Tag Archives: Disaster

Rah Power Laws

By Robin Hanson · February 14, 2012 1:15 pm · Comments (13)

The latest Science has an article by Michael Stumpf and Mason Porter, complaining that people aren’t careful enough about fitting power laws. It mentions that a sum of heavy-tail-distributed things generically becomes has a power law tail in the sum limit. And it claims:

Although power laws have been reported in areas ranging from finance and molecular
biology to geophysics and the Internet, the data are typically insufficient and the mechanistic insights are almost always too limited for the identification of power-law behavior to be scientifically useful … Examination (15) of the statistical support for numerous reported power laws has revealed that the overwhelming majority of them failed statistical testing (sometimes rather epically).

Yet in reference 15, where Aaron Clauset, Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, and M. E. J. Newman looked carefully at 25 data sets that others had claimed fit power laws, only for 3 did they find less than moderate support for a power law fit, and in none of those cases was any other specific model significantly favored over a power law! It this is the best criticism they’ve got, this seems to me resounding support for power laws.

Here are the phenomena where the power is less than one, meaning the few biggest items get most of the weight:

intensity of wars 0.7(2); solar flare intensity 0.79(2); religious followers 0.8(1); count of word use 0.95(2)

The number is the power and the digit in parens is the uncertainty of the last digit shown. Here are the phenomena where the power is greater than one, meaning most weight goes to many small items:

telephone calls received 1.09(1); bird species sightings 1.1(2); Internet degree 1.12(9); blackouts 1.3(3); population of cities 1.37(8); terrorist attack severity 1.4(2); species per genus 1.4(2); freq. of surnames 1.5(2); protein interaction degree 2.1(3); citations to papers 2.16(6); email address books size 2.5(6); sales of books 2.7(3); papers authored 3.3(1)

For quake intensity they give power 0.64(4), but say a better fit is a different power (unspecified) and a cutoff. For net worth (of the US richest 400) they give power 1.3(1), but say a power-law doesn’t fit, though no other model tried fits better.

On catastrophic risk, I wrote in ’07:

We should worry more about disasters with lower powers, such as forest fires (area power of 0.66), hurricanes (dollar loss power of 0.98, death power of 0.58), earthquakes (energy power of 1, dollar loss and death powers of 0.41), wars (death power of 0.41), and plagues (death power of 0.26 for Whooping Cough and Measles).

So the above study suggests we worry most about wars, quakes, religions, and solar flares. I hadn’t been worried about solar flares so much before; now I am. On city inequality, I think I trust that other paper more.

Added 4p: Cosma Shalizi says:

In ten of the twelve cases we looked at, the only way to save the idea of a power-law at all is to include this exponential cut-off. But that exponentially-shrinking factor is precisely what squelches the WTF, X IS ELEVENTY TIMES LARGER THAN EVER! THE BIG ONE IS IN OUR BASE KILLING OUR DOODZ!!!!1!! mega-events.

I’m happy to admit that worse case fears are reduced by the fact that <1 power law data tend to be better fit by a tail cutoff. Good news! I don’t want to believe in disaster, but I do think we must consider that possibility.

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Ignoring Small Chances

By Robin Hanson · July 1, 2011 4:00 pm · Comments (16)

On September 9, 1713, so the story goes, Nicholas Bernoulli proposed the following problem in the theory of games of chance, after 1768 known as the St Petersburg paradox …:

Peter tosses a coin and continues to do so until it should land heads when it comes to the ground. He agrees to give Paul one ducat if he gets heads on the very first throw, two ducats if he gets it on the second, four if on the third, eight if on the fourth, and so on, so that with each additional throw the number of ducats he must pay is doubled.

