<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 06/10/2012 16:17, Tomaz Kristan
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CALMrAFTmMwoZTTd0=oYtBoVALVQGVM-HJCvth9rZXxUKOisEjA@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<meta http-equiv="Context-Type" content="text/html;
charset=ISO-8859-1">
> If you want to reduce death tolls, focus on self-driving
cars.
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Instead of answering terror attacks, just mend you cars?</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
Sounds eminently sensible, except maybe to the people trapped in the
riot thread (very suitable name, I think).<br>
<br>
More seriously, Charlie makes a good point: if we want to make the
world better, it might be worth prioritizing fixing the stuff that
makes it worse according to the damage it actually makes. Toby Ord
and me have been chatting quite a bit about this (I'll see if he has
a writeup of his thoughtful analysis; this is my version based on
what I remember). <br>
<br>
==Death==<br>
<br>
In terms of death (~57 million people per year), the big causes are
cardiovascular disease (29%), infectious and parasitic diseases
(23%) and cancer (12%). At least the first and last are to a
sizeable degree caused or worsened by ageing, which is a massive
hidden problem. It has been argued that malnutrition is similarly
indirectly involved in 15-60% of the total number of deaths: often
not the direct cause, but weakening people so they become vulnerable
to other risks. Anything that makes a dent in these saves lives on a
scale that is simply staggering; any threat to our ability to treat
them (like resistance to antibiotics or anthelmintics) is
correspondingly bad.<br>
<br>
Unintentional injuries are responsible for 6% of deaths, just behind
respiratory diseases 6.5%. Road traffic alone is responsible for 2%
of all deaths: even 1% safer cars would save 11,400 lives per year.
If everybody reached Swedish safety (2.9 deaths per 100,000 people
per year) it would save around 460,000 lives per year - one Antwerp
per year. <br>
<br>
Now, intentional injuries are responsible for 2.8% of all deaths. Of
these suicide is responsible for 1.53% of total death rate, violence
0.98% and war 0.3%. Yes, all wars killed about the same number of
people as were killed by meningitis, and slightly more than the
people who died of syphilis. So in terms of absolute numbers we
might be much better off improving antibiotic treatments and suicide
hotlines than trying to stop the wars. And terrorism is so small
that it doesn't really show up: even the highest estimates put the
median fatalities per year in the low thousands. <br>
<br>
So in terms of deaths, fixing (or even denting) ageing,
malnutrition, infectious diseases and lifestyle causes is a far more
important activity than winning wars or stopping terrorists.
Hypertension, tobacco, STDs, alcohol, indoor air pollution and
sanitation are all far, far more pressing in terms of saving lives.
If we had a choice between *ending all wars in the world* and fixing
indoor air pollution the rational choice would be to fix those smoky
stoves: they kill nine times more people. <br>
<br>
==Existential risk==<br>
<br>
There is of course more to improving the world than just saving
lives. First there is the issue of outbreak distributions: most wars
are local and small affairs, but some become global. Same thing for
pandemic respiratory disease. We actually do need to worry about
them more than their median sizes suggest (and again the influenza
totally dominates all wars). Incidentally, the exponent for the
power law distribution of terrorism is safely negative at -2.5, so
it is less of a problem than ordinary wars with exponent -1.41.<br>
<br>
There are reasons to think that existential risk should be weighed
extremely strongly: even a tiny risk that we loose all our future is
much worse than many standard risks (since the future could be
inconceivably grand and involve very large numbers of people, cf.
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste.html">http://www.nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste.html</a> ). This has
convinced me that fixing the safety of governments (democides have
been larger killers than wars in the 20th century and seems to have
most of the tail risk, especially when you start thinking nukes)
needs to be boosted a lot. It is likely a far more pressing problem
than climate change, and quite possibly (depending on how you
analyse xrisk weighting) beats disease. <br>
<br>
How to analyse xrisk, especially future risks, in this kind of
framework is a big part of our ongoing research at FHI.<br>
<br>
==Happiness==<br>
<br>
If instead of lives lost we look at the impact on human stress and
happiness wars (and violence in general) look worse: they traumatize
people, and terrorism by its nature is all about causing terror. But
again, they happen to a small set of people. So in terms of
happiness it might be more important to make the bulk of people
happier. Life satisfaction correlates to 0.7 with health and 0.6
with wealth and basic education. Boost those a bit, and it outweighs
the horrors of war. <br>
<br>
In fact, when looking at the value of better lives, it looks like an
enhancement in life quality might be worth much more than fixing a
lot of the deaths discussed above: make everybody's life 1% better,
and it corresponds to more quality adjusted life years than is lost
to death every year! So improving our wellbeing might actually
matter far, far more than many diseases. Maybe we ought to spend
more resources on applied hedonism research than trying to cure
Alzheimers. <br>
<br>
==Morality==<br>
<br>
The real reason people focus so much about terrorism is of course
the moral outrage. Somebody is *responsible*, people are angry and
want revenge. Same thing for wars. And the horror tends to strike
certain people: my kind of global calculations might make sense on
the global scale, but most of us think that the people suffering the
worst have a higher priority. While it might make more utilitarian
sense to make everybody 1% happier rather than stop the carnage in
Syria, I suspect most people would say morality is on the other side
(exactly why is a matter of some interesting ethical debate, of
course). Deontologists might think we have moral duties we must
implement no matter what the cost. I disagree: burning villages in
order to save them doesn't make sense. It makes sense to risk lives
in order to save lives, both directly and indirectly (by reducing
future conflicts). <br>
<br>
But this requires proportionality: going to war in order to avenge X
deaths by causing 10X deaths is not going to be sustainable or
moral. The total moral weight of one unjust death might be high, but
it is finite. Given the typical civilian causality ratio of 10:1 any
war will also almost certainly produce far more collateral unjust
deaths than the justified deaths of enemy soldiers: avenging X
deaths by killing exactly X enemies will still lead to around 10X
unjust deaths. So achieving proportionality is very, very hard (and
the Just War Doctrine is broken anyway, according to the war
ethicists I talk to). This means that if you want to leave the
straightforward utilitarian approach and add some moral/outrage
weighting, you risk making the problem far worse by your own
account. In many cases it might indeed be the moral thing to turn
the other cheek... ideally armoured and barbed with suitable
sanctions.<br>
<br>
==Conclusion==<br>
<br>
To sum up, this approach of just looking at consequences and
ignoring who is who is of course a bit too cold for most people.
Most people have Tetlockian sacred values and get very riled up if
somebody thinks about cost-effectiveness in terrorism fighting
(typical US bugaboo) or development (typical warmhearted donor
bugaboo) or healthcare (typical European bugaboo). But if we did, we
would make the world a far better place. <br>
<br>
Bring on the robot cars and happiness pills! <br>
<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University </pre>
</body>
</html>