Let’s take the outside view for a second. After all, if you want to save the planet from AIs, you have to do a lot of thinking! You have to learn all sorts of stuff and prove it and just generally solve a lot of eye-crossing philosophy problems which just read like slippery bullshit. But if you want to save the planet from asteroids, you can conveniently do the whole thing without ever leaving your own field and applying all the existing engineering and astronomy techniques. Why, you even found a justification for NASA continuing to exist (and larding out pork all over the country) and better yet, for the nuclear weapons program to be funded even more (after all, what do you think you’ll be doing when the Shuttle gets there?).
Obviously, this isn’t any sort of proof that anti-asteroid programs are worthless self-interested rent-seeking government pork.
But it sure does seem suspicious that continuing business as usual to the tune of billions can save the entire species from certain doom.
Yes, I agree that if a politician or government official tells you the most effective thing you can do to prevent asteroids from destroying the planet is “keep NASA at current funding levels and increase funding for nuclear weapons research” then you should be very suspicious.
I think you’re missing the point; I actually do think NASA is one of the best organizations to handle anti-asteroid missions and nukes are a vital tool since the more gradual techniques may well take more time than we have.
Your application of cynicism proves everything, and so proves nothing. Every strategy can be—rightly—pointed out to benefit some group and disadvantage some other group.
The only time this wouldn’t apply is if someone claiming a particular risk is higher than estimated and was doing absolutely nothing about it whatsoever and so couldn’t benefit from attempts to address it. And in that case, one would be vastly more justified in discounting them because they themselves don’t seem to actually believe it rather than believing them because this particular use of Outside View doesn’t penalize them.
(Or to put it another more philosophical way: what sort of agent believes that X is a valuable problem to work on, and also doesn’t believe that whatever Y approach he is taking is the best approach for him to be taking? One can of course believe that there are better approaches for other people - ‘if I were a mathematical genius, I could be making more progress on FAI than if I were an ordinary person whose main skills are OK writing and research’ - or for counterfactual selves with stronger willpower, but for oneself? This is analogous to Moore’s paradox or the epistemic question, what sort of agent doesn’t believe that his current beliefs are the best for him to hold? “It’s raining outside, but I don’t believe it is.” So this leads to a remarkable result: for every agent which is trying to accomplish something, we can cynically say ‘how very convenient that the approach you think is best is the one you happen to be using! How awfully awfully convenient! Not.’ And since we can say it for every agent equally, the argument is entirely useless.)
Incidentally:
it does seem like FAI has a special attraction for armchair rationalists:
I think you badly overstate your case here. Most armchair rationalists seem to much prefer activities like… saving the world by debunking theism (again). How many issues have Skeptic or Skeptical Inquirer devoted to discussing FAI?
There’s a much more obvious reason why many LWers would find FAI interesting other than the concept being some sort of attractive death spiral for armchair rationalists in general...
My suspicion isn’t because the recommended strategy has some benefits, it’s because it has no costs. It would not be surprising if an asteroid-prevention plan used NASA and nukes. It would be surprising if it didn’t require us to do anything particularly hard. What’s suspicious about SIAI is how often their strategic goals happen to be exactly the things you might suspect the people involved would enjoy doing anyway (e.g. writing blog posts promoting their ideas) instead of difficult things at which they might conspicuously fail.
To be fair though, a lot of us would learn the tricky philosophy stuff anyway just because it seems interesting. It is pretty possible that our obsession with FAI stems partially from the fact that the steps needed to solve such a problem appeal to us. Not to say that FAI isn’t EXTREMELY important by its own merits, but there are a number of existential risks that pose relatively similar threat levels that we don’t talk about night and day.
My actual take is that UFAI is actually a much larger threat than other existential risks, but also that working on FAI is fairly obviously the chosen path, not on EV grounds, but on the grounds of matching our skills and interests.
“But it sure does seem suspicious that continuing business as usual can save the entire species from certain doom.”
Doesn’t this sentence apply here? What exactly is this community doing that’s so unusual (other than giving EY money)?
The frame of “saving humanity from certain doom” seems to serve little point other than a cynical way of getting certain varieties of young people excited.
