So, I do agree that if climate change contributes to existential risk indirectly in that sort of way (but we’re still talking about the same kind of climate change as we might worry about the direct effects of) then yes, that should go in the same accounting bucket as the direct effects. Yay, agreement.
(And I think we also agree that cases where other things such as nuclear war produce other kinds of climate change should not go in the same accounting bucket, even though in some sense they involve climate change.)
Yes on both.
This conversation is sort of interesting on a meta level. Turns out there were two ways my example was confusing, and neither of them occurred to me when I wrote it. Apologies for that.
I’m not sure if there’s a lesson here. Maybe something like ‘the difficulty of communicating something isn’t strictly tied to how simple the point seems to you’ (because this was kind of the issue; I thought what I was saying was simple hence easy to understand hence there was no need to think much about what examples to use). Or maybe just always think for a minimum amount of time since one tends to underestimate the difficulty of conversation in general. In retrospect, it sure seems stupid to use nuclear winter as an example for a second-order effect of climate change, when the fact that winter and climate are connected is totally coincidental.
It’s somewhat consoling that we at least managed to resolve one misunderstanding per back-and-forth message pair.
Yes on both.
This conversation is sort of interesting on a meta level. Turns out there were two ways my example was confusing, and neither of them occurred to me when I wrote it. Apologies for that.
I’m not sure if there’s a lesson here. Maybe something like ‘the difficulty of communicating something isn’t strictly tied to how simple the point seems to you’ (because this was kind of the issue; I thought what I was saying was simple hence easy to understand hence there was no need to think much about what examples to use). Or maybe just always think for a minimum amount of time since one tends to underestimate the difficulty of conversation in general. In retrospect, it sure seems stupid to use nuclear winter as an example for a second-order effect of climate change, when the fact that winter and climate are connected is totally coincidental.
It’s somewhat consoling that we at least managed to resolve one misunderstanding per back-and-forth message pair.