If the world does collapse access to wikipedia could be enormously useful.
What makes you think you'll have electricity in a TEOTWAWKI scenario? I'll still take beans & ammo (and maybe a paper survivalist book).
On a more general level, if you desire to prepare for the civilization collapse, downloading Wikipedia to your local hard drive is probably not the right place to start.
Water, tinned food and ammo (if you live somewhere where firearms are legal) is probably the most important, but wrapping some electronic gadgets in tin foil (would that sheild from emp blasts?) and buying some solar panels or a generator could be pretty useful too. For instance, a radio would be very useful for listening to the army trying to organise survivors.
Being around here has made me think that I know everything interesting about the world and suppressed my excitement and joy from many minor things I could do. I also feel like my sense of wonder diminished. As I write this, I am a little unhappy, and in a period of depression, but I had similar feelings, if less intense, even before this period.
I was wondering whether you have any advice on how to restore this; or even better, how to "forget" as much rationality and transhumanism as possible (if not actually forgetting, then at least "to think and feel as I did before I read the Sequences")?
Being around here has made me think that I know everything interesting about the world
You know everything interesting? Including, say, how to build FAI? Do tell! :P
I can understand how rationality might make you depressed, in fact sometimes I feel that the more I understand about signalling, psychology and so forth the more other people annoy me. I find myself picking apart what other people say for logical fallacies and translating every political statement into 'The outgroup is bad! Fight the outgroup!".
However, I'm surprised that transhumanism would diminish your sense of wonder - a philosophy about how humans could turn into Jupiter-brain gods seems to me like the sort of thing that should increase your sense of wonder. Maybe you have been reading too much analytical stuff and you need to read something more 'far-out'? Maybe read 'the headonic imperitive?'
The case for being pro-choice is so strong even neoreactionaries and fascists are pro-choice. Interestingly, on this specific issue, conservatives are to the right of fascists!
Probably more a case of demographics than the ideology itself. Total speculation, but I imagine someone who identifies as fascist is in the "liberal" demographic but happens to be into weird political beliefs in general, while someone who identifies as conservative might have just inherited that view from their family and upbringing. In general, I think old "conservative social issues" are becoming less popular among the younger generation. As our culture changes and gays and abortion become normal, the objections to them will decrease.
On political opinions, HBD is about an objective, falsifiable, scientifically mesureable characteristic of the world, whereas the other opinions are opinions. Opinions on HBD also correlates strongly with other views, and so I am interested as to how poeple's opinions would change if it was proved to them that the truth about HBD is the opposite of what they currently believe it to be. Would their other views change?
I think HBD is a fantastic test for true rationality. It's a rare case where a scientific fact conflicts with deeply ingrained political and cultural values.
The worst case scenario for nuclear war at the hight of the cold war was about 40% of humanity dies. I suppose that its possible that vast numbers of new bombs could be built, without similar investment in bomb shelters, but this does seem a little implausible.
The people directly killed by bombs are only a tiny fraction of the casualties. Afterwards you have the possibility of nuclear winter, which could radically change the climate for the worse. You have contamination of vast amounts of farmland and food supplies, and the destruction of the global economy. Even countries that weren't hit directly would be have tons of issues and would probably collapse.
In the 'Cretaceous hothouse' period CO2 levels were 8x higher, and there was still enough vegetation to support giant dinosaurs far bigger than the largest animal today. The worst-case scenarios are a decrease in economic growth and a migrant crisis, not 90% of humanity dies.
Sudden changes to the climate are bad. In the past the climate changed very very slowly, so that life had a chance to adapt. CO2 is acidifying the oceans and could destroy most of the oceans ecosystems. I tend to agree that humanity would probably survive though.
I think HBD is a fantastic test for true rationality. It's a rare case where a scientific fact conflicts with deeply ingrained political and cultural values.
Unfortunately it might also be an area where epistemic and instrumental rationality clash. In fact, most of the world does not have freedom of speech in the same way the US does - if one advocated HBD in, say, Germany, could one be thrown in prison in the same way people are imprisoned for saying 'seig heil'? On reflection, that might be a bad example, because there is a good reason why laws prohibiting Nazism exist in specifically Germany, but laws against racial hatred exist in many other countries too, and I wonder if "I am just pointing out a scientific fact, it doesn't mean I hate anyone" would be a successful legal defence when the judge and jury are not rationalists.
The people directly killed by bombs are only a tiny fraction of the casualties. Afterwards you have the possibility of nuclear winter, which could radically change the climate for the worse. You have contamination of vast amounts of farmland and food supplies, and the destruction of the global economy. Even countries that weren't hit directly would be have tons of issues and would probably collapse.
The study I am thinking of did account for this. It is thought that nuclear winter would last 6 months (based on global cooling from very large volcanic eruptions, 3 km^3 of ash cools the planet by 0.5 degrees for 6 months) and in the worst-case scenario this happens at the right time of the year to make the harvests fail. Africa starves and takes high casualties even without being nuked, while Japan raids nearby countries for food. I'm not sure why they singled out Japan for stealing food, maybe they were still angry over WWII or had some other reason to believe that Japan would behave like that.
