Research questions that could have a big social impact, organised by discipline
80000hours.org
80000hours.org
Patrick Collinson- https://patrickcollison.com/questions
Gwern- https://www.gwern.net/Questions
Alexey Guzey- https://guzey.com/personal/research-ideas/
Anybody have more?
1) How do we build machines that repair themselves?
2) How can we get human bodies to automatically repair and regrow damaged limbs and organs?
3) How do we build an energy source that is the same volume and mass as a litre of petroleum, is as stable and portable as petroleum but possesses 10x the energy density?
4) How can we get the human immune system to automatically develop suitable antiviral antibodies to combat a viral infection?
5) When will heated toilet seats become standard in North American homes (or at least north of Virginia)?
put human (consciousness) into silicon. Now all problems becomes one dimensional. (2), (4), (5) becomes moot, (3) is quite unnecessary because time is now more or less expendable, and we can just work on (1).
> What’s the minimum viable human population?
Depends on your technology. If you have frozen sperm and an effective means of genetic engineering (to fix mutations), the answer is 1.
How about the long term implications of being able to fundamentally engineer life?
Also, IANAB (I am not a biologist), but it surprises me that unravelling the genetic architecture of complex phenotypes is not represented on this list in any way, shape or form.
a more interesting question might be how many humans are necessary for some target rate of quality of life improvements (and how does that rate respond to increasing/decreasing the population). this is probably more of a political/economic question though.
Most of them sound like "how to I justify my AI driven technocracy by pointing to studies of lemurs"
Being pseudonymous is key, but it's also the valuable part.
That does not seem to be they key on Facebook.
It's hard enough for the existing companies. (And yes, I think they're genuinely trying. Or at least I think Twitter is.)
What I'm certain will never happen even though I think it would be great would be to ban any sort of emotional appeal whatsoever in advertising. It's just manipulative.
Except for - businesses with users should operate through subscription revenue, rather than 3rd party ad revenue.
This makes the argument that the need to convey product information is now fully accomplished by search engines, and advertising only adds harm / manipulation.
More like bad land management.
From my understanding large fires in Australia probably are climate change given that they seem perennial, but I don't actually know enough to say there.
The U.S. was practically begging for huge forest fires though. Thus my comment.
Overall, it was a very odd look into a discipline that I am familiar with, which leads me to think that the ideas are not very promising for any of the fields I don't have expertise in.
Whether AI is really more dangerous than, say, pandemics or asteroids, is left as an exercise for the reader.
The first question on their list is about the 'problem' of wild animal suffering - and I've personally seen EAs argue that, because some animals are carnivorous, nature should be destroyed.
That's not even the weirdest position EAs take. Look up Brian Tomasik. Specifically, his paper about the possibility that electrons might suffer.
Concern about superhuman AI is one thing; bullet-biting utilitarianism is another entirely.
(This isn't the only place where their philosophical framework is stuck in the British Empire; they also tend to take a teleological view of history and moral development, and believe that their views are the self-evident progression of ethical development that every culture and civilization will come to eventually. They may not be as bad about this now as they used to be - there are questions about China now - but I don't think they're quite to the point of coming to terms with cultural contingency yet.)
80k hours is more a cultural snapshot of the rationalist movement than anything.
Well, do Arden Koehler or Howie Lempel have 80,000 hours of CS Research experience? It looks like they have 80K hours of experience thinking about the best way to spend 80K hours. Woops.
On the contrary, the massive influx of applied research driven by deep learning hype means there's probably a lot more high-impact stuff outside of ML than inside of ML. Quantum computing, bullet-proof crypto implementations, safety engineering for robots, and even hardening the electric grid/key compute infra against solar flares all seem much more important. Also much less "sexy".
...and even most of the AI/ML problems are scraped from a few papers from corporate AI labs with the best PR skills, with an eye toward AGI risk. But 1) AGI risk is massively overblown and 2) trying to solve those problems in general has a "silver bullet" vibe. All of the solutions to "AI Safety" questions are going to boil down to "do good software engineering", which is often more about processes and org incentives than technology or science. A really good automated HiL testing setup is going to be a lot more important than "preventing reward hacking". If you don't believe me, go ask anyone who's actually built a robot.
So, I think maybe "AI Safety/Robustness broadly construed" could be one or two entries in a list of important problems in CS. But certainly not half the list as they are here.
TBH, one of the highest impact problems in CS is convincing young PhDs to not waste their time applying deep learning to every god damn thing regardless of whether it's the right tool for the job.
The Big Question in politics is, as it has been for 2 centuries now, how do we deploy the brightest minds on the biggest problems.
Our biggest problem in politics is that decisions have to make sense to the median voter. If someone comes up with a process that can transcend that without the well understood failings of dictatorship, that would be game changing beyond game changing.
The world has too many problems with well known solutions. People keep reinventing square wheels instead of being honest about what worked and didn't in the past.
I am sorry to have to inform you, but this is a meritocratic, very naive view of modern societies that every single datapoint points against. That is not the biggest problem.
The biggest problem is: what to do when there is an ongoing state capture of your country by oligopolic pan-continental corporate structures?
Stop assuming that we just have to find out a solution. Solutions exist. We can have co-owned drone farms sustaining entire villages. We COULD have that. We already have tens of thousands of bright scientists who work on drugs where the patents go to the corporations, not for those who actually did the research anyway. Profits, however, are more important to those who make decisions about our ways of living.
