A brief note: Cambridge is hosting a digital minds fellowship that I’d encourage you to apply for. How to treat digital minds is one of the most important questions we will ever answer, and yet the field is in its early stages. Having more people thinking about it is enormously important. Read more here.
You people seemed to like my last post where I listed 50 interesting facts. A fact is just something that’s the case, and it turns out that more than 50 interesting things are the case in the world. So, I thought I’d present 50 more.
There are about
100 different waysthreats from space like asteroids, supernova explosions, and solar flares could kill us. Some I hadn’t thought about before: a rogue planet could crash into us or send us hurtling through space, neutron stars with magnetic fields could send powerful magnetar bursts, we could get infected with alien microbes, and the sun will probably boil the oceans in about a billion years. However, these risks aren’t very high in general—one way you know this is that they haven’t killed life on Earth in the last ~1 billion years.One risk along these lines is that we could create a
true vacuum. Currently, on some views, the world is in a false vacuum state. If it reached a true vacuum, this would expand at the speed of light, causing an unstoppable wall of destruction. This false vacuum possibility might also be alarming for the same reason as the hypothetical existence of afalse cabbage.The best way to improve health in rich countries is likely to work on stuff like tobacco control. This is plausibly
within an order of magnitudeas effective as working on improving health in poor countries. So if you’re a nationalist who cares only about your own country, this looks like a good place todonate.Relatedly, tobacco caused about
100 million deaths in the 20th century, and causes about 8 million extra deaths per year. This includes around 490,000 in the U.S.! This means smoking is responsible for more than 10% of global deaths, and almost one in six U.S. deaths.Cats kill a lot more birds than wind turbines. However, wind turbines kill
more environmentally important bird populations, so their impact is potentially bigger. Relatedly, our evidence for how many birds cats killisn’t actually very good.One of the founders of modern deep learning
skedaddled after inventing it. He’s one of the most influential people in the modern AI revolution, and yet we basically have no idea what’s become of him.The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says that each time a quantum mechanical event occurs, the world splits. Some surprising facts about it: 1) it requires you think that two people with your evidence aren’t equally good candidates for being you; 2) there’s no agreement about how many worlds there are if many worlds is true; 3) lots of people think there’d be no fact of the matter; 4) I’ve heard estimates that range from big finite numbers to Beth 2, though there might just be some single definitive answer.
You’ve probably heard about the fine-tuning argument in physics, where certain physical parameters are set to a tiny portion of a range needed for complex life. If the cosmological constant didn’t fall in such a tiny range, no life couldn’t have arisen. Well, Robin Collins—a philosopher with a Ph.D in physics—has argued that there’s similar
fine-tuning for discoverability. There are parameters in physics in a tiny range needed for space to be discoverable, so that without them falling in that tiny range—on the order of a billionth of their possible values in some cases—the universe would have been much less discoverable. Not clear if he’s right about this, but if he is, seems very hard to explain that given atheism. The odds are just too low to think the explanation is chance, and you can’t invoke a multiverse to explain them, because there isn’t an analogous anthropic selection effect.I don’t have very strong thoughts on the simulation argument. But one overlooked fact: the argument is actually stronger given the self-indication assumption (SIA). SIA favors theories on which there are more candidates for being your present self. So, if a coin is flipped that creates one person if heads and ten if tails, SIA says you should think it’s ten times likelier the coin came up tails than heads. But because there could be a lot more copies of people like you and I if the simulation argument is true, it’s stronger given SIA than SSA.
RFK Junior has been on the record as being
strongly opposed to factory farms. He wrote one of the blurbs on the back of Matthew (great name) Scully’s famous book Dominion (not to be confused with Tom Holland’s famous book Dominion), which is about the horrors of factory farming. It’s sad that someone who spent a lot of his career opposing factory farming has taken actions to exacerbate it by supporting meat-eating and restricting lab-grown meat.(This is something I don’t really understand, so not confident it’s a fact, but did check with Claude and seems to hold up): Estimates put the number of digital minds there could be often at somewhere around 10^50-70. But if reversible computing can give rise to digital minds, there wouldn’t need to be the same kind of energy expenditure from entropy loss,
so there could be potentially like 50 orders of magnitude more digital minds. This is one reason why, even though I’m pessimistic about the welfare of biological organisms, I think the future is good in expectation: seems like, to paraphrase𝕏our president, in expectation everyone is computer.There are
tens of billionsof soil nematodes for every person—these are mostly tiny microscopic worms with a few hundred neurons. They’re probably a few hundred timesmore abundant than arthropods.Mengistu Haile Mariamruled over Ethiopia from 1977-1991. He presided over a Marxist Leninist military Junta that killed between half a million and 2 million people. His Wikipedia page described, “During his reign it was not uncommon to see students, suspected government critics, or rebel sympathizers hanging from lampposts each morning. Mengistu himself is alleged to have murdered opponents by garroting or shooting them, saying that he was leading by example.” It similarly quotes a U.S. attorney declaring during his genocide trial, “The biggest problem with prosecuting Mengistu for genocide is that his actions did not necessarily target a particular group. They were directed against anybody who was opposing his government, and they were generally much more political than based on any ethnic targeting.” However, after carrying out these wretched human rights abuses, he’s lived out a comfortable retirement in Zimbabwe, including writing a memoir.1The evidence for consciousness in snails
isn’t terrible, but it’s a lot weaker than the evidence for consciousness in lots of insects. I’m pretty impressed by the evidence for consciousness in insects; it’s just about as good as I might have expected on the high end.Mainstream views of physics
seem to implythat our actions create infinite future ripples. This means your actions will cause an infinite amount of extra welfare and suffering. Spooky if true, and hard to assess given weirdness about infinity.C.S. Lewis wrote the book
Surprised By Joyabout his conversion to Christianity, and then later, unexpectedly, married a woman named Joy. Classic case of not updating enough—in this case on the surprisingness of Joy!Good judgments don’t need to be falsifiable. There’s no realistic way to falsify my theory that outside the observable universe isn’t an endless sea of turtles painted red, but nonetheless, it is a very reasonable belief to hold. Similarly, the belief that all reasonable judgments must be falsifiable is not itself falsifiable.
