Can’t you just put the situation in all reference classes where you think it fits and multiply your prior by the Bayes factor for each? Then, of course, you would have to discount for all of the correlation between the reference classes. That is, if there were two reference classes, you couldn’t use the full factors if one of them were already evidence of it being the other.
Or, if the reference class is “science-y Doomsday predictors”, then they’re almost certainly completely wrong. …
This is just the Doomsday Problem, which has been discussed ad infinitum. Yes, most of the time, people will be right, but if population grows exponentially and at some point everyone dies, then most people will be wrong. Which counts more?
That’s not the Doomsday I was talking about, just prediction of massive suffering due to one cause or another, be in overpopulation, nuclear war, biological war, food shortages, water shortages, oil shortages, phosphorus shortages, guano shortages, whale oil shortages, rare earth metal shortages, shortages of virtually every commodity, flu pandemic, AIDS pandemic, mass scale terrorism, workers’ revolutions, Barbarian takeover, Catholic takeover, Communist takeover, Islamic takeover, or whatnot, just to name a few.
Pretty much none of them caused the massive suffering and collapse of civilization predicted. Most do not involve end of humanity, so invocations of the antropic principle are misguided.
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.
Stories of collapse of the Roman Empire are greatly exaggerated.
A more accurate description would be that center of Roman civilization shifted from Italy to Eastern Mediterranean long before that (Wikipedia says that population of Rome fell from almost a million to mere 30 thousand in Late Antiquity, making it really just a minor town before the Barbarians moved in).
Yes, Western peripheries of the Empire were lost to Barbarians (who became increasingly civilized in process), and southern peripheries to Arabs (who also became increasingly civilized in process). In neither of these civilization really collapsed, and most importantly at least until battle of Manzikert in 1071 the central parts of Roman (Byzantine) Empire were doing just fine.
A more accurate description would be that center of Roman civilization shifted from Italy to Eastern Mediterranean long before that (Wikipedia says that population of Rome fell from almost a million to mere 30 thousand in Late Antiquity, making it really just a minor town before the Barbarians moved in).
Roman civilization had had several major centers. The ones in the West gradually ceased to exist. That’s the only sense in which the center of civilization “shifted”. Some wealthy citizens of the city of Rome may have fled east, but the vast majority of the population of the western empire (Italy, Gaul, Iberia, Britain, Africa, not to mention the western Balkans and adjacent areas which were also conquered by barbarians in the 4th century) were agricultural and could flee only if they left all their posessions behind.
IOW, the fall of population by 60-80% in these areas during the 4th and 5th centuries wasn’t accomplished by emigration. (Not to mention the immigration of barbarians.)
As for the city of Rome, it was sacked by barbarians in the years 410 and 455. WP suggests that its population declined from several hundred thousand to 80,000 during approximately the fifth century, but this is unsourced and I would like better information. At any rate, at the time of the 410 sack the population was already far below its 2nd century peak of 2 million. By the 4th century the emperors didn’t live there anymore (some of the 5th century ones apparently did though), so its decline started before the invasions. Still, it was much more than a “minor town” in 410, containing many riches to plunder and rich and noble people to hold for ransom.
All in all, the Roman Empire did collapse. In ~400 the Western parts of the empire existed as it had for >200 years. By 450 it was effectively restricted to Italy and parts of southern Gaul, and in 476 it was officially terminated by the death of the last Western Emperor.
Compare this map of the entire empire in 117 (not much different than in 400). That’s a loss, inside 60 years, of all of Europe west of the Balkans (including Italy), and all of Africa west of Egypt (the province of Africa, around Carthage, had been a major source of agricultural produce).
The Eastern empire did reconquer some of the West in mid 6th century. It lost half of that again by 600, and most of the other half by 650. In any case its rule there wasn’t very much like the original Roman system in terms of culture (the barbarians were the local rulers) or economics, taxes and representation.
at least until battle of Manzikert in 1071 the central parts of Roman (Byzantine) Empire were doing just fine.
Those central parts were on the order of one-twentieth the area ruled by Romans pre-collapse, and many of them were to the east of the original Empire. Just because they preserved unbroken political succession and the name of Romans doesn’t mean we should identify them with the original Empire.
In ~400 the Western parts of the empire existed as it had for >200 years. By 450 it was effectively restricted to Italy and parts of southern Gaul, and in 476 it was officially terminated by the death of the last Western Emperor.
Not quite accurate; in 376 a big bunch of barbarians half-forced, half-negotiated their way into the Empire, became disloyal subjects, and subsequently pillaged the Balkans and defeated killed an (Eastern) emperor and his army. So it’s better to say that the Western Empire declined almost entirely during the 100 years 376-476. (Politically, militarily, and on a local rule level this is true. Culturally the collapse did take longer in some places.)
Culturally the collapse did take longer in some places
It’d argue that culturally the Roman Empire didn’t end: today 200 million Europeans (and even more outside Europe) speak languages descended from Latin; to a first approximation, all writing is in the Roman script; and the Roman Catholic Church is the largest religion in areas and populations much greater than ancient Rome.
Oh and that last paragraph included c.15 words derived from Latin.
A few small, scattered, out of context, highly mutated facets of Roman culture have survived here and there. None of these, except Christianity, were among those most important to Romans, or those they saw as primarily distinguishing them from other cultures.
And RC Christianity, apart from the name, is vastly different today than in 500 CE (and both are vastly different from RC Christianity in, say, 1300 CE). A modern Catholic would certainly be considered a sinner and a heretic many times over in 500 CE, and probably vice versa as well (I haven’t checked).