I strongly disagree on the notion that deciding the way each of us lives is on the shoulders of the profit-driven directors.
For instance, no matter how much you hate the President, you have no idea who you would appoint to be deputy secretary of interior farm management, so you’re not really offering an alternative solution.
That's because corporations do the part of drug research that actually matters, viz. translational research and safety/effectiveness studies. And it would be just as expensive if non-profits were doing it, so talking about "profits" is just not relevant.
What probably would change is the choices on which conditions and drugs to target, and to what degree. Conceivably could shift from an ability-to-pay focus to an impact focus.
Exercise left to the reader to decide if that would be desirable and/or likely to be more successful overall.
Humans are cooperative by nature. We would have scientists even under different production systems. Therefore, I think it is a default failure state to just hope for heroes to emerge. Obama was portrayed as such, and he failed to tackle most of US's pressing social issues.
High intelligence in political leaders too often leads to hubris. It must be tempered by some level of emotional intelligence, humility, and wisdom.
1) Minimize their suffering (satisfying basic needs).
2) Make sure they can develop their potential at their fullest (also quite close to a basic need).
So I'd say that politics should be about trying to coordinate society to satisfy those as much as possible for everyone.
To me, the biggest question in politics is: how do we build political / societal systems whose impact on human society is consistently positive and equitable?
This implies _fundamental_ changes in those systems. To wit: publicly-funded R&D returning value to the public purse, and not just to private companies (see: Mazzucato's "The Entrepreneurial State"); effective and highly coordinated wealth / corporate tax regimes (see: Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century"); complete transformation of education and its relationship to both human psychology and technology (see: Papert's "Mindstorms"); eradicating the very concept of "good" and "bad" neighborhoods through massive and equitable investment in schools, housing, mixed-use zoning, mixed-income development, multi-modal transit, functional green space, etc. (see: Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein's "A Pattern Language"); and, backing it all, a modern, responsive, truly digital government that is empowered to invest in tools and technologies to continually improve both internal work and external service delivery (see: Cyd Harrell's "A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide").
Structurally, corporations tend to underinvest in R&D with big future payoffs and societal benefits/positive externalities that are hard to capture. That's where the government should step in, and it has been slacking on that front for the last 20 years.
Another job of government is to ensure the proper functioning of markets. Anti-trust is an important part of that. The government has been slacking on that front for the last 40 years.
That's without getting into education, transportation, and inequality, all of which are very important problems that are either unaddressed by or exacerbated by corporations. I don't think we have a major problem with identifying existing talent, and if we do it is a comparatively lesser issue.
At one point the US government was spending 4% of GDP on NASA. Not everything NASA did was possible to commercialise, but entire industries from satellite communications and air purifiers to baby formula and memory foam were created based on solving difficult problems for spacemen. All of these now mass market industries pay tax on their US operations.
Even if a corporation could spend that sort of money on a space program it couldn't hope to collect a return from every industry that grew up out of that space program.
This is a fair question, but it should be accompanied with another one: what do the corporations do well? Will our alternative option make some things worse? What's our criteria of success and what's our backout plan if the criteria of success is not met by a certain timeframe?
If anything, corporations themselves should be begging the government to spend more on basic research. If it doesn't, it will not reduce taxes by the amount that it doesn't spend. It will merely reallocate research funds to pure defense or some other lower return endeavor.
There is a symbiosis between capitalism, innovation, and government. Capitalism without good governance turns into crony capitalism. Innovation would decline without adequate and competent* government expenditure (*historically there's no reason to believe that the government is incapable of profound basic research - quite the opposite). Good governance without a culture which appreciates market economies can slowly devolve into bad governance and a basket case country.
What are some signals you watch out for, with this?
- Industry concentration
- Degree of divergence between popular will and policy (thanks Citizens United)
- Level and direction of inequality
- Bargaining power of labor (automation does not fully explain the cratering of this bargaining power)
- Level of corporate profits (compared to the past)
Generally, I'd also look at the correlation between increased productivity and happiness. If, in aggregate, we're producing more year by year, and yet people are becoming more miserable and anxious, something is wrong.
They come to you with the solutions to the largest problem: nationalize the energy industry globally, convert nearly entirely to mass transit systems, dramatically decrease consumption in the global north, and convert to a state-run economy because capitalism will collapse under decreased consumption.
What now? Is that going to happen just because the smart people are working on the tough problems? Of course not. The real biggest problems are not actually a matter of smart people knowing the solutions, but of competing powers (that are much stronger than you as an individual), propaganda, exploitation and human subjugation that prevent balancing against those powers, war, etc.
Worse, while it may seem like a good idea to have the wonks working on the biggest problems, consider the immediate precursor: who decides on what the biggest problems are? Right now, that will end up being heavily influenced by the moneyed interests that create the biggest problem. You'll stick entire generations of the biggest and most clever nerds on making better batteries and electric cars, but ever-growing consumption will make all of that moot and the descent into collapsing ecosystems and agriculture all the more inevitable because they were focused on a lack of tech (stuff to sell / consume) being the biggest problem rather than questioning core structures (an imposed economic requirement that consumption always increase lest we all go hungry and die).
