexplained human ailments have shared a single simple explanation
It has. The germ theory.
I am claiming that the great killers of the past may have left their shadows in our genes, and those shadows still plague us today.
I am claiming that the great changes we have made in our environment may have hurt us worse than we know.
Here I stand, naked to the world. Afraid. I can do no other in good conscience. I do not believe my own conclusion.
I hope that when I am shown to be wrong, I can retreat with no more than huge embarrassment, resolving to fail better next time.
And it all depends on the TSH test. If I am wrong about that, I am just wrong.
If the TSH test is flawed, then all our statistics are confounded, and we have some thinking to do.
Still Crocker's Rules though! Let this cup pass from me!
Forget about being proved wrong and facing huge embarassment.
Short-circuit that by getting some background domain knowledge then making claims that in light of that knowledge are reasonable.
In response to
Thyroid Hormones, Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia: A Hypothesis and a Proposed Experiment
Take this to your doctor. If competent she will test you for hypothyroidism (and all other common causes of fatigue). Your test will show that your blood hormone levels are normal. At this point, you have a mysterious unexplained syndrome in which the primary symptom is chronic fatigue, but which overall shows similarities to hypothyroidism. You have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Suppose that the symptom that bothers you most is widespread pain. Then you will eventually be diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. Should you complain mostly about alternating constipation and diarrhoea, then you have Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
Or you have a psychiatric, inflammatory, genetic or other cause of fatigue, pain or bowel disturbance. Yes, undiagnosed thyroid issues could cause this but why is this more likely than other possibilities?
We should see that these syndromes have exploded in prevalence since 1970, when diagnosis of endocrine disorder by clinical symptoms went out of fashion in favour of diagnosis by blood hormone level tests.
This is weak evidence, where strong or at least more numerous arguments are needed.
In particular, it is known that the principal characteristic of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is Mitochondrial Dysfunction [4] . I contend that this is principally caused by lack of the hormone T3 in cells, for reason or reasons currently unclear.
Why? Why not an alternative cause, such as a combination of thousands of genes, mostly unrelated to the thyroid?
I believe that that is exactly what we see. They are known as the 'somatoform' disorders, because they are thought to be all in the mind. By those who have never had one.
Not true. Plenty of people have and diagnose somatoform disorders.
But I am tempted also to include other mysterious diseases without known causes and with symptoms plausibly explained by endocrine hormone abnormalities, such as Bipolar Disorder, Depression, and the 'Metabolic Syndrome', which may do exactly what it says on the tin.
But plenty is already known about the pathophysiology of bipolar disorder, depression and so on. e.g. depression seems likely to be caused by many thousands of genes (either that or some unidentified environmental stimulus, though we tend to have looked quote closely for those) (1)
Why not learn about the conditions and the evidence about their causes and then argue forward to some hypothesis rather than priveleging your thyroid-based hypothesis and trying to apply it to all available diseases?
At least an experiment is proposed here, but if you wanted to actually implement it, you would need a placebo control design, and you would approach disease interest groups or elsewhere for participants.
Ryan, thank you, I really appreciate your time, and that is exactly the sort of thing that someone needs to say to me. I have come to the conclusion that I must be trolling.
My idea, which I have arrived at quite independently by a long chain of dodgy inferences from a minor puzzle to do with my own illness, it now seems to me can be summed up as:
Almost all the remaining unexplained human ailments can be explained as disorders of the endocrine system.
This idea seems to have been first thought of in the 1940s, and independently deduced, observed, or inferred many times since. If true, it would have a great number of disturbing implications. If untrue but widely believed, it would cause a catastrophe.
Now I look for them, there are published books suggesting this, and an entire tradition of alternative medicine based on it. Which reports success. But then, they would say that, wouldn't they?
And yet no one except a few quacks believes it.
And so my mystery is now:
Where is the obvious refutation that means that it is false?
I apologise for wasting everyone's time. I am not being sarcastic.
I realise that my argument is 'You cannot prove me wrong, and therefore I must be right'
I realise just how bad that argument is.
I realise that I have blundered into a complicated subject that I am not in the least qualified to discuss.
I have already had to discard one simple obvious explanation for a complicated problem (they are almost always wrong). I do not like to believe in chocolate teapots.
I am asking for help in discarding another one.
What on earth is Less Wrong for, if it is not for this?
I do not imply that you must waste your time helping me. But I am damned sure that someone needs to say it plainly. It has fooled me. It is causing havoc. Why is it not true?
Excellent - thanks for responding to this so positively. I wouldn't say you're necessarily trolling, rather than just arguing a little more forcefully than someone else might.
Almost all the remaining unexplained human ailments can be explained as disorders of the endocrine system.
I basically think that this is the absurd conclusion that demonstrates your chain of reasoning to be false. This is far wronger than the idea that Fibromyalgia could have an endocrine cause. And I think you've identified this problem with your argument even more acutely that I had.
I think there are a lot of useful ways you can reason from here, such as: 1 - It has never been the case previously that almost all unexplained human ailments have shared a single simple explanation 2 - Many conditions that we discovered a long time ago had simpler 'single pathogen' explanations, whereas many newer ones are quite complex. 3 - Although many of these conditions will eventually be explained, the explanations are not likely to be visible to a non-expert. 4 - If they all shared an explanation, there's no major reason why it should lie in the endocrine system. An alternative 'catch-all' explanation for these would be 'psycho-neuro-immunology', another somewhat overambitious school of mostly scientific thinking that could potentially claim these conditions more credibly.
My alternative explanation that collects this thinking is that most 'unexplained human ailments' are likely to be multifactorial. This is also the common wisdom. As to where to read and learn about this, by far the best place is www.uptodate.com. This is very popular but also potentially expensive. So if you really must, you could instead look through medical textbooks like Harrison's or Kumar and Clarke, focussing specifically on unexplained conditions. I would warn that reading about conditions unexplained by medical science via textbooks of medical science might be a bit like pulling teeth, but truly it should be one way to abstract away the knowledge of these conditions.
Another approach might be to learn more about the scores of "medically unexplained physical symptoms", "diagnoses of exclusion" and "functional disorders". Likewise some "functional symptoms" and some "ideopathic" or "cryptogenic" conditions. "functional", "ideopathic" and "cryptogenic" can be used interchangeably here, as in the sentence "we can't explain your problem, but as a concession, let's meet halfway and conceal our ignorance with this Latinate (or Greek) name. On my hypothesis, most such conditions will be about halfway heritable (as are most traits in behavioural genetics). They'll be correlated with each other, and with mental health conditions. They'll often be helped by SSRIs and by psychotherapy.
I guess you just have to learn a lot about these conditions with an open mind and see where you end up. If you gain a detailed knowledge and still think that some have an endocrine explanation, then write up your findings in a google doc, send it around to some other smart people who share that knowledge, and see what they say.
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Terrorists are a rounding error. Sure, some day they'll take out a city with a nuke but in history cities have been wiped out many many times without taking their parent civilization with them.
Historically speaking, I agree, yet it's conceivable that a malicious actor might militarise some powerful technology, and classing its use as an extreme act of terrorism sounds about right.