What I meant was that knowing stuff about the issue isn’t important for everyday life. While the availability of food and water is good to know about, what environmental conditions caused it is less important unless I’m a farmer or policy-maker.
Similarly, a nuclear war would impact health, weather, and the availability of food and water, but I am much better off worrying about whether my car needs an oil change than worrying about whether my government is going to start a nuclear war.
I can sort of agree, insofar as I can’t myself direct the government to never under any circumstances actually do that, and I can’t sequester an Industrial Revolution’s worth of CO2 just by being aware of the problem, but I feel like it misses something. Not everyone is going to be equally unable to meaningfully contribute to solving the problem—if a high baseline level of meaningful-awareness of an issuye is the norm, it seems like society is more likely to get the benefits of “herd immunity” to that failure mode. It’s not guaranteed, I wouldn’t call it a sufficient condition by any means for solving the problem, but it’s increasing the odds that any given person whose potential influence over the activities of society is great might be better prepared to respond to that in a way that’s not terribly productive.
I suppose if you think we’ll get FAI soon, this is irrelevant—it’s a whole lot less efficient and theoretically stable a state than some superintelligence just solving the problem in a way that makes it a nonissue and doesn’t rely on corruptible, fickle, perversely-incentivized human social patterns. I’m not so sanguine about that possibility m’self, although I’d love to be wrong.
EDIT: I guess what I’m saying is, why would you NOT want information about something that might be averted or mitigated, but whose likely consequences are a severe change to your current quality of life?
EDIT: I guess what I’m saying is, why would you NOT want information about something that might be averted or mitigated, but whose likely consequences are a severe change to your current quality of life?
I want all information about all things. But I don’t have time for that. And given the option of learning to spot global warming or learning to spot an unsafe tire on my car, I’ll have to pick #2. WLOG.
Even if it turns out that you can leverage the ability to spot global warming into enough money to pay your next-door neighbor to look at your car tires every morning and let you know if they’re unsafe?
This implies the Maldiveans should not concern themselves with the fact that their entire country (most of it no more than a meter or two above sea level) is projected to lose most of the land sustaining its tourist industry (the main economic engine for the economy) and displacing most of its population, leading to greater social volatility in a country enjoying a relative respite after many years of internicine violence.
I want all information about all things. But I don’t have time for that.
If you think this applies to the question of whether or not it’s valuable for anyone to know about global warming in concrete terms and the plausible implications for their own lives, then I can only say that I hope for your sake you live somewhere nicely insulated from such possible changes. Me, I’d rather treat it the way I treat earthquakes where I’m from or tornadoes where I live now: things worth knowing about and being at least somewhat prepared for if it’s at all possible to do so.
What I meant was that knowing stuff about the issue isn’t important for everyday life. While the availability of food and water is good to know about, what environmental conditions caused it is less important unless I’m a farmer or policy-maker.
Similarly, a nuclear war would impact health, weather, and the availability of food and water, but I am much better off worrying about whether my car needs an oil change than worrying about whether my government is going to start a nuclear war.
I can sort of agree, insofar as I can’t myself direct the government to never under any circumstances actually do that, and I can’t sequester an Industrial Revolution’s worth of CO2 just by being aware of the problem, but I feel like it misses something. Not everyone is going to be equally unable to meaningfully contribute to solving the problem—if a high baseline level of meaningful-awareness of an issuye is the norm, it seems like society is more likely to get the benefits of “herd immunity” to that failure mode. It’s not guaranteed, I wouldn’t call it a sufficient condition by any means for solving the problem, but it’s increasing the odds that any given person whose potential influence over the activities of society is great might be better prepared to respond to that in a way that’s not terribly productive.
I suppose if you think we’ll get FAI soon, this is irrelevant—it’s a whole lot less efficient and theoretically stable a state than some superintelligence just solving the problem in a way that makes it a nonissue and doesn’t rely on corruptible, fickle, perversely-incentivized human social patterns. I’m not so sanguine about that possibility m’self, although I’d love to be wrong.
EDIT: I guess what I’m saying is, why would you NOT want information about something that might be averted or mitigated, but whose likely consequences are a severe change to your current quality of life?
I want all information about all things. But I don’t have time for that. And given the option of learning to spot global warming or learning to spot an unsafe tire on my car, I’ll have to pick #2. WLOG.
Even if it turns out that you can leverage the ability to spot global warming into enough money to pay your next-door neighbor to look at your car tires every morning and let you know if they’re unsafe?
This implies the Maldiveans should not concern themselves with the fact that their entire country (most of it no more than a meter or two above sea level) is projected to lose most of the land sustaining its tourist industry (the main economic engine for the economy) and displacing most of its population, leading to greater social volatility in a country enjoying a relative respite after many years of internicine violence.
If you think this applies to the question of whether or not it’s valuable for anyone to know about global warming in concrete terms and the plausible implications for their own lives, then I can only say that I hope for your sake you live somewhere nicely insulated from such possible changes. Me, I’d rather treat it the way I treat earthquakes where I’m from or tornadoes where I live now: things worth knowing about and being at least somewhat prepared for if it’s at all possible to do so.