Can I ask you more information on why do you think this could cause great harm to the community? I’d really rather not cause that and I’m relatively new here, so I might be wrong in my expectations on how people could react.
If we add expected technological change to the picture, climate change starts mattering even less. It’s plausible that this kind of conclusion, when presented in sufficient detail as the position of the forum, can then be framed as some sort of climate change denialism or an attitude of gross irresponsibility. If the position on this topic is spelled out, it presents an opportunity for an attack that would otherwise be unavailable.
The alternative of only saying more politically correct things is even worse, encourages motivated reasoning. To some extent my own comment is already a victim (and perpetrator) of this problem, as the potential for such an attack motivated me to avoid mentioning that climate change matters much less than otherwise because of AGI timelines, where with sufficient AGI-accelerated technological progress the whole issue becomes completely irrelevant in a reasonable time, unless we get some civilization-shattering catastrophy that delays AGI by more than decades (compared to a no-catastrophy scenario), in which case climate change would also be the least of our problems. So I chose to talk about the consensus and not the phenomenon itself, as AGI timeline considerations are not part of the standard discussion on the topic.
These arguments are not needed for my thesis that people who are not already working on climate change shouldn’t be concerned about it. And regulating climate change is still the cost-effective thing to do (probably), similarly to buying more of the things that are on a sale from a grocery store, no reason to abandon that activity. But the above point is a vital component of my understanding of seriousness of climate change as a civilizational concern, making it another order of magnitude less important than it would be otherwise.
It isn’t at all my intention to frame the position of the forum as one of gross irresponsibility, or to use the replies I’ll get to present the forum’s position as one which is pro climate change denialism (either in the sense that climate change isn’t happening, that it won’t be harmful, or that it shouldn’t be avoided).
I also won’t try to censor my post by including only statements that would be uncontroversial in a laymen discussion (I don’t like to use politically correct with that meaning), I believe this is one of the few sites where one can be both polite and accurate in his statements and also be perceived as so.
If you were instead worried that my question, the replies it got, or my planned future post, could be used by someone to attack the site or its users, I’d like to know more about it.
If it seems like a real risk, I’d take countermeasures such as avoid stating what the users beliefs are in my future post (NOTE: I’m not planning to link any beliefs I’d talk about to any specific users, my current plan is just to address the common beliefs about the subject and try to provide good informations and analysis about them) and prevent people from commenting on it. If what’s been already said could already be a likely source of damage, I could try to find ways to sink or delete this question and the replies I got.
So far the greatest potential risk I see is to create a toxic discussion between the members of this community.
I don’t want that to happen, of course, but feel that if the different positions aren’t explained and if any eventual errors in them aren’t corrected, toxic discussions could form every time related topics will be mentioned in the future in any post.
In another discussion that touched related topics, I wrote at least two comments that I still endorse and think have correct information and reasoning, but that I realised were unnecessarily angry in tone. Even worse, I realised my brain had switched on it’s “politic debate” mode as I was writing a third one. All around, the discussion felt to me as being remarkably more similar to the kind of discussion one can see on an average site rather than the level of discussion I usually see here, and I believe that an important part of that is that there wasn’t a diffused attempt to understand why people had different beliefs about the subject, and to figure out where the mistakes were.
The risk is of inciting a discussion that’s easy to exploit for a demagogue (whether they participate in the discussion or quote it long after the fact). You don’t have to personally be the demagogue, though many people get their inner demagogues awakened by an appropriate choice of topic. This indirectly creates a risk of motivated reasoning to self-censor the vulnerable aspects of the discussion. There’s also a conflict about acceptability and harm of self-censoring of any kind, though discussing this at a sufficient level of abstraction might be valuable.
My reply in the grandparent is half-motivated by noticing that I probably self-censored too much in the original comment on this post. When it’s just my own comment, however noncontroversial I expect its thesis to be, it’s not yet particularly exploitable. If it eventually turns into a recurring topic of discussion with well-written highly upvoted posts, or ideologically charged highly debated posts, that might be a problem.
(To be clear, I don’t know if the concern I’m discussing is close to what steven0461 was alluding to. Both the relevant aspect of truth and the harm that its discussion could cause might be different.)
I see. My current aim is to provide knowledge and reasoning that would actually lower the chances of such discussions happening, moving the subject of climate change away from ideology and political opinions.
I’ll try to think of ways to further reduce the likelihood of exploitable discussions and demagoguing happening in my post. Knowing what I plan to write, I don’t think such discussions would easily be created even if I didn’t, though.
For my attempt ending up as increasing the likelihood of future posts and that leading to harmful discussions… I think it would require people being so determined in arguing about this and ignoring all the points I’d try to make that the current lack of posts on the subject wouldn’t serve as a sufficient barrier to stop them from arguing about it now.
