[ExI] Eliezer Yudkowsky on FB about why we're all doomed

[Darin Sunley]

It's all right there in the name "Limited Liability Corporation". They
enable relatively normal people to attempt Great and Risky endeavors with
the understanding that some of those attempts will fail horribly, and that
amnesty for those risks is a reasonable price to pay for the increases in
innovation and achievement thereby allowed, but it seems unlikely that the
originators of the idea would have approved of the sheer size of the
failures that have been allowed to go unpunished under that umbrella.

On Wed, May 26, 2021 at 9:05 AM BillK via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 26 May 2021 at 15:00, Dave Sill via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> >
> > Back in the golden days of this list, Eliezer was a regular contributor.
> >
> > The global economy finally got shut down for a year by a human-boosted
> pathogen and it wasn't done by a military faction, an evil corporation bent
> on profit, one suicidal researcher, or done deliberately at all.  We'll
> probably never know for certain, but it's now looking 80% probable to me
> (and eg Nate Silver says he's at 60%):  Covid-19 was accidentally released
> from a US-funded Chinese laboratory doing gain-of-function studies.
> Presumably, this accident was carried out by researchers looking for a good
> paper they could get into a journal; as incentivized by journal editors
> trying to play the role of scientists, and not otherwise incentivized to
> guard the earth from harms that they didn't imagine would be traced back to
> them personally.
> >
> <big snip>
> > _______________________________________________
>
>
> Fermi paradox solved............
>
> I have been worrying for a while that the idea that multi-million
> dollar fines can somehow be thought of as a fix for misbehaviour is
> mistaken. It doesn't restore lives ruined, deaths caused, years of
> unhappiness. It just becomes a cost of doing business. And we get more
> of the same behaviour. The incentives of modern civilisation have gone
> wrong somewhere along the line.
>
> BillK
>
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>
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