I feel like the barrier here is more of a political one than being a matter of research or feasibility. I never quite understood why we are not throwing money at this issue. I mean I get that we collectively have doubt it could happen but the alternative is the big sleep anyway so why the hell not try?
Every day we feel tantalizingly closer to solving each of these problems but each decade seems to pass by quicker than the last. Perhaps we are a terminal species.
Maybe the real big problem lies in social science or psychology. Better stewardship or collective modeling. Maybe we should start force-feeding lsd into people who actively vote against and stand opposed to scientific progress. There’s got to be more in life than just withdrawing a paycheque or not and dying eventually. Sinking into the past and eventually erased from living memory. I once saw a picture of a guy in the 1920s who bred horses in the Greek mountains. This vague memory is all that’s left of my great grandfather. I don’t even know his name.
https://peterattiamd.com/start-here/
From a microbiology perspective it's really tough to prevent cellular senescence without also increasing the risk of malignancy. Those two factors are in direct conflict.
For sure it is. But even the very language you use gives me hope. Our understanding of disease and aging is very much advanced compared to 100 years ago. We are making progress, that’s for sure. Our understanding of exactly why extreme life extension is difficult is becoming more sophisticated.
Think of it the other way around like, would a bunch of people from the 1800s really be of much use to society today? Or are we better off that we get to stake out the near future for ourselves and likewise that our descendants are better off getting to stake out their future? I don’t have an answer.
At the same time it’s like what about the other way around? Clearly 30 years of life for example is way too short. So just because 70 or 80 years or something is the norm now in developed countries that don’t mean that this is the ideal either.
Like I say, I find it really difficult to try and decide upon.
Maybe not everyone but go back another hundred years. Would Newton be of negative value today? I seriously doubt it. I adore James Joyce, who was around in the 1800s. But let’s not consider people like that for a second but consider the random guy on the bus last year. A no name non-contributing zero. I want him to travel the stars. I don’t need a random guy on the bus to produce or display worth in order to not only live but live well- live better than any kings have ever had. I would like that for you. You don’t need to show your papers to stick around another year as far as I’m concerned. I would love for you to experience unending pure hedonistic pleasure for centuries free of charge. You don’t need to say anything if you don’t want to or can’t. I don’t think anyone should have to work for it if they don’t want to.
Long story short, Max Planck was on the money when he said that "“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Joyce on the other hand: a saint.
Every minor advance medical technology that effectively increases lifespan gives those living more time on the clock to hit one of those major breakthroughs. If we had a sudden breakthrough that allowed us to reverse some aspects of aging resulting in a lifespan increase of 20 or perhaps even 10 years, I would think that those additional years plus the new public attention would give enough time to find further improvements. Eventually you reach the point that the average human lifespan starts increasing per year by more than one year. At this point even if you don't yet know how to make people biologically immortal you're going to drastically decrease the chance of death to the point that many of those alive will live to be biologically immortal.
To a lesser degree this applies to all sorts of medical advancements that increase lifespan. All sorts of things could combine to allow those currently living to survive long enough to make use of true longevity treatments. Cures for cancer, alzheimer, and other such symptoms of aging brings us closer to this possibility. At this point it's a lottery game and I wouldn't bet against at least some people winning the jackpot.
Look at the actual evidence. For centuries life expectancy in developed countries was on a general upward trend. Now it has flattened out and is no longer increasing. There is no scientific basis to think that curve will trend up at a rate of more than one year per year in our lifetimes. If you believe that will happen then it's based on faith, not science.
Can you imagine: on the one hand post industrial countries are inhabited by a bunch or multi centenarians, on the other hand poor countries are overpopulated by youngsters.
In the post industrial countries their minuscule pool of young people have no chance to dislodge entrenched old people who have the power.
There is less rejuvenation and less change in these multi centenarian societies and they become calcified, ossified. Old buggers hanging on for what? Will their minds be plastic? Sure, I don’t always agree with my young self or today’s young on all things, but I believe they should have the opportunity to shape their society in their time without obstructionist old timers.
If the oldest members of the population constitute a majority, and you're living in a democracy, cultural change is pretty hard to achieve.
Here in Germany, where we have one of the oldest populations on the planet, politics consists essentially of one issue, social services and pensions.
I agree with the "room for new people" conundrum but you could approach that as a population control issue from a couple of different directions.
Or you could approach lifespan extension simultaneously with research on its consequences, like how to structure society (economics, politics, etc) so as to optimize well-being.
Bad news: we probably won’t be getting extreme lifespan anyways. It’s very political.
Young and old, so that's like a century right there, and some things can get out-of-date a lot faster than that.
That's what makes it such a long-term problem.
The equivalent in a corporate culture is a structure inherited from a time before any current employees were there.
Either way you can end up with some misguided systems which are not relevant enough for a modern situation, and it can be very painful to correct.
>Can you imagine: on the one hand post industrial countries are inhabited by a bunch or multi centenarians, on the other hand poor countries are overpopulated by youngsters.
Since World War 2 this has been the trend, not people living that much longer, but average & median ages diverging widely.
American, German, British, Japanese, Russian, Italian WW2 participants are finally almost completely gone. Their descendants of these participants as a group skew older than the general populations which are trending less youthful than developing countries overall.
Remember these entire countries (their population at the time) participated, not just the warfighters, that's one reason they call it a World War.