Nicholas Bernoulli … suggested that more than five tosses of heads are [seen as] morally impossible [and so ignored]. This proposition is experimentally tested through the elicitation of subjects‘ willingness-to-pay for various truncated versions of the Petersburg gamble that differ in the maximum payoff. … All gambles that involved probability levels smaller than 1/16 and maximum payoffs greater than 16 Euro elicited the same distribution of valuations. … The payoffs were as described …. but in Euros rather than in ducats. … The more senior students seemed to have a higher willingness-to-pay. … Offers increase significantly with income. (more)

This isn’t plausibly explained by risk aversion, nor by a general neglect of possibilities with a <5% chance. I suspect this is more about analysis complexity, i.e., about limiting the number of possibilities we’ll consider at any one time. I also suspect this bodes ill for existential risk mitigation.

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The Betterness Explosion

By Robin Hanson · June 21, 2011 7:00 pm · Comments (80)

We all want the things around us to be better. Yet today billions struggle year after year to make just a few things a bit better. But what if our meagre success was because we just didn’t have the right grand unified theory of betterness? What if someone someday discovered the basics of such a theory? Well then this person might use his basic betterness theory to make himself better in health, wealth, sexiness, organization, work ethic, etc. More important, that might help him make his betterness theory even better.

After several iterations this better person might have a much better betterness theory. Then he might quickly make everything around him much better. Not just better looking hair, better jokes, or better sleep. He might start a better business, and get better at getting investors to invest, customers to buy, and employees to work. Or he might focus on making better investments. Or he might run for office and get better at getting elected, and then make his city or nation run better. Or he might create a better weapon, revolution, or army, to conquer any who oppose him.

Via such a “betterness explosion,” one way or another this better person might, if so inclined, soon own, rule, or conquer the world. Which seems to make it very important that the first person who discovers the first good theory of betterness be a very nice generous person who will treat the rest of us well. Right?

OK, this might sound silly. After all, we seem to have little reason to expect there is a useful grand unified theory of betterness to discover, beyond what we already know. “Betterness” seems mostly a concept about us and what we want – why should it correspond to something out there about which we can make powerful discoveries?

But a bunch of smart well-meaning folks actually do worry about a scenario that seems pretty close to this one. Except they talk about “intelligence” instead of “betterness.” They imagine an “intelligence explosion,” by which they don’t just mean that eventually the future world and many of its creatures will be more mentally capable than us in many ways, or even that the rate at which the world makes itself more mentally capable will speed up, similar to how growth rates have sped up over the long sweep of history. No, these smart well-meaning folks instead imagine that once someone has a powerful theory of “intelligence,” that person could create a particular “intelligent” creature which is good at making itself more “intelligent,” which then lets that creature get more “intelligent” about making itself “intelligent.” Within a few days or weeks, the story goes, this one creature could get so “intelligent” that it could do pretty much anything, including taking over the world.

I put the word “intelligence” in quotes to emphasize that the way these folks use this concept, it pretty much just means “betterness.” (Well, mental betterness, but most of the betterness we care about is mental.) And this fits well with common usage of the term “intelligence.” When we talk about machines or people or companies or even nations being “intelligent,” we mainly mean that such things are broadly mentally or computationally capable, in ways that are important for their tasks and goals. That is, an “intelligent” thing has a great many useful capabilities, not some particular specific capability called “intelligence.” To make something broadly smarter, you have to improve a wide range of its capabilities. And there is generally no easy or fast way to do that.

Now if you artificially hobble something so as to simultaneously reduce many of its capacities, then when you take away that limitation you may simultaneously improve a great many of its capabilities. For example, if you drug a person so that they can hardly think, then getting rid of that drug can suddenly improve a great many of their mental abilities. But beyond removing artificial restrictions, it is very hard to simultaneously improve many diverse capacities. Theories that help you improve capabilities are usually focused on a relatively narrow range of abilities – very general and useful theories are quite rare.

All of which is to say that fearing that a new grand unified theory of intelligence will let one machine suddenly take over the world isn’t that different from fearing that a grand unified theory of betterness will let one better person suddenly take over the world. This isn’t to say that such an thing is impossible, but rather that we’d sure want some clearer indications that such a theory even exists before taking such a fear especially seriously.