There have been quite a few airburst nuclear tests, and the background radiation on earth has barely changed. While the half life of uranium is millions or billions of years (depending upon isotope) the products of a nuclear explosion have very short half-lives - the worst would be over within an hour. Not only do we not have enough bombs to contaminate the world, but ground zero would be habitable again after a few months. Hiroshima was rebuilt, not abandoned, after WWII.
Yes, I agree many countries would collaspe, and moreover that the primary combatants quite possibly would take over 90% casualties, the low global rate being largely because many countries emerge unscathed. If there were some reason for most countries to be nuked, and enough bombs to nuke them all, then 90% global casualties is a possiblity, and while I think a nuclear war between allmost all countries is unlikly, its still a lot more likly then 90% of humanity killed by environmental or political collapse.
Sudden changes to the climate are bad. In the past the climate changed very very slowly, so that life had a chance to adapt.
Life is pretty good at surviving. Humans can live in the arctic circle and in tropical rainforest. Hopefully, by this time we would also have better technology to help us.
CO2 is acidifying the oceans and could destroy most of the oceans ecosystems.
This is a little worrying. I thought it was mostly 'just' the corral reefs, which, while very pretty, are not vital to everything.
A quick and dirty inspiration: that value alignment is very hard is showed by very intelligent people going neoreactionary or convert to a religion from atheism. They usually base their 'move' on a coherent epistemology, with just some tiny components that zag instead of zigging.
Comment at will, I'll expand with more thoughts.
Both neoreactionaries and other people want a functional society, they just disagree on how to get it; both transhumanists and religious people want to live forever, they just disagree about whether life extension or preying to get into the best afterlife is the best way to go about it. Perhaps they have the same terminal goals?
OTOH if religious people have 'faith' as a terminal value and atheists do not, then yes, this may be more of a problem. If people have 'other people follow my values' as a terminal value, this could be a very large problem.
Frankly, I wouldn't use the word "sensible" anywhere near these approaches :-/
Hang on, wouldn't starting forest fires create more CO2?
Have you considered adding the geometric mean for certain questions? It should help a bit to deal with extreamly large answers.
Some things I found interesting:
1) The case for being pro-choice is so strong even neoreactionaries and fascists are pro-choice. Interestingly, on this specific issue, conservatives are to the right of fascists!
2) On political opinions, HBD is about an objective, falsifiable, scientifically mesureable characteristic of the world, whereas the other opinions are opinions. Opinions on HBD also correlates strongly with other views, and so I am interested as to how poeple's opinions would change if it was proved to them that the truth about HBD is the opposite of what they currently believe it to be. Would their other views change?
3) Some of the '90% of humanity die' risks seem extremely low probability to me, and I am perplexed by why so many people chose them:
Nuclear war: +4.800% 326 (20.6%)
The worst case scenario for nuclear war at the hight of the cold war was about 40% of humanity dies. I suppose that its possible that vast numbers of new bombs could be built, without similar investment in bomb shelters, but this does seem a little implausible.
Environmental collapse (including global warming): +1.500% 252 (16.0%)
In the 'Cretaceous hothouse' period CO2 levels were 8x higher, and there was still enough vegetation to support giant dinosaurs far bigger than the largest animal today. The worst-case scenarios are a decrease in economic growth and a migrant crisis, not 90% of humanity dies.
Economic / political collapse: -1.400% 136 (8.6%)
Its difficult enough to imagine political collapse killing 90% of the population in one country. The Syrian civil war has killed 3% of the population. The Japanese invasion of China killed 4%. I'm aware of some wars that killed 50% - parts of the thirty years war, the Mongol invasion of China - but I think these were combined with famines or disease outbreaks. In the 1870 Japanese civil war, the samurai combatants took over 99% casualties, but the non-combatants survived. 90% deaths of one country would be mind-boggling. But 90% deaths of the whole of humanity? A political collapse that affects the entire world, including countries of every culture? Including China and other countries that are not democracies?
This might make some sense if DNNs were being used to further our understanding of theoretical physics, but afaik they're not. They're being used to classify cat pics. SInce when do you use polynomial Hamiltonians to recognise cats?
These properties mean that neural networks do not need to approximate an infinitude of possible mathematical functions but only a tiny subset of the simplest ones
No finite DNN can approximate sin(x) over the entire real numbers, unless you cheat by having a sin(x) activation function.
Stellaris - a 4X sci-fi game with interesting pro's and con's.
I especially like the very detailed race creation, with choices ranging from basic morphology to meta-ethics and government type. I also like that the game accounts for ethical drifting within your population, different models of FTL travel and malignant events such as UFAI fooming (called synth rebellion in the game).