So these older-populated countries still have a significant cohort whose fathers & grandfathers were the participants in WW2, and the legacy of the devastation was not forgotten by as many generations since then compared to developing countries. Some of whom had much smaller percentages of WW2 participants to begin with, and now it's largely their great-grandfathers & great-great-grandfathers.
Seems to me those are the ones most likely to start WW3. In recent decades some have known more intense fighting than there actually was in their location during WW2 anyway.
>In the post industrial countries their minuscule pool of young people have no chance to dislodge entrenched old people who have the power.
It could be worse, you could have a teenage monarch, then you'd have to wait a really long time before you could expect a royal change.
>they should have the opportunity to shape their society in their time without obstructionist old timers.
This is so important to youthful accomplishment, the sooner people can have a society more suitable for its time, the better off everyone would be. Especially young people with a long future ahead of them, it's amazing what you can accomplish in a few short decades if you start early.
Fortunately not all old timers are obstructionist, but it does tend to be a technique for seeking & holding on to undue legacy power, and they're the ones with the most time for consolidation.
Unfortunately, it's also the core of Western culture.
I think the idea of psychodelic-assisted reeducation is a promising and humane strategy if we want to avoid total social collapse in the West over the next 3 decades. But it's also extremely, extremely radical and deeply offensive to vague interpretation of "liberty". After all, why should someone tell me what to think or do, as I willingly earn $13/hr to barely make ends meet while consuming corporate media products in my rare leisure hours...
Does it though? You are failing to provide an adequate argument for death. I see it as more than just a physical revulsion of dying or a fear of letting go. A western perversion or as a crisis of individualism. Those are present, to be sure, (I don’t agree with the western part but let’s go with that too) but is dreaming for immortality immature? Immortality is the very essence of maturity, it’s purest expression. But, is immaturity also so bad, like let’s be adult here and like fall into an abyss without struggling? To be certain, I am not blind to the charms of being courageous in the face of death. But this isn’t what I’m driving at.
It’s not just fear of death, it’s also a collective refusal to live exponentially better than we do today. So many of our problems as a species stem from a joint agreement that life is inherently bad when life really is, maybe this is just me talking here, everything we could ever have in this place. And could we also dare to improve?
Quickly forgotten is a bit of a stretch when I often think of my grandparents. But your thinking on this notion of poor memory as a, what now? Good reason to die? Much of what you say seems to depend on this idea that we should die because we are selfish anyways so good riddance.
If blind selfishness is a prime cause of our ills than wouldn’t our slow rate of progress be a result of that? It’s not like blind selfishness is directly causing immortality.
You mention western culture which begs the question: are you culturally opposed to extreme life extension?
“Psychedelic re-education” I’m not a actually serious. The bottom of the rabbit hole is just more rabbit hole. LSD can inspire but it’s not an end goal.
However, life and behavioral sciences show that this is a weak assumption. Humans operate in predictable ways, as do other forms of life. And "humans" are in fact merely a collection of trillions of individual cells with individual needs and capabilities. And so on.
If we break free of individual and anthropocentric notions of life and consciousness, we can reexamine what it means to be "immortal". For example, as a species we are virtually immortal from the perspective of a single human lifetime. Reproduction can be viewed as a endosomatic technology for endless life; doubly so for sexual reproduction.
I posit that the endless vertical scaling of human consciousness is a dead end. Just as we are the product of billions of years of evolution and increasing organisation of life forms, we have reached a point at which horizontal scaling of human consciousness--to larger and more intimately connected social organisms--is extremely promising, and the proof is staring us in the face (the explosive success of collectivist China over the last 4 decades). Exosomatic "information technology" is the primary catalyst of this evolution. The potential for humanity and terrestrial life is truly staggering if we give ourselves permission to think outside the box of individualism.
Assumption of immortality is pretty much the epitome of childish narcissism, coming from a lack of having contextualized oneself in the real world, wanting to be everything, never making a choice, never making sacrifices to matter for others and future generations. It is literally encoded in the stories like Peter Pan, the infinite child, Puer Aeternus.
Humans have lifespans past reproductive age mostly because there is a survival advantage to elders sticking around and helping raising new generations with their wisdom (memetic transfer). Advanced medicine only protracts that a little bit, but we have no evidence that individuals staying alive much longer is beneficial to the survival of species nor meaningful for the individuals. I am not saying that because survival of species is an absolute normativity, but just in order to live as individuals, we also need to survive as species, a type of calculation many of us fail at when it comes to problems like covid or climate change.
> You are failing to provide an adequate argument for death.
Death is the norm. I think the burden is on the immortalist to make an argument why they should live forever. How is their existence justified beyond prolonging their consumptive egocentrism a little longer? What is their value to humanity and themselves? If they are in competition for the same resources with the young ones, who should win?
I think this is precisely the pathology of our times; narcissistic children of narcissistic parents can't let go of their meaning-lacking existences, because they are terrified of death, because their narcissism prevented them from placing themselves in a meaningful life that mattered for more than just themselves. This is a tragedy and not necessarily their fault, but they know that they will stop mattering the moment they stop consuming (death), so few, if anyone, will remember them or what they did beyond one generation.
“I think the burden is on the immortalist to make an argument why they should live (longer) “
I would like to tie these two strings together here because there is a natural precedent for old age. You said it yourself, the previous generation can instruct the new one.