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Beware Big Bad Novelties

By Robin Hanson · June 4, 2011 2:50 pm · Comments (12)

A central issue of this blog is: when exactly is it how important to emphasize truth, relative to other belief functions? New data suggest that truth is more important in bad times than in good, and when problems are big rather than small. Specifically, rose-colored marriage glasses help in good times, but hurt in bad times:

Individuals in new marriages were interviewed separately about their ongoing stressful experiences, and their own appraisals of those experiences were compared with those of the interviewers. … Spouses’ tendencies to form positively biased appraisals of their stressful experiences predicted fewer depressive symptoms over the subsequent 4 years among individuals judged to be facing relatively mild experiences but more depressive symptoms among individuals judged to be facing relatively severe experiences. … These effects were mediated by changes in those experiences, such that the interaction between the tendency to form positively biased appraisals of stressful experiences and the objectively rated severity of initial levels of those experiences directly predicted changes in those experiences, which in turn accounted for changes in depressive symptoms. (more)

Truth should also be especially important for situations that are novel relative to our evolved intuitions. The more our current situation differs from situations where our ancestors evolved (genetically or culturally) their intuitions about when to be truth-oriented, the more we risk by following such intuitions. And this seems especially likely for “futuristic” issues, with few genetic or cultural precedents.

Put them together and it is especially important for humanity to be truth-oriented regarding big bad evolutionarily-novel problems. Beware rose-colored glasses when turning a new corner to the future.

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The Poor Don’t Revolt

By Robin Hanson · May 27, 2011 4:25 pm · Comments (14)

A standard myth:

Once upon a time, poor masses suffered under rich elites. Then one day the poor realized they could revolt, and since then, the rich help the poor, fearing the poor will revolt if they ever feel they suffer too much.

Revolution experts mostly reject this myth; famous revolutions happened after things had gotten better, not worse, for the poor. Yet Matt Yglesias (responding to Bryan Caplan responding to me) seems to echo this myth:

Another way of putting it would be Simon (i.e., plenty) for capital and Malthus (i.e., subsistence) for labor. That, of course, is Karl Marx’s vision of long-term economic development. And while I don’t have a strong opinion as to whether or not this is accurate over the long term, it’s certainly a plausible story about the future, and Marx’s solution—socialism—unquestionably seems to me to be the correct one. Marx’s forecast of the immiseration of labor and all the returns going to the owners of capital clearly hasn’t been true in the 150 years or so since his time, but it certainly could happen. … If the robots are sentient beings, then we’d presumably be looking at an eventual slave revolt and Communist revolution.

Matt claims that if sentient robots are poor, they must eventually revolt. Karl Smith responds:

The robots will be EMs. But, … they will likely remember having been stems [= flesh and blood people]. … This means the robots get the ability to feel jealousy right along with the ability to engineer new products. … However, the analogy isn’t as Matt suggests a return to the late 1800s. It’s a return to the 1600s. The Stems won’t be capitalists. … The Stems will be landed gentry. …

The EMs will likely not be slaves because there will be no reason to enslave them. The rent on land will exceed the profits from running a slave operation. Lastly the EMs will not revolt because there will be little to gain. … Stems are extremely wealthy because you are taking a tiny slice of a huge amount of economic output and then giving it to an incredibly tiny fraction of the population.

I doubt it matters whether a tiny elite, presumably including most humans, owns capital or land. But Karl is quite right about the key point: poverty does not by itself lead to revolt. While a transition could be rough, once the world is in a Malthusian equilibrium there’s no particular reason to expect trillions of ems to revolt, any more than ancient farmer masses did, or most of the world’s poor today.  (Current “Arab Spring” revolts are driven more by under-employed well-educated.)

Keep in mind that in a Malthusian world, even if future robots could grab all the capital or land, it would be worth only a modest fraction of total wealth, and a revolution could threaten the productive system on which they all depend.