As far as I can tell, SI long ago started avoiding that frame because the frame had deleterious effects, but if we wanted to excite anyone, it was ourselves, not other young people.
Saying that you save the world by exploring many unusual and controversial ideas is like saying you save the world by eating ice cream and playing video games.
Isn’t “exploring many unusual and controversial ideas” what scientists usually do? (Ok, maybe sometimes good scientist do it...) Don’t you think that science could contribute to saving the world?
What I am saying is “exploring unusual and controversial ideas” is the fun part of science (along with a whole lot of drudgery). You don’t get points for doing fun things you would rather be doing anyways.
Some of the potentially useful soft sciences research is controversial. But essentially no hard sciences research is both (a) controversial and (b) likely to contribute massive improvement in human well-being.
Even something like researching the next generation of nuclear power plants is controversial only in the sense that all funding of basic research is “controversial.”
Nuclear science is controversial for the same reason that equal-access marriage is controversial: Because there are people who have some opinions that cannot be changed by rational argument.
There’s some ambiguity in your use of the word “science.” Nuclear engineering is controversial (i.e. building and running nuclear plants is politically controversial).
But the post I was responding to was about research. In terms of political controversy, I suspect that nuclear researchers receive essentially no hate mail, especially compared to sociologists researching child-rearing outcomes among opposite-sex and same-sex couples.
Nuclear researchers run reactors. It’s pretty much the only commercially viable way to test the effects of neutron bombardment on materials. They typically aren’t power plants, because steam turbines are a lot more work to operate and research reactors are typically intermittent and low power (in terms of the electrical grid)
Over-hyped BS. There are regular reactors, and there are breeder reactors (fast neutron reactors), both can use uranium but only the latter type can use thorium. The latter type, also, incidentally, uses a lot less uranium than the former, and can use depleted uranium. The cost of fuel is of no consequence and all the safety issues are virtually identical for fast neutron reactors using thorium and using uranium (and for both, are expected to be significantly more severe than for regular water moderated reactors) There’s a lot of depleted uranium laying around costing negative $ . Not thorium, though.
Pretty much, yeah. The hexafloride is somewhat harder to contain, though. And expect long-term brain damage from the block of lead.
(The decay chain of U-238 is mostly alpha and beta, which are completely absorbed by paper wrapping. There is some gamma radiation in some of the decay steps, but not significantly more than background for any reasonable amount. 18,500 metric tons of the stuff might have a total activity somewhat higher (=2.74e15 Bq), or one mole of helium produced every 70 years from direct decay alone, and a few mA’s worth of electron emissions once the decay products reach equilibrium. It looks like the half-thickness for ‘uranium’ is about 7mm for Co-60 gamma emissions.
Doing the calculus, the total unshielded activity at the surface of the block would be equal to the integral of (total activity per unit thickness {14.8 Bq/mg; DU has a density of 18.5 G/cc}*percentage unshielded at that depth)
*{(}1/2)}%5E{(1000x/7cM)}dx)
(1000cM^2 is the cross sectional area, 1000mG/G is a conversion factor, making the first term the total activity per thickness; second term is the percentage unshielded calculated by raising 1⁄2 to the power of the number of half thicknesses of uranium above the layer in question. X is in cM.)
Overall though, the stochastic effects of ionizing radiation exposure are close enough to zero that studies of the effects of occupational exposure do not find conclusive correlations of long term low-level exposure to disease.
And expect long-term brain damage from the block of lead.
I don’t believe you.
It’s wrapped in paper (your stipulation) and under the bed (my stipulation). Are you asserting that the wrapped, undisturbed block of counterfactual lead under my bed is a significant airborne pollution threat?
Overall though, the stochastic effects of ionizing radiation exposure are close enough to zero that studies of the effects of occupational exposure do not find conclusive correlations of long term low-level exposure to disease.
I wasn’t wrapping the lead in paper, but that wasn’t fair of me- because frankly, inhaled DU particles ARE much worse than inhaled lead particles, because the ‘wrapped in paper’ (or painted, I suppose) is significant. DU munitions and armor aren’t ‘safe’ in the sense of failing to contaminate the nearby area, but neither are lead munitions.