However it's a young and complex production, and some of its strategic aspects are poorly balanced, read the negative Steam reviews for those, I've not played it enough and with the right focus to have an opinion on those.
As a pure sci-fi 4X, it's not the best: you will probably enjoy Endless Space or Beyond Earth much more.
But as a meta-civ simulator, I think it's amazing. I play Stellaris as if I'm playing a space version of Democracy 3: coming up with ludicrous empires and having fun evolving them in space, without much focus on winning.
I started Stellaris and regret it. I agree with many of the pros, but I find two extreamly annoying downsides. Firstly, even the fastest mode is quite slow, especially early on.
Secondly, there is a mechanism whereby if an empire is loosing a war, it surrenders; this would be reasonable except I had no idea this would happen, afaict there is no 'moral level' which would warn of a surrender, no way to negotiate a conditional surrender. Loose one minor outlying system and your entire empire surrenders.
Thirdly, it seems that 'hard difficulty' provides a 50% bonus to everything your opponents do, while normal difficulty provides no bonus. I suspect that hard difficulty is very hard, while normal will be quite easy. Adding a custom 'the AI gets an x% advantage' sounds like a very easy modification that would make the game far better.
There are other ways to prevent global warming. Plan C is creating artificial nuclear winter by volcanic explossion or starting large scale forest fires with nukes.
Goes straight into the "Shit LW people say" bucket.
I think starting forest fires with flamethrowers, or cooling the Earth by painting things white, is probably the less exciting but more sensible approach.
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There is a difference between advocating something and merely believing it. But I'm mostly skeptical of the people that put "strongly disagree" on that question. As opposed to "disagree" or "neutral". The fact that it's so correlated with political ideology is more evidence that it's just political bias.
If I lived 200 years ago, I wouldn't go around advocating atheism. But I might have believed it privately, and I would be more skeptical of the openmindedness of people that say they "strongly oppose the evils of atheism".
I really don't know. When I researched this it seems like the effects are pretty hard to estimate. Different models give very different results. A recentish study using more modern climate models shows that the effects would be catastrophic and last for multiple years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#2007_study_on_global_nuclear_war
Those first few months are the problem though. The crops and livestock die or absorb the radioactive isotopes. The people too if they don't happen to have a fallout shelter handy.
Also the nuclear bombs themselves aren't the only concern. You would have to deal with all the waste left in the cities they destroy. Nuclear power plants would melt down with no one to contain them. Vast amounts of chemical waste would leak from abandoned chemical plants and waste storage. Oil would leak and pollute the oceans with no cleanup.
I don't know how to estimate the damage of this. But it should be at least a bad or worse than major industrial accidents of the past, like Bhopal, deepwater horizon, or Chernobyl. But all happening at once and with no one left to organize any kind of response.
I think you are underestimating the secondary effects. I imagine a complete destruction of the global economy. There isn't enough food to go around and lots of countries are starving. This would lead to more war and chaos.
A few thousand years ago the civilizations of the mediterranean all collapsed almost at once. It's now speculated to be the result of a serious drought and bad weather. The states that couldn't feed their population got overthrown, and their hungry populations went to war with neighboring countries for food, until nothing of the old orders remained. It was a serious setback for humanity.
If that happened in the modern world, technological civilization might end and never be restarted. The modern world depends on hugely complex infrastructure and tons of different industries and inputs. If we lose that, it would be very difficult to rebuild. We've already extracted most of the easy to get to minerals and fossil fuels. Much farmland has been degraded from overuse and depends on inputs of fertilizer, irrigation systems, and of course modern machinery which would be difficult to replace.
This correlation is what interests me - it does fit with political bias, but could it also be that the political views are a product of beliefs in HBD?
I think I might have put too much faith in one study. Perhaps 90% deaths is plausible.
The crops may absorb the isotopes, but the isotopes will continue to decay, and so by the time the crops are to be eaten they should be fairly safe. I agree that there would be terrible casualties, but I don't think it would be as bad as having to spend a decade underground.
Moreover, my main point here is that the cloud of radioactive death might kill 95% of the US/Russia (or whoever the primary belligerents are) but by the time it reaches Brazil for instance it would be a lot less radioactive.
I agree. The end of technological civilization is a different point from simple mass casualties - if 'only' 40% of humanity dies, but those 40% are concentrated in first world countries and urban centres, would the survivors be able to rebuild? Machinery would continue to work for a while, although the oil distribution chain would break for a while at least, but in the long run machinery would break. The factories tend to be in the first world countries that have been nuked, the universities in the cities have been mostly destroyed. Moreover there would likely be a general luddite tendency to blame technology for the crisis. Its probably easier to restablish resource extraction then to restart scientific research, and so we would be less likely to develop renewable energy before the fossil fuels run out. I suppose the end of technological civiliseation would reduce the population back to medieval levels, although this would be a long process of resources slowly running out and machinery slowly degrading.