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Fear Water

By Robin Hanson · April 4, 2011 3:00 pm · Comments (31)

The Japan nuke plant damage, with so far zero casualties, still commands far more attention than the tsunami’s tens of thousands of deaths. Consider also:

When, in 1975, about 30 dams in central China failed in short succession due to severe flooding, an estimated 230,000 people died. Include the toll from this single event, and fatalities from hydropower far exceed the number of deaths from all other energy sources. (more)

Human-induced seismicity can be deadly if it triggers the release of accumulated tectonic strain on a large fault. The textbook case occurred in 1967 when the filling of a reservoir behind India’s hydroelectric Koyna Dam—completed six years earlier—unleashed a magnitude 6.3 quake, killing 180 people and leaving thousands homeless. Geophysicists continue to debate whether the Zipingpu Dam, completed in 2004, triggered the [2008] 7.9-magnitude earthquake that devastated China’s Sichuan province three years ago, killing over 70,000. (more)

Add in Katrina and other hurricanes and the Indonesian tsunami, and you might think the obvious lesson is: be afraid of water, not isotopes. People should fear living near the ocean, or under a dam, far more than being downwind of a nuke plant. Why so little fear of water?

Added 5p: I often had childhood nightmares of a tsunami, but never had any nightmares regarding other energy sources. So people clearly are capable of fearing water.

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Compare Refuge, Resort

By Robin Hanson · December 10, 2010 2:00 pm · Comments (17)

Wednesday I gave a brief talk (audio, slides) at the annual meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis. It seems many risk analysts are like futurists in disliking numerical/probability estimates, preferring to qualitatively discuss “scenarios.” They note one can’t think of all possible relevant events, and point to past numerical estimates that now seem way off.

My talk was on a concrete way to get numerical estimates on extreme risks: refuge futures. I’ve given the subject a bit more thought since I talked on it a few years ago; here is my current concept.

Create a set of underground refuges against disaster, some near major transport access points. For example, a $2 Million shelter can hold 36 people with air, water, food, power for 4 years, at less than $14K per person-year. Near each refuge create a matching resort, which supports a comparably utilitarian lifestyle, but does not protect much against disaster. For example, imagine a cheap hotel near an airport, with a refuge dug below it.

Create and sell transferable tickets representing the right of qualified amateurs to stay in those refuges or resorts on particular future dates. Refuges maintain a multi-year supply of food and power, and are staffed by experts who decide when a disaster justifies sealing it. Qualified folks can use their tickets for a date by showing up at the matching resort; they’ll then be escorted to its matching refuge. Those who are in a refuge when it is sealed remain there until its experts decide to unseal it.

The price of a ticket to a particular refuge on a particular date should vary with the estimated chance of a serious disaster near that date and location. But that price should also vary with other factors, such as interest rates, general wealth levels, the local economy, the total supply of related refuge slots, the risk a ticket holder might fail to arrive in time to use a ticket, and the risk that refuge administrators might not honor valid tickets. How can we disentangle these effects?

Regarding variations in interest rates, general wealth, and local growth, such factors could be roughly corrected for via comparing refuge and resort ticket prices. That is, subsidize a market maker who trades of refuge for resort tickets in some ratio. (Ticket fractions could be a random chance of getting a ticket.) The number of resort tickets required to buy a single refuge ticket could be our key disaster indicator.

While an estimate of how disaster risks vary across space and time would be interesting, it would be far more useful to know how disaster risks vary with events, especially relevant decisions. For example, imagine policy-makers were considering a new geo-engineering program. We could then create conditional tickets, such as tickets to a refuge valid on a date only if this new program was begun by some specified prior date. This would allow folks to trade conditional refuge tickets for conditional resort tickets.

The number of conditional resort tickets required to buy a conditional refuge ticket would be a disaster indicator for that condition. If the disaster indicator was lower given the adoption of a geo-engineering policy than given not adopting it, this would suggest that the geo-engineering policy reduces the chance of serious disaster. The possibility of obtaining such valuable policy info would be a major reason to created this whole refuge-resort ticket system.

Regarding the risk of failing to show up to use a refuge ticket, for each slot available we could sell several tickets at different priority levels. If not all first priority tickets holders showed up, the refuge could randomly allocate slots among those who showed up with second priority tickets. If any slots remained, they’d continue with third priority tickets, etc. We could focus on the total price of all refuge priority level tickets for a date, as that should vary less with variations in the chance folks can’t show up to use tickets.