We could extend the period of doing serious lifelong work. Engage in more pleasure and leisure as well as personal development and research. You seem to hang on this notion that people are merely consumers, especially those who want to live longer, so they must die. A tortoise can live for 200 years. Why not yourself?
You approach this in utilitarian terms and I still ask so what? People want more pleasure? Why not? I won’t deny that I have a hedonistic streak in me but I’ve yet to see a convincing argument against hedonism which doesn’t take an extreme view of it. Your vocabulary set suggest an appreciation and maybe even training in science but the feeling is puritanical and punitive. I don’t share your misgivings and the burden of proof is not on the immoralist because there are no gods to judge us. Life extension would be our own decision to make. To deny it for your reasons infantilizes humanity, judging us as incapable of agency in our own lives. You would in fact render people as short lived consumers who are unable to chose. Peter Pan is on you after all. You want the natural order to crystallize as it is now, an eternal infancy of the human race as short lived by choice.
I don’t demand for you to be remembered nor do I expect you to earn your keep for eternity. I want everyone to live the life they want for as long as they want. Life extension is a part of that.
That is not an intrinsic property to people. But so far, at this scale, the only normativity we were able to organize human endeavour around has been the normativity of market. Religions are gone, particular states don't matter much, and so little else is left with purpose. Just the market. This naturally makes consumers of us. Pretending we will use the extra time to "engage in more pleasure and leisure as well as personal development and research." is self-deception in my opinion. Longer lifespans also amplify accumulatory dynamics of rent-seeking, causing greater inequality. Whatever potential we have right now that we are wasting, will go onto be waster at large scale while a select few, distributed by power laws, will "enjoy" that time of leisure and pleasure.
In short, we can't even organize the time and talent we have wisely, and the dynamics that create this imbalance would only be amplified with longer lifespans.
> People want more pleasure? Why not? I won’t deny that I have a hedonistic streak in me but I’ve yet to see a convincing argument against hedonism which doesn’t take an extreme view of it.
Here is my best argument; pleasure itself is a poor goal to organize one's life around. It is ephemeral, it is prone to confuse proximal rewards with actual goals behind it and therefore the meaning it can provide is a very narrow one. Life of any addict is a proof of this dynamic. Porn (proximal reward) is not intimacy. Hyperpalatable junk food is not nutrition. Cocaine is not a real win in life. In fact, all of those prevent the actual goals to be attained.
> the feeling is puritanical and punitive. I don’t share your misgivings and the burden of proof is not on the immoralist because there are no gods to judge us.
I am not suggesting any purity codes, nor complete exclusion of erotic consumption. But existence itself is punitive if you optimize for the wrong criteria. Reality is the god to judge all of us, the consequences of our choices and the lesser gods we thought we could identify with, like the god of pleasure or god of immortality, potentially misleading that we can cheat reality.
At the bottom of that reality is that we are humans, all of which had and will have a taste of death.
..when your idea to fix things as well as your dialogue is way too close for a Marvel supervillain's plot to control the world, you might want to rethink it.
Marvel superheroes/villains/narratives have very little connection to reality.
Reading this book, aging feels like an area where we might see huge advances in the next 15-20 years.
There are already really strong results for extending vital life by significant margins in other species, including rhesus monkeys. There are already drugs people take that seem to have some of this effect, though I think currently they come with some dangerous side-effects that might not be worth it if you didn't have the underlying disease the drug was intended for.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-Why-Age_and-Dont-Have/dp/150...
[2] https://www.cell.com/trends/biotechnology/fulltext/S0167-779...
Otherwise with whatever extreme life extension stuff might happen, it'll just be unjustly distributed based on wealth and race is it is too often today.
Also, man, let's not fear death too much : ). I'm not looking forward to it, but, my gut sense this whole extreme life extension thing is 50% pharoahnic - afraid of death and wanting to hold on to the toys you have, as opposed to living a full life.
Science needs it's own legs to stand on here before government swoops in. Right now, its mostly hype and smoke and mirrors, there's nothing I've seen that warrants government funding.
Prolonging life, working for eternity while continuously having children, the planet rotting away because we refuse to die? That may be more (at least in terms of years), but is it much better?
Really though, I don’t believe we’d ever get extreme life extension without getting many other ducks in a row such as sustainable living in massive numbers.
That is not a given. It is easy to imagine medicine being able to prolong life in terms of, well, preventing death, but the person would still suffer from some of the downsides of senescence like excessive credulity (i.e. the elderly being easily taken in by con-artists), slower cognitive function, etc.
It may be that advances and improvements that help yound lives also help old lives. If so, great. But there's no need to focus on the extreme corner case.
Maybe we should stop assuming that every selfish impulse, gluttonous instinct, and absurd demand on the universe is somehow "scientific" and "good". Who wants to live longer if you can't appreciate the one, short, life you do have? Why waste it trying to get more? Life extension has at its core an unquestionable assumption that parades itself as morality--the sanctity and worth of human life!--but it is really the basest narcissism and selfishness that is utterly alien to the functioning of every single component of this vast ecosystem. Things die.
> Sinking into the past and eventually erased from living memory. I once saw a picture of a guy in the 1920s who bred horses in the Greek mountains.
