Nevertheless, if most everyone in the world is affected by a such a disaster, then a large fraction of people will be right, so the point still applies.
On the other hand, if many disasters are predicted and (at most) one actually happens, then averaging over separate predictions or scenarios (instead of over people), we should expect any one scenario to be very improbable.
Why does that measure matter? You care about the risk of any existential threat. The fact that it happened by grey goo rather than Friendliness failure is little consolation.
It may matter because, if many scenarios have costly solutions that are very specific and don’t help at all with other scenarios, and you can only afford to build a few solutions, you don’t know which ones to choose.
Yes, I know that reasons exist to distinguish them, but I was asking for a reason relevant to the present discussion, which was discussing how to assess total existential risk.
Well, it has to do more with the original discussion. If you’re going to discount doomsday scenarios by putting them in appropriate reference classes and so forth, then either you automatically discount all predictions of collapse (which seems dangerous and foolish); or you have to explain very well indeed why you’re treating one scenario a bit seriously after dismissing ten others out of hand.
Or, if the reference class is “science-y Doomsday predictors”, then they’re almost certainly completely wrong. See Paul Ehrlich (overpopulation), and Matt Simmons (peak oil) for some examples, both treated extremely seriously by mainstream media at time. So far in spite of countless cases of science predicting doom and gloom, not a single one of them turned out to be true, usually not just barely enough to be discounted by anthropic principle, but spectacularly so. Cornucopians were virtually always right.
taw was saying that you should discount existential risk as such because it (the entire class of scenarios) is historically wrong. So it is the existential risk across all scenarios that was relevant.
We’d see the exact same type of evidence today if a doomsday (of any kind) were coming, so this kind of evidence is not sufficient.
I thought I addressed this with “usually not just barely enough to be discounted by anthropic principle, but spectacularly so” part. Anthropic principle style of reasoning can only be applied to disasters that have binary distributions—wipe out every observer in the universe (or at least on Earth), or don’t happen at all—or at least extremely skewed power law distributions.
I don’t see any evidence that most disasters would follow such distribution. I expect any non-negligible chance of destruction of humanity by nuclear warfare implying an almost certainty of limited scale nuclear warfare with millions dying every couple of years.
I think anthropic principle reasoning is so overused here, and so sloppily, that we’d be better off throwing it away completely.
It may matter because, if many scenarios have costly solutions that are very specific and don’t help at all with other scenarios, and you can only afford to build a few solutions, you don’t know which ones to choose.
This is a good point. Fortunately as it happens we can just create an FAI and pray unto Him to ‘deliver us from evil’.
A relative absence of smaller disasters must count as evidence against the views of those predicting large disasters. There are some disasters which are all-or-nothing—but most disasters are variable in scale. We have had some wars and pandemics—but civilization has mostly brushed them off so far.
What absence of smaller disasters? Why don’t the brushes with nuclear war and other things you mention count?
Also, civilizations have fallen. Not in the sense of their genes dying out [1] but in the sense of losing the technological level they previously had. The end of the Islamic Golden Age, China after the 15th century, the fall of Rome (I remember reading one statistic that said that the glass production peak during the Roman empire wasn’t surpassed until the 19th century, and it wasn’t from lack of demand.)
[1] unless you count the Neanderthals, which were probably more intelligent than h. sapiens. And all the other species in genus homo.
Here’s a summary of the different species in homo—note the brain volumes. (I didn’t mean to say all were intelligent, just that they were all near-human and went extinct, but the Neanderthals were likely more intelligent.)
Neanderthals, according to Jordan (2001), appear to have had psychological traits that worked well in their early history but finally placed them at a long-term disadvantage with regards to modern humans. Jordan is of the opinion that the Neanderthal mind was sufficiently different from that of Homo sapiens to have been “alien” in the sense of thinking differently from that of modern humans, despite the obvious fact that Neanderthals were highly intelligent, with a brain as large or larger than our own. This theory is supported by what Neanderthals possessed, and just as importantly, by what they lacked, in cultural attributes and manufactured artifacts.
The WP table you link to gives these cranial volume ranges: H. sapiens, 1000-1850. H. neanderthalensis, 1200-1900.
Given the size of the ranges and > 70% overlap, the difference between 1850 and 1900 at the upper end doesn’t seem necessarily significant. Besides, brain size correlates strongly with body size, and Neanderthals were more massive, weren’t they?
More importantly, if the contemporary variation for H. sapiens (i.e. us) is all or most of that huge range (1000-1850 cc), do we know how it correlates with various measures of intellectual and other capabilities? Especially if you throw away the upper and lower 10% of variation.