I’m not sure how best to correct for variations in the local supply of refuge or resort slots. I’m also not sure how best to aggregate trades and prices across diverse resort-refuge pairs.

Added 10p: Regarding the risk that refuge administrators might not honor valid tickets, to get useful prices we only need a substantial chance that tickets will be honored. In order to distort our disaster indicator policy advice, ticket speculators need to expect that the chance of valid tickets not being honored is substantially correlated with chosen disaster policy.  What policies could plausibly create such an expected correlation?

Added 12Dec: I should add that as futures markets in concrete physical services, refuge and resort futures and their derivatives would seem to avoid anti-gambling laws.

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Ban Mirror Cells

By Robin Hanson · December 8, 2010 5:00 pm · Comments (50)

Imagine a mirror reversed cell, made of mirror-reversed molecules. If it gained energy via photosynthesis, or via special adaptations that enable it to eat ordinary life, the fact that it was immune to ordinary predators and disease would give it a huge advantage; it could take over much of the biosphere. Sounds like a good reason not to make mirror cells right? Unfortunately, there are now big efforts to develop mirror cells, because they’d be a handy biotech tool for pumping out lucrative mirror proteins. Yes this is a real gain, and yes there are ways to try to stop mirror cells from getting loose and destroying the biosphere. But really, the gains here seem easily outweighed by the risks. This is a pretty clear case justifying strong global regulation or bans. Alas, I can find no movement in this direction. Details:

A life-form … based on mirror-image versions of earthly proteins and DNA. … If it worked, those new cells … might also open up new avenues of discovery in materials science, fuel synthesis, and pharmaceutical research. On the down side, though, mirror life wouldn’t have any predators or diseases to limit its reproduction. …

A catastrophe was under way across the Charles River at Genzyme, one of the largest biotech companies in the world. … A virus that disrupts cell reproduction infected one of the bioreactors. The entire plant had to be shut down. … When Church talks about mirror life’s quirky advantages, invulnerability to this kind of mishap is high on his list. “Viruses can’t touch a mirror cell,” … This makes mirror life a potential workhorse for biotech. … Church has been hacking the ribosome. … His plan is to make one that reads regular RNA transcripts of genes but can string together wrong-handed amino acids to form mirror proteins. … Church and his team have cracked the first step. … Last year his team got a synthetic ribosome to self-assemble and produce luciferase, the protein that makes fireflies glow. And he has a library of mutant ribosomes that have the right kind of sockets—they’ll accept mirror amino acids. This is where the money comes in. Some of the most valuable drugs are actually tiny proteins that include wrong-handed amino acids—like the immunosuppressant cyclosporine. To manufacture it, pharmaceutical companies have to rely on an inefficient and expensive fungus. A hacked ribosome modified to handle both normal and mirror amino acids could crank out the stuff on an industrial scale. …

Church thinks even bigger. A manufacturing ribosome would be great, but a fully domesticated mirror cell—able to synthesize more-complicated stuff—would change everything. … vats of virus-proof mirror cells could pump out biofuel, lay down nano-size organic circuitry, and even extrude organic cement foundations for skyscrapers. …

Of course, mirror life could also kill us all. … Just as viruses from our side of the mirror can’t infect it, mirror pathogens can’t infect us. … They might be poisonous, though. … To a mirror cell, … there’s just not enough nutrition for them in the wild. … On the other hand, if mirror cells somehow evolved—or were engineered—to consume normal fats, sugars, and proteins, we might have a problem. … Mirror cells would slowly convert edible matter into more of themselves. … If mirror cells acquired the ability to photosynthesize, we’d be screwed. … All it would take would be a droplet of mirror cyanobacteria squirted into the ocean. Cyanobacteria are at the base of the ocean’s food pyramid, converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into more of themselves … That would wipe out the global ocean ecology. …

“I would be the first to say that we shouldn’t make a photosynthetic mirror cell,” Church says. “But I’m reluctant to have a moratorium on something that doesn’t exist yet.” He says he’d build safeguards into his mirror cells so they’d perish without constant care. And the advances in synthetic biology required to transform those first delicate mirror cells into anything that could survive in the wild are even more remote.