Incidentally, we are corresponding in a language that has much more in common with old Germanic tongues than with Latin, but it doesn’t follow that we retain any of their culture. And here in Israel I talk and write a Hebrew which is quite similar to late Roman-era Hebrew—certainly more so than English is to German or Latin—and Orthodox Jews are the biggest religious segment in the country, but it doesn’t follow that we (the non-religious people) have anything in common with ancient Jewish culture. (Consider that the vast majority of Europeans don’t strictly follow RC rules either.)
Can’t you just put the situation in all reference classes where you think it fits and multiply your prior by the Bayes factor for each? Then, of course, you would have to discount for all of the correlation between the reference classes. That is, if there were two reference classes, you couldn’t use the full factors if one of them were already evidence of it being the other.
This is just the Doomsday Problem, which has been discussed ad infinitum. Yes, most of the time, people will be right, but if population grows exponentially and at some point everyone dies, then most people will be wrong. Which counts more?
That’s not the Doomsday I was talking about, just prediction of massive suffering due to one cause or another, be in overpopulation, nuclear war, biological war, food shortages, water shortages, oil shortages, phosphorus shortages, guano shortages, whale oil shortages, rare earth metal shortages, shortages of virtually every commodity, flu pandemic, AIDS pandemic, mass scale terrorism, workers’ revolutions, Barbarian takeover, Catholic takeover, Communist takeover, Islamic takeover, or whatnot, just to name a few.
Pretty much none of them caused the massive suffering and collapse of civilization predicted. Most do not involve end of humanity, so invocations of the antropic principle are misguided.
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.
Well, there was the (drawn out) fall of the Western Roman Empire. It was quite a collapse of civilization, with a lot of death and suffering.
Stories of collapse of the Roman Empire are greatly exaggerated.
A more accurate description would be that center of Roman civilization shifted from Italy to Eastern Mediterranean long before that (Wikipedia says that population of Rome fell from almost a million to mere 30 thousand in Late Antiquity, making it really just a minor town before the Barbarians moved in).
Yes, Western peripheries of the Empire were lost to Barbarians (who became increasingly civilized in process), and southern peripheries to Arabs (who also became increasingly civilized in process). In neither of these civilization really collapsed, and most importantly at least until battle of Manzikert in 1071 the central parts of Roman (Byzantine) Empire were doing just fine.
Roman civilization had had several major centers. The ones in the West gradually ceased to exist. That’s the only sense in which the center of civilization “shifted”. Some wealthy citizens of the city of Rome may have fled east, but the vast majority of the population of the western empire (Italy, Gaul, Iberia, Britain, Africa, not to mention the western Balkans and adjacent areas which were also conquered by barbarians in the 4th century) were agricultural and could flee only if they left all their posessions behind.
IOW, the fall of population by 60-80% in these areas during the 4th and 5th centuries wasn’t accomplished by emigration. (Not to mention the immigration of barbarians.)
As for the city of Rome, it was sacked by barbarians in the years 410 and 455. WP suggests that its population declined from several hundred thousand to 80,000 during approximately the fifth century, but this is unsourced and I would like better information. At any rate, at the time of the 410 sack the population was already far below its 2nd century peak of 2 million. By the 4th century the emperors didn’t live there anymore (some of the 5th century ones apparently did though), so its decline started before the invasions. Still, it was much more than a “minor town” in 410, containing many riches to plunder and rich and noble people to hold for ransom.
All in all, the Roman Empire did collapse. In ~400 the Western parts of the empire existed as it had for >200 years. By 450 it was effectively restricted to Italy and parts of southern Gaul, and in 476 it was officially terminated by the death of the last Western Emperor.
Compare this map of the entire empire in 117 (not much different than in 400). That’s a loss, inside 60 years, of all of Europe west of the Balkans (including Italy), and all of Africa west of Egypt (the province of Africa, around Carthage, had been a major source of agricultural produce).
The Eastern empire did reconquer some of the West in mid 6th century. It lost half of that again by 600, and most of the other half by 650. In any case its rule there wasn’t very much like the original Roman system in terms of culture (the barbarians were the local rulers) or economics, taxes and representation.
Those central parts were on the order of one-twentieth the area ruled by Romans pre-collapse, and many of them were to the east of the original Empire. Just because they preserved unbroken political succession and the name of Romans doesn’t mean we should identify them with the original Empire.
Not quite accurate; in 376 a big bunch of barbarians half-forced, half-negotiated their way into the Empire, became disloyal subjects, and subsequently pillaged the Balkans and defeated killed an (Eastern) emperor and his army. So it’s better to say that the Western Empire declined almost entirely during the 100 years 376-476. (Politically, militarily, and on a local rule level this is true. Culturally the collapse did take longer in some places.)
It’d argue that culturally the Roman Empire didn’t end: today 200 million Europeans (and even more outside Europe) speak languages descended from Latin; to a first approximation, all writing is in the Roman script; and the Roman Catholic Church is the largest religion in areas and populations much greater than ancient Rome.
Oh and that last paragraph included c.15 words derived from Latin.
A few small, scattered, out of context, highly mutated facets of Roman culture have survived here and there. None of these, except Christianity, were among those most important to Romans, or those they saw as primarily distinguishing them from other cultures.
And RC Christianity, apart from the name, is vastly different today than in 500 CE (and both are vastly different from RC Christianity in, say, 1300 CE). A modern Catholic would certainly be considered a sinner and a heretic many times over in 500 CE, and probably vice versa as well (I haven’t checked).
Incidentally, we are corresponding in a language that has much more in common with old Germanic tongues than with Latin, but it doesn’t follow that we retain any of their culture. And here in Israel I talk and write a Hebrew which is quite similar to late Roman-era Hebrew—certainly more so than English is to German or Latin—and Orthodox Jews are the biggest religious segment in the country, but it doesn’t follow that we (the non-religious people) have anything in common with ancient Jewish culture. (Consider that the vast majority of Europeans don’t strictly follow RC rules either.)