I think this has less to do with the general factor of doom and more with priming on a specific preferable solution.
Experts who think our effort to fight climate change are unsufficient usually have an actual idea of what policy we need to implement instead. They think we need to implement this idea and they treat all the potential damages as a reason to implement this idea. Thus alternative ideas such as geoengineering are competing with their idea. And as they prefere their idea to geoengineering, they tend not to support geoengineering.
And yes, I think there is a similar thing going on with AI safety. People have a solution they prefere (a group of researchers cracking the hard technical problem of alignment). And thus they are pessimistic towards alternative approaches such as regulating the industry.
I am not aware of any single policy that can solve climate change by itself. What policy do these experts support? Let’s say it is to eliminate all coal power stations in the world by magic. That is at best 20% of global emission, so isn’t that policy synergistic with geoengineering? To think your favorite policy is competing with geoengineering, that policy should be capable of solving 100% of the problem, but I am not aware of existence of any such policy whatsoever.
Doesn’t have to be a singular thing. The policy may consist of multiple ideas, this doesn’t change the reasoning.
Geoengineering as an approach competes with reducing carbon emissions as an approach, in a sense that the more effective is geoengineering the less important it is to reduce carbon emissions. If you believe that reducing carbon emissions is very important you naturally believe that geoengineering isn’t very effective. Mind you, it doesn’t even have to be faulty reasoning.
I think this has less to do with the general factor of doom and more with priming on a specific preferable solution.
Experts who think our effort to fight climate change are unsufficient usually have an actual idea of what policy we need to implement instead. They think we need to implement this idea and they treat all the potential damages as a reason to implement this idea. Thus alternative ideas such as geoengineering are competing with their idea. And as they prefere their idea to geoengineering, they tend not to support geoengineering.
And yes, I think there is a similar thing going on with AI safety. People have a solution they prefere (a group of researchers cracking the hard technical problem of alignment). And thus they are pessimistic towards alternative approaches such as regulating the industry.
I am not aware of any single policy that can solve climate change by itself. What policy do these experts support? Let’s say it is to eliminate all coal power stations in the world by magic. That is at best 20% of global emission, so isn’t that policy synergistic with geoengineering? To think your favorite policy is competing with geoengineering, that policy should be capable of solving 100% of the problem, but I am not aware of existence of any such policy whatsoever.
Doesn’t have to be a singular thing. The policy may consist of multiple ideas, this doesn’t change the reasoning.
Geoengineering as an approach competes with reducing carbon emissions as an approach, in a sense that the more effective is geoengineering the less important it is to reduce carbon emissions. If you believe that reducing carbon emissions is very important you naturally believe that geoengineering isn’t very effective. Mind you, it doesn’t even have to be faulty reasoning.