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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2013-06-12 07:21, Florent Berthet
wrote:<br>
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<blockquote
cite="mid:CAA9DTzRDsExQ2aqt0VODX2eSjdz0tGK48-o1BMyu=OfRSXdagQ@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
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<div class="im"
style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><span
style="font-family:arial;font-size:small;color:rgb(34,34,34)">2013/6/12
Anders Sandberg </span><span dir="ltr"
style="font-family:arial;font-size:small;color:rgb(34,34,34)"><<a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:anders@aleph.se"
target="_blank">anders@aleph.se</a>></span><br>
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
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<div class="im">On 2013-06-11 23:45, BillK wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
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On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 11:10 PM, Keith Henson wrote:<br>
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As Anders mentioned, the payment is from life
insurance and as he<br>
says, it's less than the cost of a dinner out a
week.<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
Correct, but it also involves giving the life
insurance payout to a<br>
cryonics company rather than to his estate for his
family.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
</div>
But is this a general problem? At least in my family I am
the least well-off: none of the others need my
inheritance.<br>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
</div>
<div style="">What if the insurance payout is given to
x-risk mitigation? <br>
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</blockquote>
<br>
Depends on what xrisk mitigation we are talking about. If that money
would reduce the probability of eventual extinction by 0.1%, sure, I
would put the money there (I think the astronomical waste argument
is pretty strong: the future is worth *a lot*). But realistically,
it would be used to allow some people to think a bit more about
xrisk (about a few postdoc man-months if we are lucky), maybe coming
up with good ideas, which maybe get implemented and maybe have
effect. Multiplying together all that produces a much, much smaller
impact. I am not certain that impact is worth less than the
subjective value of my life to me, but it seems at least possible.
[*]<br>
<br>
It would likely be more useful to spend that money on doing xrisk
advocacy to get much more funding. Max Tegmark made the point pretty
well in his recent talk (<a
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZDVv-MI0VU">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZDVv-MI0VU</a>
- this particular point starts at 41:10). The amount of funding for
xrisk research is minuscule, and if we could get some tiny faction
of the money wasted on truly frivolous or destructive pursuits
redirected in this direction we would get far, far more than what we
could get from all cryonicists switching their insurance to xrisk
reduction. Now, I happen to spend a fair amount of my time trying to
convince people about the importance of xrisk reduction, as well as
contribute to the research. I have no good measure of my
effectiveness, but it seems likely that I have a positive impact - I
am already doing those man-months mentioned above as part of my job
and overall lifestyle. It would hence be a really good thing if I
could go on doing this for a long time: hence cryonics.<br>
<br>
That argument might get the handful of xrisk researchers with
cryonics contracts off the hook (a surprisingly large number, by the
way, given the rarity of either pursuit) but I think there is a
general efficiency argument too. Quibbling over individual health
choices in a rather small population while enormous resources are
going to waste is... wasteful. It is a bit like building managers
asking people to remove AC-adapters from plugs in order to save
energy, while maintaining floodlights to light up the façade at
night. It is easier to point at the discrete individual actions than
the overall system, but it is usually at the system level the big
wins are. <br>
<br>
<br>
[*] Fun counting exercise. Suppose we regard ozone depletion as an
averted potential xrisk. I doubt it would have been 100% fatal:
let's assume ozone depletion if it happens has 10% chance of wiping
out humanity (this is on par with numbers I get for nuclear winter
scenarios from experts). If we ignore the research necessary for its
discovery (lots and lots of chemistry, meteorology and the work
needed to launch the satellite that saw it), there is still a lot of
research effort. Crutzen, Molina, and Rowland devoted at least a
fraction of their research careers to it, and it is likely safe to
assume that there was much relevant research outside that group.
Let's assume 10 years of work for each of them, making 30 man-years.
There are 50,000 hits in Google scholar for pre-1976 papers with
"ozone depletion"; assuming just 1% are relevant and each took a
month to write, that is still 500 man-months of work, about 41
man-years. (The 1976 Academy of Science report on halocarbons was
written by about 15 people: if they took a month of work each to
write their part it would already have been more than my cryonics
insurance could pay for). So if we sum all of this up, it seems
reasonable to say that the total effort that led to the discovery
and recognition (not counting the later mitigation work) is on the
order of 50 man-years. So 50 man-years can buy a 10% reduction of a
xrisk risk. If a research scientist salary is $80k, the total cost
of that is $48 million.<br>
<br>
This is of course a debatable example, since it was in many ways an
*easy* xrisk to fix - single cause, anthropogenic, not too powerful
vested interests, easy substitutes - and we resolved it. The amount
of money and effort spent on decreasing nuclear war risk is likely
orders of magnitude larger, and has perhaps yielded less. <br>
<br>
In any case, if my $100k were spent on ozone depletion reduction
back in the day (I am already handwaving so much we can ignore
inflation) I would have helped the field by 0.2%. That means an
xrisk reduction of 10% * 0.2% = 0.02%. But that assumes I picked the
right xrisk to reduce: of all the research topics only a handful
turn out to be xrisk-relevant. There are about 5 million researchers
in the world; if each topic gets 10-100 researchers it means there
are about 50,000-500,000 research topics at present. We know of less
than 100 xrisks, so the chance of one topic discovering one might be
around 0.2%-0.02%. So my help, if applied randomly, might reduce
xrisk by a factor of 4*10^-5 or 4*10^-6. <br>
<br>
Nick's astronomical waste argument *still* multiplies this with a
huge factor of saved future, of course. <br>
<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University
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