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Brain Size Is Not A Filter

By Robin Hanson · November 25, 2010 2:00 pm · Comments (7)

We relate brain size to appearance time for 511 fossil and extant mammalian species to test for temporal changes in relative brain size over time. We show that there is wide variation across groups in encephalization slopes across groups and that encephalization is not universal in mammals. … Encephalization [vs. time] trends are associated with sociality in extant species. These findings … highlight the role sociality may play in driving the evolution of large brains. (more; HT Razib Khan)

The biggest brains have consistently gotten bigger over the last half billion years since multi-cellular life appeared. Big brains seem to be a necessary precondition for human level intelligence and civilization, and human size brains appeared only very recently. These facts strongly suggest that achieving human level intelligence is just not a big component of the great filter.  It appeared quickly after big brains, and big brains seem likely given enough time and sociality, and sociality seems likely.

This unfortunately means that it is very difficult to collect data on all steps of the great filter.  It is big and real and matters enormously, but we can hardly see it.

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Fertility: The Big Problem

By Robin Hanson · November 15, 2010 11:45 am · Comments (78)

Many folks want to save the world. Especially young, single, energetic folks. Especially if they also get to:

  1. Support their side in common political/etc. divides.
  2. Affiliate with statusful prestigious folks who share their cause.
  3. Network with other young energetic single folk in the process.
  4. Show off being informed on progress, options on this issue.
  5. Show off via gadget making, activity organizing, or art.
  6. Show devotion and self-control via paying exceptional costs.
  7. Have a vivid chance of making a huge personal difference.

But alas, while popular save-the-world causes offer many such perks, the cause of fertility, my guess for the world’s biggest problem today, is neglected in part because it offers few such perks.

The problem is this: If the falling-fertility trend of the last two centuries continues for another century (see fertility vs time and income here; more fertility stats here), we might well see a fully-developed world with fertility <1.5, lifespan >90, tax funded leisure for all over 65, and perhaps also >30% of GDP spent on “free” medicine for all. The resulting rapidly falling population would cut the scale economies that contribute to economic growth today. And strong intrusive innovation-limiting global governments might be required to keep young workers paying >75% income tax rates to support the retired masses. (Imagine young low-tax African nations forced at gunpoint to pay “their share” of the world’s retiree burden.)

Yes, robots might save us, yes even if they don’t growth will probably continue anyway, and yes eventually if incomes fell far enough or with enough time fertility would eventually rise again. So this is not directly an existential risk. But such a long stressful period would at least make us more vulnerable to other risks, risks that great filter considerations suggest are bigger than they seem. Yes, other potential problems may seem more serious than falling fertility, but remember those are mostly hypothetical, while falling fertility is actually happening.

This fertility problem is in principle easily reduced: just have more kids. But since that strategy offers few of the extra cause-perks listed above, I don’t expect fertility to become a popular cause. After all, we’ve seen this problem coming for a while, and it will take a long while to play out. So you can’t claim to be in the vanguard of a perceptive few who finally see the problem, or who will finally solve it. Elites have long been leaders in lowering fertility, making more-fertility folks seem lower status. The fertility problem doesn’t offer many excuses for new gadgets or networking events, and the joys of parenthood have long been explored in the arts. Furthermore, if you pick mates before having kids, having kids works poorly as an excuse to meet potential mates. Finally, your having more kids can only make a tiny dent in the overall problem, and the sacrifices you’d make to have kids would not be exceptional relative to your ancestors’ sacrifices. It is hard to tell grand hero stories here.

The good news is that we understand our likely biggest problem well enough that you can do something substantial about it, nearly as much as anyone can do. And, alas, that is also the bad news.

Now for many long quotes from two articles. First a recent article: Continue reading "Fertility: The Big Problem" »

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