Yeah, well, the atoms that make up the molecules in the proteins in the cells in your body were manufactured in the massive explosions of supernovae billions of years ago that no one remembers. You think your great grandfather is lost to the sands of time for all eternity, when in reality he is only lost to you. It's just a further expression of unquestioned selfishness, wanting more life for yourself by coopting his into your experience. Let your great grandfather and his entire life be as it was. There is nothing required more of him now.
Why is the arbitrary length of human life sacred? Less is seemingly bad (because murder is illegal), but more would also be bad... so we got exactly the correct amount now, regardless of the fact that it is a different number for different people. Sounds like Stockholm syndrome.
If you like your life, you still have to prioritize. You would like to do X and Y, time is short, you choose X. With more time, you could experience Y, too. Why not?
If you don't want to live, I respect your decision, just please don't force it on other people.
My preferred option would be an unlimited life, with perfect health, and the ability to choose quick painless death if you decide so.
Isn’t that the funny part? It’s fascinating to me that the people arguing against life extension here have two main points:
1. People don’t deserve it because they are inherently bad, they are poorly optimized, are selfish agents, would exhaust their value, are incapable of managing the impact of life extension, and so on. 2. Life is meaningless without death. <—- I am willing to entertain this second idea but the first has a disciplinary puritanical feeling to it which I really don’t relate to at all. This profound pessimism is alien to me. I can’t help but feel that there are ultimately some religious undertones at play here.
You're reading into this what you want to. That is some kind of bizarre binary thinking that doesn't exist.
As for "alien", there have been literally thousands of human cultures that have been erased and replaced with the current spur of "scientific" advancement that holds the world in exactly one way, a conveniently self-centered and tragically misguided one, IMHO.
This is exactly the problem. In the default state of nature the entirety of erosive processes lead to a natural cycle of decay and death. Life extension is the alteration to this, to bend all of society's energy, focus, and scientific endeavor to stave off the absolutely natural erosive process that is the engine of Darwinian evolution, so that some gluttonous individuals and spend "centuries in hedonistic pleasure".
Would it be better to have dozen kids and watch half of them die before their first birthday?
If no, then what is so great about watching your parents die before their hundredth birthday?
This should start early in middle school and high school, too. Surprised this idea of replication crisis fails to get more attention.
As an aside, I'd ask those who promote the idea that children should be taught "how to think" instead of "facts they can just look up" to think a bit more deeply about what they are saying. IMO, you cannot reach valid conclusions without facts. Facts are the foundation of knowledge, synthesis and analysis. Without facts, one cannot understand a topic or even know what questions to ask about it. Note, I'm not saying that children should be force fed facts via rote learning. But consider, what happens when someone believes they can think for themselves but is ignorant of topic they're thinking about?
You can absolutely teach critically thinking skills to teens. Force-feeding facts which are often questionable at best leads to poor outcomes.
The replication crisis indicates, frankly, that confidence in the process of science should be eroded a bit. Many people I know treat scientific studies as true until proven otherwise, and the replication crisis demonstrates this isn't an accurate assessment.
A replication crisis is by design - the system doesn’t exist to publish the best available science, it exists to create credential and status hierarchy in which to control scientific authority and shape it as a political tool.
To address this issue you’d have to first address general plutocracy which even 80000 Hours itself is enmeshed in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism
https://80000hours.org/about/#how-are-you-funded
The principles of effective altruism are largely consequentialist, utilitarian, cosmopolitan, and humanist, although none of those fit exactly right.
But more importantly, I think if you just went and talked to random political scientists, you would find they actually had not thought very hard about what the most important causes are. If you ask them, they would come up with something on the spot. Indeed, political scientists don't at all seem to be the correct experts for this question.
To be fair to the authors, they openly state right at the beginning of the article that the scope of the questions they're listing is based entirely on questions being asked within their community. I'm not saying the questions aren't worth answering, but a community with less overlap with LessWrong's 'politics is the mind killer' singularity-believers would perhaps choose a set of 'important questions in politics' somewhat less narrowly focused on AI. And this community overlap clearly has more of an impact on the authors' conclusion that the most impactful questions in politics nearly all concern AI than pure philosophical commitment to maximising the utilitarian value of their time.
Political scientists will know the most important questions in political science as judged by intellectual interest, but that's just not the question being asked here. They are asking which questions in political science will have the biggest impact on the world as judged by a utilitarian and long-termist framework, and I don't see why political scientists would have a confident answer to that.
Likewise, I am a physicist with expertise in what questions are of intellectual interest to physicists, but I don't think that I or my colleagues have good ready answers to which physics questions will have the biggest impact on the world.
> And this community overlap clearly has more of an impact on ...
But the community overlap wasn't a random event that is just now influencing this investigation. The members of the community were attracted to each other because they were convinced by certain abstract arguments. (LessWrong is concentrated in Berkeley while 80k Hours is UK based and the members mostly hail from there and Australia. They found each other through the internet and through the Oxford philosophy department.) You can certainly disagree with the arguments, but chalking this up to having overlap with some dorky community is a cheap ad hominem.
> Likewise, I am a physicist with expertise in what questions are of intellectual interest to physicists, but I don't think that I or my colleagues have good ready answers to which physics questions will have the biggest impact on the world.
While answering the question involves predicting the future in ways no one should be overly confident in, it's worth noting that social impact questions of that type are, in fact, within the domain of political science in a way they are not within the domain of physics, so practitioners within the two fields aren't exactly similarly situated with regard to the question.