Lastly, the site seems to me as having been designed with very effective barriers about such things spiralling out of of control enough to make not trivial damage, though, since you have been on this site from a lot longer than me, I feel like I should value your intuition on the subject more than mine.
All considered, it feels to me that if I consider the risks in leaving the situation as it is and the benefits good reasoning on the subject could provide, what I should do is write my post and try to minimise the chances of the discussion on that turning out badly.
I’m not claiming that this is a likely scenario (it might be, but that’s not the point). It’s about the meaning, not the truth. The question is what kind of hazards specifically steven0461 might be referring to, regardless of whether such hazards are likely to occur in reality (“has the potential to cause great harm” is also not a claim about high credence, only about great harm).
Personally I feel the forum finds the topic uninteresting, so that it’s hard to spark a continuing discussion, even if someone decides to write a lot of good posts on it. I also don’t expect a nontrivial amount of toxic debate. But that’s the nature of risks, they can be a cause for concern even when unlikely to materialize.
I mostly agree with Vladimir’s comments. My wording may have been over-dramatic. I’ve been fascinated with these topics and have thought and read a lot about them, and my conclusions have been mostly in the direction of not feeling as much concern, but I think if a narrative like that became legibly a “rationalist meme” like how the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is a “rationalist meme”, it could be strategically quite harmful, and at any rate I don’t care about it as a subject of activism. On the other hand, I don’t want people to be wrong. I’ve been going back and forth on whether to write a Megapost, but I also have the thing where writing multiple sentences is like pulling teeth; let me know if you have a solution to that one.
I agree on your evaluation on the strategic harm this meme would cause if spread. I will have to be careful to not spread this narrative when I write about this subject, it’s not a risk I had already considered.
The likelihood of this narrative spreading doesn’t feel to me as lesser if I don’t write my post or if I didn’t wrote this question, though.
I posted this question specifically because I had noticed in several occasions comments that would support that narrative, especially if taken out of contest, also because they weren’t throughly explaining the thought processes behind them, and I think I’ve saw a number of conversations below average for users of this site, so others could get that idea as well. But after hearing the reasonings in these comments “not caring about climate change” is not how I see the viewpoint of the community anymore and I have a model of it that’s a lot less negative (in a sense of the utility values I assign to it). I still feel like I can provide an improvement, though.
I’d be very interested in knowing how to not write a Megapost half the times I comment, instead. I can’t help but to obsess over having been enough explicative or precise, writing this took me thirty-eight minutes by the clock.
Can I ask you more information on why do you think this could cause great harm to the community? I’d really rather not cause that and I’m relatively new here, so I might be wrong in my expectations on how people could react.
If we add expected technological change to the picture, climate change starts mattering even less. It’s plausible that this kind of conclusion, when presented in sufficient detail as the position of the forum, can then be framed as some sort of climate change denialism or an attitude of gross irresponsibility. If the position on this topic is spelled out, it presents an opportunity for an attack that would otherwise be unavailable.
The alternative of only saying more politically correct things is even worse, encourages motivated reasoning. To some extent my own comment is already a victim (and perpetrator) of this problem, as the potential for such an attack motivated me to avoid mentioning that climate change matters much less than otherwise because of AGI timelines, where with sufficient AGI-accelerated technological progress the whole issue becomes completely irrelevant in a reasonable time, unless we get some civilization-shattering catastrophy that delays AGI by more than decades (compared to a no-catastrophy scenario), in which case climate change would also be the least of our problems. So I chose to talk about the consensus and not the phenomenon itself, as AGI timeline considerations are not part of the standard discussion on the topic.
These arguments are not needed for my thesis that people who are not already working on climate change shouldn’t be concerned about it. And regulating climate change is still the cost-effective thing to do (probably), similarly to buying more of the things that are on a sale from a grocery store, no reason to abandon that activity. But the above point is a vital component of my understanding of seriousness of climate change as a civilizational concern, making it another order of magnitude less important than it would be otherwise.
It isn’t at all my intention to frame the position of the forum as one of gross irresponsibility, or to use the replies I’ll get to present the forum’s position as one which is pro climate change denialism (either in the sense that climate change isn’t happening, that it won’t be harmful, or that it shouldn’t be avoided).
I also won’t try to censor my post by including only statements that would be uncontroversial in a laymen discussion (I don’t like to use politically correct with that meaning), I believe this is one of the few sites where one can be both polite and accurate in his statements and also be perceived as so.
If you were instead worried that my question, the replies it got, or my planned future post, could be used by someone to attack the site or its users, I’d like to know more about it.
If it seems like a real risk, I’d take countermeasures such as avoid stating what the users beliefs are in my future post (NOTE: I’m not planning to link any beliefs I’d talk about to any specific users, my current plan is just to address the common beliefs about the subject and try to provide good informations and analysis about them) and prevent people from commenting on it. If what’s been already said could already be a likely source of damage, I could try to find ways to sink or delete this question and the replies I got.
