rodeo_flagellum's Quick takes

Thoughts and Notes: October 5th 0012022 (1) 

As per my last shortform, over the next couple of weeks I will be moving my brief profiles for different catastrophes from my draft existential risk frameworks post into shortform posts to make the existential risk frameworks post lighter and more simple. 

In my last shortform, I included the profile for the use of nuclear weapons and today I will include the profile for climate change. 

Climate change 

• Risk: (sections from the well written Wikipedia page on Climate Change): "Contemporary climate change includes both global warming and its impacts on Earth's weather patterns. There have been previous periods of climate change, but the current rise in global average temperature is more rapid and is primarily caused by humans.^[2][3] Burning fossil fuels adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, most importantly carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane. Greenhouse gases warm the air by absorbing heat radiated by the Earth, trapping the heat near the surface. Greenhouse gas emissions amplify this effect, causing the Earth to take in more energy from sunlight than it can radiate back into space." In general, the risk from climate change mostly comes from the destabilizing downstream effects it has on civilization, rather than from its direct effects, such as the ice caps melting or increased weather severity. One severe climate change catastrophe is the runaway greenhouse effect, but this seems unlikely to occur, as the present humans activities and natural processes contributing to global warming don't appear capable of engendering such a catastrophe anytime soon. 
• Links: EAF Wiki; LW Wiki; Climate Change (Wikipedia); IPCC Report 2022; NOAA Climate Q & A; OWID Carbon Dioxide and Emissions (2020); UN Reports on CC; CC and Longtermism (2022); NASA Evidence of CC (2022)
• Forecasts: If climate catastrophe by 2100, human population falls by >= 95%? - 1%; If global catastrophe by 2100, due to climate change or geoengineering? - 10%; How much warming by 2100? - (1.8, 2.6, 3.5) degrees; When fossil fuels < 50% of global energy? - (2038, 2044, 2056)

Thoughts and Notes: October 3rd 0012022 (1)

I have been working on a post which introduces a framework for existential risks that  I have not seen covered on the either LW or EAF, but I think I've impeded my progress by setting out to do more than I originally intended. 

Rather than simply introduce the framework and compare it to the Bostrom's 2013 framework and the Wikipedia page on GCRs, I've tried to aggregate all global and existential catastrophes I could find under the "new" framework. 

Creating an anthology of global and existential catastrophes is something I would like to complete at some point, but doing so in the post I've written would be overkill and would not in line with the goal of"making the introduction of this little known framework brief and simple". 

To make my life easier, I am going to remove the aggregated catastrophes section of my post. I will work incrementally (and somewhat informally) on accumulating links and notes for and thinking about each global and/or existential catastrophe through shortform posts. 

Each shortform post in this vein will pertain to a single type of catastrophe. Of course, I may post other shortforms in between, but my goal generally is to cover the different global and existential risks one by one via shortform. 

As was the case in my original post, I include DALLE-2 art with each catastrophe, and the loose structure for each catastrophe is Risk, Links, Forecasts. 

Here is the first catastrophe in the list. Again note that I am not aiming for comprehensiveness here, but rather am trying to get the ball rolling for a more extensive review of the catastrophic or existential risks that I plan to complete at a later date. The forecasts were observed on October 3 0002022 and represent the community's uniform median forecast. 

Use of Nuclear Weapons(Anthropogenic, Current, Preventable) 

• Risk: The use of a nuclear weapon on a well populated region could directly kill thousands to millions of people. The indirect effects, which include radiation poisoning from the fallout and heightened instability, contributes to additional death. In the event one nuke is deployed, the use of many more nuclear weapons might follow; the soot released into the stratosphere from these blasts could block out the sun - a nuclear winter - leading to the collapse agricultural systems and subsequently to widespread famine. Both scenarios - the use of one nuclear weapon or the use of many - could precipitate a chain of events culminating in societal collapse.
• Links: EAF Wiki;  LW Wiki; Nuclear warfare (Wikipedia); Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction (2021); Nuclear War Map; OWID Article (2022); On Assessing the Risk of Nuclear War (2021); Model for impact of nuclear war (2020); "Putin raises possibility of using nuclear weapons for the war" (YouTube, LW 2022)
• Forecasts: Nuke used in Ukraine before 2023? - 5%; US nuke detonated in Russia before 2023? - 1%; Russian nuke detonated in Ukraine before 2023 - 1%; >=1 nuke used in war by 2050? - 28%; No non-test nukes used by 2035? - 76%; If global catastrophe by 2100, due to nuclear war? - 25%; Global thermonuclear war by 2070? - 10%

As of September 30th, 2021, 80000 Hours lists ageing under Other longtermist issues, which means that, at the moment, it is not one of their Highest priority areas. 

Despite this, I am interested in learning more about research on longevity and ageing. The sequence Gears of Ageing, Laura Deming's Longevity FAQ, and the paper Hallmarks of Aging, are all on my reading list. 

Relatedly, my friends have sometimes inquired how long I would like to live, if I could hypothetically live invincibly for however long I wanted, and I have routinely defaulted to the answer: "10,000 years". I have not expended much thought as to why this number comes to mind, but it may have to do with the fact that the first known permanent settlements occurred roughly 10,000 years ago (assuming I recall this accurately), and that I thought it'd be interesting to see where human civilization is in this amount of time (starting from when I was born). 

Several of Aubrey de Grey's talks on Gerontology and ageing have also resonated with me. From Wikipedia:

In 2008 Aubrey de Grey said that in case of suitable funding and involvement of specialists there is a 50% chance, that in 25-30 years humans will have technology saving people from dying of old age, regardless of the age at which they will be at that time.^[26] His idea is to repair inside cells and between them all that can be repaired using modern technology, allowing people to live until time when technology progress will allow to cure deeper damage. This concept got the name "longevity escape velocity".

In one TED talk, he made the case that ageing research was highly neglected, but I can't recall just how neglected. Given that I do not want to die, I really would like to see a cultural shift towards prioritizing anti-ageing research. 

There may be a strong negative impact on humanity's long-term and/or short-term potential as a result of extending people's lifespans, but I think that whether the magnitude of positive impact (reduction of existential risk, improvements to collective well-being) of this intervention/technology/research outweighs the negative impact is still highly uncertain in my mind. 

Maybe writing a future-history (a story that traces the societal changes engendered by hypothetical sequences of scientific/cultural advancements) on different scenarios for anti-ageing research breakthroughs and implementations could stir the community into thinking more about its potential (for existential risk increase or reduction, among other things).