Or do you have some sort of special expertise?
Because sure, what you're saying sounds good, but it's far from a piece of ironclad logic, so, color me un-convinced : ).
So. This seems like the perfect question for folks with deep knowledge in history, politics/current events (on a global scale), and philosophy.
Luckily, that's kind of what a lot of political philosophy / political science / political theory (the name varies) is!
Or social theory. Or philosophy. Even literature, to be honest. You laugh? Consider how often literature has been a driver of social reform.
Did you just come up with this on the spot? ; )
But, I agree! Personally, I'd ask the historians! ;)
Step 1 in finding the highest impact thing to do is being serious about establishing cause and effect, and historians by their own admission rarely try to do that. (Cliometrics is a bit better.)
TBH I'd make an argument for the elimination of war being a huge way to better the world. Imagine:
- No invasion of Iraq.
- No bungling of the invasion of Afghanistan (or no invasion)
- No Syrian war and millions of refugees.
War has huge negative ripple effects in addition to all of the deaths it causes; societies and communities are destroyed, whose effects echo for generations. It consumes insane amounts of resources. If we want to think big, that's what I'd think about. Maybe even focus on exclusively. I mean, who do you think is going to buck against checks and balances on scary intelligent AI research? Defense-funded research.
Sure, EA talks about international relations, etc, but, where's the study on the cost/benefits of world-wide pacifism, if we're theorizing here?
Part of my skepticism of all this is because there is so much thought put into bettering the world over time:
- All the religions, which still undergird the various systems of morals/laws we have.
- To name a few philosophers / social thinkers who directly discussed making things "better":
- Plato
- Hobbes
- Marx
- Habermas (I haven't read him, but I've read about him; big on liberal democracy and the post WWII European system, I think)
And, tbh, I think it's easy for non-historians, or scholars who don't focus on political science or political philosophy/theory to just write the field off; and, IMHO the "hard" sciences and tech/CS folk in particular have a tendency to do this. So I'm always a bit skeptical.
Sentience of animals and non-humans comes up a lot. Which looks less important than a lot of other areas of research, fusion, physics, ect.
Think how 40 years ago lithium batteries didn't exist, and they only started becoming commercially available in this millennium.
Are equivalent improvements happening soon?
There are more problems than there are scientists.
And more scientists than there are labs that can solve problems.
As we move from a multiplicity of disparate cultures to a single common denominating quagmire of internet-unified global capitalism, how do we ensure that alternative perspectives on nature, society and purpose continue to exist and are granted reasonable space and resources to self-sustain?
Alternatively stated: how can homo sapiens as a group reliably value things such as the commons (nature, intellectual heritage, freedom of choice, individual dignity, etc.) that exist outside of conventional private ownership and economic rationalism without politically centralizing objective value thereby capitulating the great strengths known to be associated with heterogeneity?
> What’s the minimum viable human population (from the perspective of genetic diversity)?
~500 people. It's not a 'firm' answer, as the research is still ongoing (aka, its complicated) but it looks like the number is ~500 but likely a bit more : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population
> What future possibilities are there for brain-computer interfacing and how does this interact with issues in AI safety?
It all come down to scarring. Current attempts typically end in scarring, at least in the Central Nervous System. We've not got a good way around it yet, at least for little tetrode like probes you have to insert.
The most exciting (to me) is to use Clarity and Optogenetics. Clarity to make the brain, well, clear-er. And Optogenetics to stimulate cells with light. Shine light, nerves fire.
Trouble is the Clarity makes the brain swell ~3x, and nerves are smaller than the diffraction limit of light, mostly. Maybe attach some iron atoms in the optogenetic pore and then pull on them in a magnetic gradient, thereby separating out the frequencies needed. Still it's a long ways off.
> What do we know from animals about how cognitive abilities scale with brain size, learning time, environmental complexity, etc.?
There's been some good work out of the Hercule lab (U. Chile I think?) about this. The trouble is in getting a reliable brain marker for 'learning ability'. You can use markers for the number of layers of the cortex, and their cross connectivity, but it's still tough to understand. Turns out, the 'wrinklage' of a mammalian brain is correlated with increasing 'learning-ness', but atmospheric/hydodynamic pressure plays a huge role in the 'wrinklage'. Sorry, my google-fu is not good today and I don't have the paper citation
> Why has Mohism almost died out in China, relative to other schools of thought?
Damn! Now that is a good question. For those just seeing Mozi for the first time, he was a defensive siege engineer during the early Warring states period (~470BC). Guy's ethos would really fit well in Silicon Valley, he was a kinda engineery-hippy dude, kinda Kevin Kelly-esque: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozi
"Improve our modelling of impact winter scenarios, especially for 1–10 km asteroids. Work with experts in climate modelling and nuclear winter modelling to see what modern models say. "
I think impact scenarios is a definite, but nuclear winter is actually an extremely questionable "theory". Many people are not aware, but the the Russian KGB boasted that they literally made this up in order to divert public opinion in the west against nuclear weapons as NATO rolled out medium range missiles in Europe back in 1982: http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/nuclear-winter/ The mushrooms clouds from nuclear detonations do indeed dissipate over a few days. I believe subsequent modeling has come up empty even in the worst case scenarios.
"Develop more reliable and tamper-proof measures for so-called ‘dark tetrad’ traits — psychopathy, Machiavellianism, sadism, and narcissism."
