[ExI] Planetary defense

[Kelly Anderson]

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 4:36 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> Kelly Anderson wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, May 7, 2011 at 3:45 AM, Tom Nowell <nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> bioweapons, AGI & nanotech, Wars, Climate change
>>>
>>
>> Can't we all just agree that clean water is worth working on? Or how
>> about the indoor use of charcoal?
>>
>> Or is that stuff just too third world for people to care about?
>>
>
> Apples and oranges (i.e different but comparable along a few dimensions).
> Water and charcoal kills many people every day, and on average more people
> die of them than any of the above GCRs. But were a serious GCR to happen, it
> might kill *far* more people - or all of them. So do you focus on the
> average case, the past average, the long-term average or the tail risk?

Understood. I wasn't arguing against GCR work. Rather, I was pointing
out that economically, it makes more sense to go after the low hanging
fruit before attacking something like global warming. I think chasing
asteroids makes much more sense economically than CO2 sequestration.

> While the mundane threats - water, sanitation, local pollution, food - are a
> bit unsexy, doing something about the big threats often suffer from either
> paralysis (they seem too big) or silliness bias (they are not 'real'). Far
> more work is spent on intermediate threats that might rationally be lower
> priority, like terrorism or certain diseases. The biggest problem is that
> people do not work or fund risk mitigation in any particularly rational
> way..

Totally with you brother!!!

> I think the rational approach here is to go for the big wins and they are
> likely at both ends of the scale. There are low hanging fruits in female
> education and water/sanitation solutions, there are potentially huge wins in
> slight reductions of big GCRs. It is not as if the budget for desalination
> is seriously competing with the budget for nuclear disarmament.

So what do you do with something like global warming that is neither
low hanging fruit, nor unimportant? It's a tough play.

> And if we can make risk management smarter, then we will get more big wins.
> So work on the metalevel might actually be more helpful in lives saved per
> year than rushing into the workshop/lab and working on the direct solution.

Totally agreed!!!

-Kelly