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Comment by origin_path | Hacker News Reader

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"the worst-case scenario is unlikely or in the future ... loss of human life is virtually certain"

These two things are in conflict. We could ignore both asteroids and climate change and according to the best known science there'd be very little impact for vast timespans and possibly no impact ever (before humanity is ended by something else like war).

Yes, also for the climate. Look at the actual predictions and it's like a small reduction in GDP growth spread over a very long period of time, and that's assuming the predictions are actually correct when they have a long track record of being not so.

Really stuff like asteroids and climate is a good counter-argument to caring about AI risk. Intellectuals like to hypothesize world-ending cataclysms that only their far sighted expertise can prevent, but whenever these people's predictions get tested against something concrete they seem to invariably end up being wrong. Our society rewards catastrophising far too generously and penalizes being wrong far too little, especially for academics, NGOs etc. It makes people feel or seem smart in the moment, and they can punt the reputational damage from being wrong far into the future (and then pretend they never made those predictions at all or there were mitigating factors).

> We could ignore both asteroids and climate change and according to the best known science there'd be very little impact for vast timespans and possibly no impact ever (before humanity is ended by something else like war).

That's just incorrect. The Tunguska event was a nuclear-weapon scale asteroid. These are predicted to happen once every hundred years or so. If it happens over a populated city millions would die. If a person wrongly concludes this was a surprise nuclear attack, maybe everyone would die, to say nothing of the real risk that the asteroid itself could be big enough to wipe us all out.

There's a lot of uncertainty around climate change, but changing climate patterns will certainly change resource allocations (fresh water, arable land, etc.). This will lead to shortages in places that were once abundant, which could easily lead to wars in which millions die.

> Really stuff like asteroids and climate is a good counter-argument to caring about AI risk.

This. This boggles my mind. Long-tail risks exist, and burying your head in the sand and pretending they don't just places millions of lives at risk, and potentially the entire human race. You don't have to think these are top priorities, but to dismiss them as complete unimportant is frankly bonkers.

"The Tunguska event was a nuclear-weapon scale asteroid"

Which had very little impact on humanity because it exploded in the middle of the tundra.

"These are predicted to happen once every hundred years or so"

What is predicted exactly, by whom and how were these predictions validated against testable reality given the postulated rareness? If they're so common then why is it so hard to name the last 10? I think in reality these events are very rare and will almost always happen over the oceans, deserts, poles etc where not many people live.

"Long-tail risks exist, and burying your head in the sand and pretending they don't"

They exist and I am not pretending they don't. I am saying that this style of reasoning in which an extremely unlikely event is unfalsifiably and arbitrarily assigned near infinite downsides in order to justify spending time and resources on it, is problematic and as a society we are far too generous towards people who do this.

> If they're so common then why is it so hard to name the last 10?

"I can't name such events therefore they're not worth thinking about" is a ridiculous argument.

The most recent one happened less than 10 years ago and almost 1,500 people were injured, and we completely missed its approach:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor

Luckily, it again happened near a depopulated zone, but the damage was still extensive.

> I think in reality these events are very rare and will almost always happen over the oceans, deserts, poles etc where not many people live.

Most car accidents will happen to bad drivers, so if you're a good driver you don't need to wear your seatbelt, amirite?

The fact that an easily preventable event typically happens without much damage is no consolation when that's not the case.

> They exist and I am not pretending they don't. I am saying that this style of reasoning in which an extremely unlikely event is unfalsifiably and arbitrarily assigned near infinite downsides

Your mistake is thinking the likelihoods assigned are arbitrary and unfalsifiable. By your logic, COVID-19 was unlikely as most outbreaks are small and isolated, and the likelihood of a global contagion so unfalsifiably remote it's not worth thinking about. Therefore pandemic preparation is a waste of time and money. Now that 6 million people have died, that view doesn't look so rosy in hindsight.

The calculations on asteroid threats have been done based on known data, and even with our current preparations we still miss some potentially devastating ones like Chelyabinsk:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event#Frequency_and_ris...

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