I’d be more concerned about the fire hazard if you scratch it (by your depleted uranium paperweight). It’s like lighter sparkler on steroids, from what i’ve heard. The activity in practice would also depend to how depleted it is (they don’t deplete all the way to 0% u-235), and it better not be “dirty” depleted uranium from fuel re-processing. edit: also to how old it is, as the decay chain won’t be in equilibrium. It will actually get more radioactive over time.
By the way. Depleted uranium is actually used as radiation shielding for e.g. medical irradiation sources, as well as for tank armor, and everyone knows about the ammunition.
For fun: read the parent as implying that wedrifid has slept on top of a cubic meter of lead for decades.
It’s so soft! There is no other metal that I’ve slept on for decades that is more comfortable than lead.
I haven’t tried a water bed filled with mercury yet. That actually has potential. The extra mass would absorb the impact or rapid movement of a human more smoothly while maintaining malleable fluidity over a slightly longer timescale. Plus if you attach a glass tube near the head of the bed you can calculate your weight based off changes in mmHg!
It’s not the mass, it’s the viscosity. The higher density would result in a ‘firmer’ feel, since less immersion would be needed for the same amount of buoyant force.
A more reasonable option might be Gallium-which would be firm on initial contact, but then liquefy.
No, really, it’s both. I edited out out viscosity since either would be sufficient and I happened to be certain about mass but merely confident about viscosity.
I assume that the primary mechanism by which mass absorbs impact would be inertia.
Malleable is a property that liquids don’t have, so what did you mean by ‘maintaining malleable fluidity’ that doesn’t also result from having the liquid in a closed container with some airspace and some elasticity? How would more inertia help absorb impact (spread the impulse out over a longer period of time)?
Accidentally rupturing a tank of mercury doesn’t usually kill a worker and injure a dozen. A tank of very nasty mercury compound might.
Actually, to steer back to topic which is (laudably tolerated here) dislike of rationalists, this argument can make good tiny pet example of ‘rationalist’ vs ‘experts’ debates.
Rationalists believe by special powers of rationality they are unusually less prone to for example nuclear = scary bias, and say that uranium wrapped in paper safe as lead etc etc. (By the way, also false, uranium is a serious fire hazard). There’s a lot of such ‘rationalists’ around, not just here but everywhere, that’s where people get misconceptions like yours from.
Experts actually know the matters to conclude something. (Not that I am a nuclear expert, of course, I only know overall overview of the process, and would defer to experts)
Frankly, rupturing any tank of just about any hexafluoride compound would be expected to be pretty dangerous.
I’m by no means a nuclear expert, I was just a nuke plant mechanic. The reason I am unafraid of radiation isn’t because the fearmongering is baseless, it’s because I’m enough of a lay expert to know the magnitude of the actual risks.
How is elemental uranium a fire hazard? Does flame spread across it faster that it spreads across wood paneling? I never considered that kind of hazard to be important, because uranium-as-she-is-used is safe enough from fire.
Actually, to steer back to topic which is (laudably tolerated here) dislike of rationalists, this argument can make good tiny pet example of ‘rationalist’ vs ‘experts’ debates.
You can tell your pet “‘rationalist’ vs ‘expert’” example has issues when it can replaced with “‘rationalist’ vs ‘anyone with a net connection and 30 spare seconds’” and it applies just as well.
Experts actually know the matters to conclude something. (Not that I am a nuclear expert, of course, I only know overall overview of the process, and would defer to experts)
You realise, of course, that this places you squarely on the ‘rationalist’ side of that artificial dichotomy?
(By the way, also false, uranium is a serious fire hazard).
Not to mention it’ll do much more damage to your toe if you drop it on yourself—so much heavier!
You realise, of course, that this places you squarely on the ‘rationalist’ side of that artificial dichotomy?
I would defer to experts, I said. This community has a well respected founder apparently leading it by example NOT to defer to experts, but instead go on how experts are wrong, on basis on something terribly shaky. (quantum sequence).
You have to learn all sorts of stuff and prove it and just generally solve a lot of eye-crossing philosophy problems which just read like slippery bullshit.
The enormous problem with philosophy problems is this. Philosophy fails a lot, historically. Fails terribly.
