[extropy-chat] The Proactionary Principle: comments encouragedon almost-final version

[Anna Tylor]

>and in regards to wikipedia..maybe you need to use formal language to get 
>your
point accross:)
Anna


>From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience at pobox.com>
>Reply-To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
>To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
>Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] The Proactionary Principle: comments 
>encouragedon	almost-final version
>Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2005 13:24:46 -0800
>
>Hal Finney wrote:
>>
>>Nevertheless I couldn't help recalling our discussion last month
>>initiated by Robin Hanson, on the utility of scenario-based forecasting.
>>(Thread title was "Inside Vs. Outside Forecasts".)  Some of the advice
>>in the proposed document amounts to creating inside-type forecasts,
>>i.e. setting up scenarios, looking at probable outcomes, and making
>>decisions on that basis.  The paper we discussed last month shows that
>>this forecasting methodology is not very good, unfortunately.  It is
>>prone to cognitive biases of many kinds.
>
>Correct.  I name also an additional cognitive bias: defensibility. 
>Cost-benefit analyses aim at warding off anxiety about catastrophe, or 
>blame in the event of catastrophe.  Warding off actual catastrophe is a 
>great deal harder.  You do not realize this until you have written a 
>careful, elaborate analysis of risks and benefits (such as appears in 
>http://singinst.org/CFAI/policy.html) and then it turns out that Nature 
>would have gone ahead and killed you anyway, even though you'd conducted a 
>cost-benefit analysis.  How unreasonable of Nature!  What more does She 
>want from us?  At that point I first realized the incredible difficulty gap 
>between fulfilling a deontological obligation to perform a risk analysis, 
>and actually avoiding risk.  You can always perform a risk analysis - it 
>requires merely that you quantify your ignorance. There's no guarantee that 
>survival is even possible - this requires nonignorance, and nonignorance 
>can be arbitrarily difficult to obtain. It is in the nature of 
>deontological social obligations that they tend to be fulfillable, which 
>tells you something about their distance from the real world.
>
>George Orwell wrote:  "In our time, political speech and writing are 
>largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of 
>British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of 
>the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments 
>which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with 
>the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to 
>consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness."
>
>Humanity can survive the loss of a thousand people, or a million people; it 
>survives fifty-five million deaths every year.  It is therefore appropriate 
>to trade off the risk of fatal side effects against probable benefits of 
>life-saving pharmaceuticals, to minimize net casualties. This is the 
>argument which is too brutal for most people to face: it requires accepting 
>that every now and then, even after performing a cost-benefit analysis, the 
>Proactionary Principle will kill a few thousand people - loudly, visibly, 
>in full public view.  The Precautionary Principle kills many more people, 
>but silently.
>
>If human beings did not age, but still suffered accidents, we would in no 
>sense be immortal; we would live only until one of life's many dangers cut 
>us down.  The human species is like an unaging individual human; it has 
>survived this far only because there has not been *any* significant, 
>recurring danger of extinction.  Once we enter the realm where existential 
>risk becomes *possible*, it imposes a death sentence on humankind, unless 
>the window of vulnerability is bounded, and small.  No existential risk can 
>ever be realized, even once.  It is as if you did not age, but you were 
>still vulnerable to all ordinary accidents, and you absolutely had to 
>survive at all costs.  The Proactionary Principle does not inculcate a 
>mindset appropriate to such a task.  It is the creed of someone who can 
>never really be hurt, as humankind can never really be hurt by a 
>pharmaceutical mistakenly approved.
>
>--
>Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
>Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
>_______________________________________________
>extropy-chat mailing list
>extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
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