It wasn’t just the brain size, but the greater technological and cultural achievements that are evidenced in their remains, which are listed and cited in the articles.
By greater do you mean greater than those of H. sapiens who lived at the same time? AFAICS, the Wikipedia articles seem to state the opposite: that Neanderthals, late ones at least, were technologically and culturally inferior to H. sapiens of the same time.
The paragraph right after the one you quoted from your second link states:
There once was a time when both human types shared essentially the same Mousterian tool kit and neither human type had a definite competitive advantage, as evidenced by the shifting Homo sapiens/Neanderthal borderland in the Middle East. But finally Homo sapiens started to attain behavioural or cultural adaptations that allowed “moderns” an advantage.
The following paragraphs (through to the end of that section of the article) detail tools and cultural or social innovations that were (by conjecture) exclusive to H. sapiens. There are no specific things listed that were exclusive to Neanderthals. What “greater achievements” do you refer to?
Also, I see no basis (at least in the WP article) for “the obvious fact that Neanderthals were highly intelligent”, except for brain size which is hardly conclusive. Why can’t we conclude that they were considerably less intelligent than their contemporary H. sapiens?
Okay, I confess, it’s above my pay grade at this point: all I can do is defer to predominant theory in the field that Neanderthals were more intelligent at the level of the individual.
Note that this doesn’t mean they were more “collectively intelligent”. If they were better at problem solving on their own, but weren’t as social as humans, they may have failed to pass knowledge between people and ended up re-inventing the wheel too much.
predominant theory in the field that Neanderthals were more intelligent at the level of the individual.
But that’s just what I’m asking about! Can you please give me some references that present or at least mention this theory? Because the WP articles don’t even seem to mention it, and I can’t find anything like it on Google.
Yes, but they also had more massive bodies, possibly 30% more massive than modern humans. I’m not sure that they had a higher brain/body mass ratio than we do and even if they had, a difference on the order of 10% isn’t strong evidence when comparing intelligence between species.
Maybe their additional brain mass was used to give them really good instincts instead of the more general purpose circuits we have.
This is a quote from Wikipedia supposedly paraphrasing Jordan, P. (2001) Neanderthal: Neanderthal Man and the Story of Human Origins.. “Since the Neanderthals evidently never used watercraft, but prior and/or arguably more primitive editions of humanity did, there is argument that Neanderthals represent a highly specialized side branch of the human tree, relying more on physiological adaptation than psychological adaptation in daily life than “moderns”. Specialization has been seen before in other hominims, such as Paranthropus boisei which evidently was adapted to eat rough vegetation.”
Note that this doesn’t mean they were more “collectively intelligent”. If they were better at problem solving on their own, but weren’t as social as humans, they may have failed to pass knowledge between people and ended up re-inventing the wheel too much.
Given the circumstances that would have been quite some achievement!
More importantly, if the contemporary variation for H. sapiens (i.e. us) is all or most of that huge range (1000-1850 cc), do we know how it correlates with various measures of intellectual and other capabilities?
This is still civilisation’s very first attempt, really. I did acknowledge the existence of wars and pandemics. However, disasters that never happened (such as nuclear war) are challenging to accurately assess the probability of.
Nevertheless, if most everyone in the world is affected by a such a disaster, then a large fraction of people will be right, so the point still applies.
On the other hand, if many disasters are predicted and (at most) one actually happens, then averaging over separate predictions or scenarios (instead of over people), we should expect any one scenario to be very improbable.
Why does that measure matter? You care about the risk of any existential threat. The fact that it happened by grey goo rather than Friendliness failure is little consolation.
It may matter because, if many scenarios have costly solutions that are very specific and don’t help at all with other scenarios, and you can only afford to build a few solutions, you don’t know which ones to choose.
Yes, I know that reasons exist to distinguish them, but I was asking for a reason relevant to the present discussion, which was discussing how to assess total existential risk.
Well, it has to do more with the original discussion. If you’re going to discount doomsday scenarios by putting them in appropriate reference classes and so forth, then either you automatically discount all predictions of collapse (which seems dangerous and foolish); or you have to explain very well indeed why you’re treating one scenario a bit seriously after dismissing ten others out of hand.
The original discussion was on this point:
taw was saying that you should discount existential risk as such because it (the entire class of scenarios) is historically wrong. So it is the existential risk across all scenarios that was relevant.
We’d see the exact same type of evidence today if a doomsday (of any kind) were coming, so this kind of evidence is not sufficient.
I thought I addressed this with “usually not just barely enough to be discounted by anthropic principle, but spectacularly so” part. Anthropic principle style of reasoning can only be applied to disasters that have binary distributions—wipe out every observer in the universe (or at least on Earth), or don’t happen at all—or at least extremely skewed power law distributions.