Let’s take the outside view for a second. After all, if you want to save the planet from AIs, you have to do a lot of thinking! You have to learn all sorts of stuff and prove it and just generally solve a lot of eye-crossing philosophy problems which just read like slippery bullshit. But if you want to save the planet from asteroids, you can conveniently do the whole thing without ever leaving your own field and applying all the existing engineering and astronomy techniques. Why, you even found a justification for NASA continuing to exist (and larding out pork all over the country) and better yet, for the nuclear weapons program to be funded even more (after all, what do you think you’ll be doing when the Shuttle gets there?).
Obviously, this isn’t any sort of proof that anti-asteroid programs are worthless self-interested rent-seeking government pork.
But it sure does seem suspicious that continuing business as usual to the tune of billions can save the entire species from certain doom.
Yes, I agree that if a politician or government official tells you the most effective thing you can do to prevent asteroids from destroying the planet is “keep NASA at current funding levels and increase funding for nuclear weapons research” then you should be very suspicious.
I think you’re missing the point; I actually do think NASA is one of the best organizations to handle anti-asteroid missions and nukes are a vital tool since the more gradual techniques may well take more time than we have.
Your application of cynicism proves everything, and so proves nothing. Every strategy can be—rightly—pointed out to benefit some group and disadvantage some other group.
The only time this wouldn’t apply is if someone claiming a particular risk is higher than estimated and was doing absolutely nothing about it whatsoever and so couldn’t benefit from attempts to address it. And in that case, one would be vastly more justified in discounting them because they themselves don’t seem to actually believe it rather than believing them because this particular use of Outside View doesn’t penalize them.
(Or to put it another more philosophical way: what sort of agent believes that X is a valuable problem to work on, and also doesn’t believe that whatever Y approach he is taking is the best approach for him to be taking? One can of course believe that there are better approaches for other people - ‘if I were a mathematical genius, I could be making more progress on FAI than if I were an ordinary person whose main skills are OK writing and research’ - or for counterfactual selves with stronger willpower, but for oneself? This is analogous to Moore’s paradox or the epistemic question, what sort of agent doesn’t believe that his current beliefs are the best for him to hold? “It’s raining outside, but I don’t believe it is.” So this leads to a remarkable result: for every agent which is trying to accomplish something, we can cynically say ‘how very convenient that the approach you think is best is the one you happen to be using! How awfully awfully convenient! Not.’ And since we can say it for every agent equally, the argument is entirely useless.)
Incidentally:
I think you badly overstate your case here. Most armchair rationalists seem to much prefer activities like… saving the world by debunking theism (again). How many issues have Skeptic or Skeptical Inquirer devoted to discussing FAI?
There’s a much more obvious reason why many LWers would find FAI interesting other than the concept being some sort of attractive death spiral for armchair rationalists in general...
My suspicion isn’t because the recommended strategy has some benefits, it’s because it has no costs. It would not be surprising if an asteroid-prevention plan used NASA and nukes. It would be surprising if it didn’t require us to do anything particularly hard. What’s suspicious about SIAI is how often their strategic goals happen to be exactly the things you might suspect the people involved would enjoy doing anyway (e.g. writing blog posts promoting their ideas) instead of difficult things at which they might conspicuously fail.
FHI, for what it’s worth, does say that simulation shutdown is underestimated but doesn’t suggest doing anything.
To be fair though, a lot of us would learn the tricky philosophy stuff anyway just because it seems interesting. It is pretty possible that our obsession with FAI stems partially from the fact that the steps needed to solve such a problem appeal to us. Not to say that FAI isn’t EXTREMELY important by its own merits, but there are a number of existential risks that pose relatively similar threat levels that we don’t talk about night and day.
My actual take is that UFAI is actually a much larger threat than other existential risks, but also that working on FAI is fairly obviously the chosen path, not on EV grounds, but on the grounds of matching our skills and interests.
“But it sure does seem suspicious that continuing business as usual can save the entire species from certain doom.”
Doesn’t this sentence apply here? What exactly is this community doing that’s so unusual (other than giving EY money)?
The frame of “saving humanity from certain doom” seems to serve little point other than a cynical way of getting certain varieties of young people excited.
As far as I can tell, SI long ago started avoiding that frame because the frame had deleterious effects, but if we wanted to excite anyone, it was ourselves, not other young people.