You’ve probably heard that malaria killed half of people historically. This isn’t true, but it caused around
5% of deaths. Relatedly, you can save a life from malaria for about4,500 dollars.Humans
irrationallycare a lot more about problems when there’s some specific malignant entity we can attribute them to.If you sample people at random moments, and ask them if they’d like to
skip whatever task they’re doing, about 40% of the time they do. This seems to indicate that about 40% of the day is hedonically negative. This includes most of their time at work. Bleak stuff! Thoughanother studyfound that people reported feeling good about 70% of the time.I assume everyone knows this at this point, but prediction markets are
ridiculously accurate!This is slightly out of accordance with the rest of the list but I’ll say it anyways: smoothies are amazing. The things you want in food are: 1) being healthy; 2) being tasty; 3) being vegan (if you are obeying the moral law); 4) having specific stuff you want—e.g. protein if you want to get more protein; and 5) not taking too long to make. Smoothies have all of these properties! It’s just amazing!
Probably chess engines are
getting relatively close to perfect play!Important paragraph from Robin Hanson explaining
why he doesn’t expect FOOM:
However, we have no concrete reason to expect [FOOM]. Humans have been improving automation for centuries, and software for 75 years. And as innovation is mostly made of many small gains, rates of overall economic and tech growth have remained relatively steady and predictable. For example, we predicted when computers would beat humans at chess decades in advance, and current AI abilities are not very far from what we should have expected given long-run trends. Furthermore, not only are AIs still at least decades from being able to replace humans on most of today’s job tasks, AIs are much further from the far greater abilities that would be required for one of them to kill everyone, by overwhelming all of humanity plus all other AIs active at the time.
Historically there was
mostly no GDP growth. Then, starting a few hundred years ago, it began to accelerate rapidly. This is one reason to be skeptical of nothing-ever-happens predictions about AI.
Bees
can learn to use tools.Cleaner wrassecan pass the mirror test.Ozempic randomly seems to work against
pretty much all disease! Wild!It’s commonly said that there are about 86 billion neurons in the brain.
We actually aren’t really sure the number!On Earth, there are
probably between10^23 and 10^24 neurons. “Most of this is distributed roughly evenly among small land arthropods, fish, and nematodes, or possibly dominated by nematodes with the other two as significant contenders.” This is despite nematodes having hundreds of neurons, just because they’re so numerous. Now, before you get all excited,neuron countsare a bad proxy for estimating sentience.1.5 million peopledie of lead exposure every year. Despite this, it is hugely underfunded, so progress on the margins is very impactful.America is an
unusually high-information culture. This means that Americans have a lot of knowledge about America. People in other countries don’t really—to quote the article’s author:
Discourse on Swazi society is extremely basic, even among very smart people. There is no reliable data on whether the economy is improving or worsening. The life expectancy of the country has risen from an astonishing 40.9 in 2004 to probably over 60 today (
[sources]disagree on the[number]by as much as 7 years) thanks primarily to an[American aid program called PEPFAR], but this is not widely known outside of development circles. Nobody has a strong sense of whether the economy is improving or worsening this year, or which sectors are growing. Very few people could name a law that was passed this year. It is very difficult to have productive discourse in this low-information context.
We slaughter potentially as high as
tens quadrillioninsects annually with potentially very painful pesticides. If we assume an insect’s death is .01% as painful as a human’s death, then this causes about as much agony as if we poisoned to death 10 trillion people every year—or about 27 billion people every day. Humane pesticides are desperately needed! This seems like a no-brainer even if you’re generally skeptical of insect welfare; if we’re painfully poisoning to death quadrillions of beings, we should at least look towards doing it more humanely.Corporate chicken campaigns have affected probably between 9 and 120 chicken life-years
per dollar spent. However, probably future campaigns will be nearer to 9, given the recent drop in effectiveness. Still, totally absurd amounts of value.Humanity’s impact on
net primary productivityhas been smaller than its impact on animal abundance. In fact, impact on NPP has been pretty negligible, despite steep declines in animal numbers. Som…