I don’t see any evidence that most disasters would follow such distribution. I expect any non-negligible chance of destruction of humanity by nuclear warfare implying an almost certainty of limited scale nuclear warfare with millions dying every couple of years.
I think anthropic principle reasoning is so overused here, and so sloppily, that we’d be better off throwing it away completely.
This is a good point. Fortunately as it happens we can just create an FAI and pray unto Him to ‘deliver us from evil’.
A relative absence of smaller disasters must count as evidence against the views of those predicting large disasters. There are some disasters which are all-or-nothing—but most disasters are variable in scale. We have had some wars and pandemics—but civilization has mostly brushed them off so far.
What absence of smaller disasters? Why don’t the brushes with nuclear war and other things you mention count?
Also, civilizations have fallen. Not in the sense of their genes dying out [1] but in the sense of losing the technological level they previously had. The end of the Islamic Golden Age, China after the 15th century, the fall of Rome (I remember reading one statistic that said that the glass production peak during the Roman empire wasn’t surpassed until the 19th century, and it wasn’t from lack of demand.)
[1] unless you count the Neanderthals, which were probably more intelligent than h. sapiens. And all the other species in genus homo.
Really? Can you give more detail (or a link) please?
Here’s a summary of the different species in homo—note the brain volumes. (I didn’t mean to say all were intelligent, just that they were all near-human and went extinct, but the Neanderthals were likely more intelligent.)
And here:
The WP table you link to gives these cranial volume ranges: H. sapiens, 1000-1850. H. neanderthalensis, 1200-1900.
Given the size of the ranges and > 70% overlap, the difference between 1850 and 1900 at the upper end doesn’t seem necessarily significant. Besides, brain size correlates strongly with body size, and Neanderthals were more massive, weren’t they?
More importantly, if the contemporary variation for H. sapiens (i.e. us) is all or most of that huge range (1000-1850 cc), do we know how it correlates with various measures of intellectual and other capabilities? Especially if you throw away the upper and lower 10% of variation.
It wasn’t just the brain size, but the greater technological and cultural achievements that are evidenced in their remains, which are listed and cited in the articles.
By greater do you mean greater than those of H. sapiens who lived at the same time? AFAICS, the Wikipedia articles seem to state the opposite: that Neanderthals, late ones at least, were technologically and culturally inferior to H. sapiens of the same time.
The paragraph right after the one you quoted from your second link states:
The following paragraphs (through to the end of that section of the article) detail tools and cultural or social innovations that were (by conjecture) exclusive to H. sapiens. There are no specific things listed that were exclusive to Neanderthals. What “greater achievements” do you refer to?
Also, I see no basis (at least in the WP article) for “the obvious fact that Neanderthals were highly intelligent”, except for brain size which is hardly conclusive. Why can’t we conclude that they were considerably less intelligent than their contemporary H. sapiens?
Okay, I confess, it’s above my pay grade at this point: all I can do is defer to predominant theory in the field that Neanderthals were more intelligent at the level of the individual.
Note that this doesn’t mean they were more “collectively intelligent”. If they were better at problem solving on their own, but weren’t as social as humans, they may have failed to pass knowledge between people and ended up re-inventing the wheel too much.
But that’s just what I’m asking about! Can you please give me some references that present or at least mention this theory? Because the WP articles don’t even seem to mention it, and I can’t find anything like it on Google.
The theory is that they had bigger brains—e.g. see the reference at:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/165/how_inevitable_was_modern_human_civilization_data/124q
Yes, but they also had more massive bodies, possibly 30% more massive than modern humans. I’m not sure that they had a higher brain/body mass ratio than we do and even if they had, a difference on the order of 10% isn’t strong evidence when comparing intelligence between species.
Maybe their additional brain mass was used to give them really good instincts instead of the more general purpose circuits we have.
This is a quote from Wikipedia supposedly paraphrasing Jordan, P. (2001) Neanderthal: Neanderthal Man and the Story of Human Origins.. “Since the Neanderthals evidently never used watercraft, but prior and/or arguably more primitive editions of humanity did, there is argument that Neanderthals represent a highly specialized side branch of the human tree, relying more on physiological adaptation than psychological adaptation in daily life than “moderns”. Specialization has been seen before in other hominims, such as Paranthropus boisei which evidently was adapted to eat rough vegetation.”
Given the circumstances that would have been quite some achievement!
.2
Can you expand please? Exactly what measurement is correlated with cranial capacity at .2?
This is still civilisation’s very first attempt, really. I did acknowledge the existence of wars and pandemics. However, disasters that never happened (such as nuclear war) are challenging to accurately assess the probability of.