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

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Wed May 26 15:02:28 UTC 2021


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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