Exploring many unusual and controversial ideas? Certainly we get criticized for focusing on things like FAI often enough, it should at least be true!
Saying that you save the world by exploring many unusual and controversial ideas is like saying you save the world by eating ice cream and playing video games.
Isn’t “exploring many unusual and controversial ideas” what scientists usually do? (Ok, maybe sometimes good scientist do it...) Don’t you think that science could contribute to saving the world?
What I am saying is “exploring unusual and controversial ideas” is the fun part of science (along with a whole lot of drudgery). You don’t get points for doing fun things you would rather be doing anyways.
Actually, I think you get points for doing things that work, whether they are fun or not.
Some of the potentially useful soft sciences research is controversial. But essentially no hard sciences research is both (a) controversial and (b) likely to contribute massive improvement in human well-being.
Even something like researching the next generation of nuclear power plants is controversial only in the sense that all funding of basic research is “controversial.”
Nuclear science is controversial for the same reason that equal-access marriage is controversial: Because there are people who have some opinions that cannot be changed by rational argument.
There’s some ambiguity in your use of the word “science.” Nuclear engineering is controversial (i.e. building and running nuclear plants is politically controversial).
But the post I was responding to was about research. In terms of political controversy, I suspect that nuclear researchers receive essentially no hate mail, especially compared to sociologists researching child-rearing outcomes among opposite-sex and same-sex couples.
Nuclear researchers run reactors. It’s pretty much the only commercially viable way to test the effects of neutron bombardment on materials. They typically aren’t power plants, because steam turbines are a lot more work to operate and research reactors are typically intermittent and low power (in terms of the electrical grid)
If the real reason people want nuclear power plants were their benefits compared to other ways of generating power, they’d use thorium not uranium. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RaptorHunter/FunFacts#Thorium_reactor
[citation needed]
No, a user’s talk page won’t do.
Over-hyped BS. There are regular reactors, and there are breeder reactors (fast neutron reactors), both can use uranium but only the latter type can use thorium. The latter type, also, incidentally, uses a lot less uranium than the former, and can use depleted uranium. The cost of fuel is of no consequence and all the safety issues are virtually identical for fast neutron reactors using thorium and using uranium (and for both, are expected to be significantly more severe than for regular water moderated reactors) There’s a lot of depleted uranium laying around costing negative $ . Not thorium, though.
I thought that depleted uranium wrapped in paper was pretty much as safe as lead?
Really? As in… I can sleep with a cubic metre of the stuff under my bed and not expect to get cancer within a decade or two?
Pretty much, yeah. The hexafloride is somewhat harder to contain, though. And expect long-term brain damage from the block of lead. (The decay chain of U-238 is mostly alpha and beta, which are completely absorbed by paper wrapping. There is some gamma radiation in some of the decay steps, but not significantly more than background for any reasonable amount. 18,500 metric tons of the stuff might have a total activity somewhat higher (=2.74e15 Bq), or one mole of helium produced every 70 years from direct decay alone, and a few mA’s worth of electron emissions once the decay products reach equilibrium. It looks like the half-thickness for ‘uranium’ is about 7mm for Co-60 gamma emissions.
Doing the calculus, the total unshielded activity at the surface of the block would be equal to the integral of (total activity per unit thickness {14.8 Bq/mg; DU has a density of 18.5 G/cc}*percentage unshielded at that depth)
(1000cM^2 is the cross sectional area, 1000mG/G is a conversion factor, making the first term the total activity per thickness; second term is the percentage unshielded calculated by raising 1⁄2 to the power of the number of half thicknesses of uranium above the layer in question. X is in cM.)
Overall though, the stochastic effects of ionizing radiation exposure are close enough to zero that studies of the effects of occupational exposure do not find conclusive correlations of long term low-level exposure to disease.
I don’t believe you.
It’s wrapped in paper (your stipulation) and under the bed (my stipulation). Are you asserting that the wrapped, undisturbed block of counterfactual lead under my bed is a significant airborne pollution threat?
Fascinating, thankyou.
I wasn’t wrapping the lead in paper, but that wasn’t fair of me- because frankly, inhaled DU particles ARE much worse than inhaled lead particles, because the ‘wrapped in paper’ (or painted, I suppose) is significant. DU munitions and armor aren’t ‘safe’ in the sense of failing to contaminate the nearby area, but neither are lead munitions.