So far the greatest potential risk I see is to create a toxic discussion between the members of this community.
I don’t want that to happen, of course, but feel that if the different positions aren’t explained and if any eventual errors in them aren’t corrected, toxic discussions could form every time related topics will be mentioned in the future in any post.
In another discussion that touched related topics, I wrote at least two comments that I still endorse and think have correct information and reasoning, but that I realised were unnecessarily angry in tone. Even worse, I realised my brain had switched on it’s “politic debate” mode as I was writing a third one. All around, the discussion felt to me as being remarkably more similar to the kind of discussion one can see on an average site rather than the level of discussion I usually see here, and I believe that an important part of that is that there wasn’t a diffused attempt to understand why people had different beliefs about the subject, and to figure out where the mistakes were.
The risk is of inciting a discussion that’s easy to exploit for a demagogue (whether they participate in the discussion or quote it long after the fact). You don’t have to personally be the demagogue, though many people get their inner demagogues awakened by an appropriate choice of topic. This indirectly creates a risk of motivated reasoning to self-censor the vulnerable aspects of the discussion. There’s also a conflict about acceptability and harm of self-censoring of any kind, though discussing this at a sufficient level of abstraction might be valuable.
My reply in the grandparent is half-motivated by noticing that I probably self-censored too much in the original comment on this post. When it’s just my own comment, however noncontroversial I expect its thesis to be, it’s not yet particularly exploitable. If it eventually turns into a recurring topic of discussion with well-written highly upvoted posts, or ideologically charged highly debated posts, that might be a problem.
(To be clear, I don’t know if the concern I’m discussing is close to what steven0461 was alluding to. Both the relevant aspect of truth and the harm that its discussion could cause might be different.)
I see. My current aim is to provide knowledge and reasoning that would actually lower the chances of such discussions happening, moving the subject of climate change away from ideology and political opinions.
I’ll try to think of ways to further reduce the likelihood of exploitable discussions and demagoguing happening in my post. Knowing what I plan to write, I don’t think such discussions would easily be created even if I didn’t, though.
For my attempt ending up as increasing the likelihood of future posts and that leading to harmful discussions… I think it would require people being so determined in arguing about this and ignoring all the points I’d try to make that the current lack of posts on the subject wouldn’t serve as a sufficient barrier to stop them from arguing about it now.
Lastly, the site seems to me as having been designed with very effective barriers about such things spiralling out of of control enough to make not trivial damage, though, since you have been on this site from a lot longer than me, I feel like I should value your intuition on the subject more than mine.
All considered, it feels to me that if I consider the risks in leaving the situation as it is and the benefits good reasoning on the subject could provide, what I should do is write my post and try to minimise the chances of the discussion on that turning out badly.
I’m not claiming that this is a likely scenario (it might be, but that’s not the point). It’s about the meaning, not the truth. The question is what kind of hazards specifically steven0461 might be referring to, regardless of whether such hazards are likely to occur in reality (“has the potential to cause great harm” is also not a claim about high credence, only about great harm).
Personally I feel the forum finds the topic uninteresting, so that it’s hard to spark a continuing discussion, even if someone decides to write a lot of good posts on it. I also don’t expect a nontrivial amount of toxic debate. But that’s the nature of risks, they can be a cause for concern even when unlikely to materialize.
I mostly agree with Vladimir’s comments. My wording may have been over-dramatic. I’ve been fascinated with these topics and have thought and read a lot about them, and my conclusions have been mostly in the direction of not feeling as much concern, but I think if a narrative like that became legibly a “rationalist meme” like how the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is a “rationalist meme”, it could be strategically quite harmful, and at any rate I don’t care about it as a subject of activism. On the other hand, I don’t want people to be wrong. I’ve been going back and forth on whether to write a Megapost, but I also have the thing where writing multiple sentences is like pulling teeth; let me know if you have a solution to that one.
I agree on your evaluation on the strategic harm this meme would cause if spread. I will have to be careful to not spread this narrative when I write about this subject, it’s not a risk I had already considered.
The likelihood of this narrative spreading doesn’t feel to me as lesser if I don’t write my post or if I didn’t wrote this question, though.
I posted this question specifically because I had noticed in several occasions comments that would support that narrative, especially if taken out of contest, also because they weren’t throughly explaining the thought processes behind them, and I think I’ve saw a number of conversations below average for users of this site, so others could get that idea as well. But after hearing the reasonings in these comments “not caring about climate change” is not how I see the viewpoint of the community anymore and I have a model of it that’s a lot less negative (in a sense of the utility values I assign to it). I still feel like I can provide an improvement, though.
I’d be very interested in knowing how to not write a Megapost half the times I comment, instead. I can’t help but to obsess over having been enough explicative or precise, writing this took me thirty-eight minutes by the clock.