I actually like this question and have been thinking the same thing recently. These traits are very dangerous especially when exhibited by those at the top of the food chain in both politics and business and need to be identified early and treated, and not allowed to flourish among those in power (Some good reads on this is The Sociapath Next Door and the Sociopath Test). Bad actors have incredibly out-sized influence globally.
"Why have certain aspects of Chinese civilization been so long-lasting? Are there any lessons we can draw from this about what makes for highly resilient institutions, cultures, or schools of thought?"
I'd be curious to know what they are referring to here in modern China. Is this question even relevant post cultural revolution? I think its a more relevant question for Taiwan that preserved the "old" culture as best it could.
To use the meme, an AI won't be smarter than us; it'll be faster at being stupid.
Computers beating humans at chess is a great example of not being smarter, but being stupid faster. Both humans and computers approach PSPACE-complete problems like chess by approximating their searches and looking at trees of possible moves. We have no special insights into how to consider or evaluate moves; we have psychological profiles on which moves might be connected during practical play but no reason to require people to make such moves, and those profiles are largely limited to "openings", classifying the relatively few initial trees.
How do computers beat humans in chess? They do exactly what we do, but faster. This isn't smart, but fast stupid.
Genetics: To what extent does the RNA world (leadzyme, ribozyme, RNA bases) influence our DNA's actions; is there more beyond genome and epigenome?
Business Development: Enumerate all models of cooperation.
Climatology: Classify the climates of Venus and Mars under anthropogenic climate change; what will terraforming do to their climates?
Earth Science: Classify the minerals and rocks of Venus and Mars.
Neuroscience: Is demyelination preventable or treatable?
Economics: Are markets efficient? Prove that either P<NP (no) or FP=PPAD (yes).
Medicine: Can phage therapy prevent an antibiotic-resistant bacterial doom scenario?
History: Just let historians critique history books for a few hours live on stage, and broadcast the results. This will more socially impactful than any specific question or research agenda.
Law: I do have a soft spot for "What rights might digital minds have under current law?" It's a good question. However, a better one, in terms of social impact today, might be: How can the law establish effective oversight over its executors and legislators?
Statistics: Are there tighter bounds on neural net performance than PAC/VC theory? Alternatively, are neural nets essentially polynomial regression?
Philosophy: The Hard Problem.
Physics: Scale quantum computing to today's classical computational regimes.
Astronomy: Finish building planned telescopes; do the planned experiments have results which agree with current theories?
Political Science: How can two-party democracies be converted by the will of the people to multi-party democracies; can Duverger's Law be bent?
Psychology: The Hard Problem.
Philosophy of Science: The Demarcation Problem.
Sociology: How do societies collapse; how are technologies lost? Case studies won't cut it; we need models.
Mathematics: The Riemann Zeta Hypothesis. If metamathematics is allowed, then whether P<NP, P=NP, etc.
Research on these lines of thought does have a big social impact today just by consideration and exploration, and will have big social impacts if they ever actually answer the questions.
I definitely am not going to be supporting this 80000hours.org organization if their list is really what they think is high priority.
Asking why isn't trolling and deserves a response. If you don't want to respond it is fine, but downvoting? really? It implies that you (the mods) think you are beyond any questioning from the hoi polloi.
- inflammatory, dismissive labels without concrete justification: "eugenics, corporatism, sci-fi bait:"
- ditto for "what a series of shallow tropes"
- presumptuous assertion: "Here's one question in each field which is better than any of theirs"
The HN guidelines strongly advise against doing that.
First, the most important thing: Note that one of the responses to my original comment is feeling intense emotional relief at having some uncanny unease put directly into words. This is not the first time I've responded to this sort of article, and not the first time I've seen this sort of reply. I gather that it is difficult for folks to articulate the ambient horror of what this sort of writing is sketching.
Eugenics is recognizable from phrenology. They want to know why brain size matters and how to measure intelligence in different parts of the brain. They also want to know whether FAAH-OUT can make people happier and less sensitive to pain, and whether "extreme" human life extension is possible. They want to know how small the human race can get, and what the marginal utility of each additional person is. Indeed they ask whether utilitarianism isn't the ultimate ethical method.
Corporatism is most obvious in the framing. Various already-established consensus positions are turned into but-really or what-about questions, so that it seems as if climate change is not something that definitely exists, that we definitely could do something about, and that we definitely are not doing enough about. Corporations are portrayed as the leaders in innovation, while governments and the public are incompetent and slow to change.
Why do I say that these positions are tropes? Because I've read enough Dark Enlightenment literature to recognize its fingerprints, mostly. The authors are very slanted towards a meritocratic transhumanist utopia, where their very intelligent observations about the coming utopia will be rewarded with high stations and praise in the coming utopia. Meanwhile all of the implications about classism and injustice are carefully worded away so as not to be blatant and repulsive.
I recognize that you might not like my questions. But you also admit that they're substantive, and that's good enough for me. Honestly, they're barely my questions at all; each of them has been open for decades, I think. Maybe quantum computing is the most recent one to have something interesting happen, and that's changed our trajectory from asking "can we?" to "can we, bigger?" and "can we, cheaper?" and "can we, easier?"
Also,
>I recognize that you might not like my questions.
My criticism wasn't about any of those.