I’d be more concerned about the fire hazard if you scratch it (by your depleted uranium paperweight). It’s like lighter sparkler on steroids, from what i’ve heard. The activity in practice would also depend to how depleted it is (they don’t deplete all the way to 0% u-235), and it better not be “dirty” depleted uranium from fuel re-processing. edit: also to how old it is, as the decay chain won’t be in equilibrium. It will actually get more radioactive over time.
By the way. Depleted uranium is actually used as radiation shielding for e.g. medical irradiation sources, as well as for tank armor, and everyone knows about the ammunition.
For fun: read the parent as implying that wedrifid has slept on top of a cubic meter of lead for decades.
It’s so soft! There is no other metal that I’ve slept on for decades that is more comfortable than lead.
I haven’t tried a water bed filled with mercury yet. That actually has potential. The extra mass would absorb the impact or rapid movement of a human more smoothly while maintaining malleable fluidity over a slightly longer timescale. Plus if you attach a glass tube near the head of the bed you can calculate your weight based off changes in mmHg!
I used to think that my mercury bed was a bad idea and mad as a hatter. But then I gave it a fair try for a few months, and boy did my mind change!
It’s not the mass, it’s the viscosity. The higher density would result in a ‘firmer’ feel, since less immersion would be needed for the same amount of buoyant force.
A more reasonable option might be Gallium-which would be firm on initial contact, but then liquefy.
No, really, it’s both. I edited out out viscosity since either would be sufficient and I happened to be certain about mass but merely confident about viscosity.
I assume that the primary mechanism by which mass absorbs impact would be inertia.
Malleable is a property that liquids don’t have, so what did you mean by ‘maintaining malleable fluidity’ that doesn’t also result from having the liquid in a closed container with some airspace and some elasticity? How would more inertia help absorb impact (spread the impulse out over a longer period of time)?
That’s actually a neat idea. You could use gallium/indium/tin alloy perhaps. Would be easily the most expensive fluid bed.
It’s uranium hexafluoride actually, that’s laying around.
Ah, so it’s about as safe as elemental mercury or many mercury compounds then.
Accidentally rupturing a tank of mercury doesn’t usually kill a worker and injure a dozen. A tank of very nasty mercury compound might.
Actually, to steer back to topic which is (laudably tolerated here) dislike of rationalists, this argument can make good tiny pet example of ‘rationalist’ vs ‘experts’ debates.
Rationalists believe by special powers of rationality they are unusually less prone to for example nuclear = scary bias, and say that uranium wrapped in paper safe as lead etc etc. (By the way, also false, uranium is a serious fire hazard). There’s a lot of such ‘rationalists’ around, not just here but everywhere, that’s where people get misconceptions like yours from.
Experts actually know the matters to conclude something. (Not that I am a nuclear expert, of course, I only know overall overview of the process, and would defer to experts)
Frankly, rupturing any tank of just about any hexafluoride compound would be expected to be pretty dangerous.
I’m by no means a nuclear expert, I was just a nuke plant mechanic. The reason I am unafraid of radiation isn’t because the fearmongering is baseless, it’s because I’m enough of a lay expert to know the magnitude of the actual risks.
How is elemental uranium a fire hazard? Does flame spread across it faster that it spreads across wood paneling? I never considered that kind of hazard to be important, because uranium-as-she-is-used is safe enough from fire.
You can tell your pet “‘rationalist’ vs ‘expert’” example has issues when it can replaced with “‘rationalist’ vs ‘anyone with a net connection and 30 spare seconds’” and it applies just as well.
You realise, of course, that this places you squarely on the ‘rationalist’ side of that artificial dichotomy?
Not to mention it’ll do much more damage to your toe if you drop it on yourself—so much heavier!
I would defer to experts, I said. This community has a well respected founder apparently leading it by example NOT to defer to experts, but instead go on how experts are wrong, on basis on something terribly shaky. (quantum sequence).
… and his position is held by a fair fraction of the experts.
The enormous problem with philosophy problems is this. Philosophy fails a lot, historically. Fails terribly.