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I've found my writing has stagnated due to lack of feedback. Unfortunately my friends and family don't seem interested enough in my writing to engage with it.

I suspect it is still important to get to know people and build trust in the flesh, even if having a remote leader can be good.

I'm more scared of the stagnation world I feel ultimately goes straight to apocalypse.

What apolcalypse is he worried about? Or is it the breakdown in politics, due to the stagnation, the problem? Why should the breakdown lead to an apocalypse, rather than a reformation?

The claim is largely that voters started to care more about politicians implementing their favorite policies than being the recipient of trickle-down graft.

For me graft is a more acceptable in good times. When things are booming it doesn't matter too much if a little extra is skimmed to one side.

When things seem dire, you want someone that will actually fix the problems you are worried about. So graft goes out of fashion.

Could you be more precise in what you are responding to?

When you look at how many bad decisions have been taken these past few years despite plenty of access to good information, this sentiment seems pretty out of touch…

I'd argue we have lots of good information about what is going on. I'm not sure we have lots of good information about what we should do. Should we move to renewables and storage, nuclear or carbon capture and storage or would it be better to geo-engineer?

There are lots of trade-offs for all these paths. Being able to simulate their interactions accurately and under different assumptions might help form a consensus about a not too bad way forward.

I've been thinking about these kinds of things a bit. PDE and FEA seem core to lots of interesting simulations. From chemistry and climate to engineering.

Firedrake [1] and Fenics [2] seem like interesting approaches to this. I know that firedrake is being explored for some climate modelling with fluidity project [3][4].

The value of any simulation platform is based on the value of the models and datasets in that platform. So the key question is, can you attract the people making the valuable models to your platform. Working with things that people are already using seems important, as does talking to those people about it. I've got a Google form asking questions currently to try to get more information about what people who currently make and use simulations need. [5]

[1] https://www.firedrakeproject.org/

[2] https://fenicsproject.org/

[3] http://fluidityproject.github.io/

[4] https://www.archer.ac.uk/community/eCSE/eCSE06-01/IC15-ecse-...

[5] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfH-ns1CSQlyVyo7oj_...

It can, but lots of interesting philosophy can need collaboration. Good philosophy of mind stuff should be informed by neuroscience.

One of my wishes is that it would support a hardware token like the yubikey for storing the private key, to make leaks less likely (although it might not be super performant).

“ According to Maistre, any attempt to justify government on rational grounds will only lead to unresolvable arguments about the legitimacy and expediency of any existing government and that this in turn will lead to violence and chaos.[23][24] As a result, Maistre argued that the legitimacy of government must be based on compelling, but non-rational grounds which its subjects must not be allowed to question.” >Perhaps whatever is useful is oftentimes more important than what is true.

There has been an ongoing debate in the UK about proportional representation and the first past the post system. It has not, as yet, lead to violence and chaos. So I think that the link Maistre identifies between questioning the status quo and chaos is not always true.

Admittedly there is time and place for debate. You don't argue about the cars direction, when the driver is trying to concentrate in a dangerous situation.

This is one benefit of democracies. People can form alternate leadership structures with different strengths and focuses, without them trying to wrest power at unpredictable times.

I'd rather not be rich or famous. If I happened to become either I'd try and leverage them in some way to help or form organisations that can navigate the hot mess of our societies next few decades.

For me trying to negotiate with people playing super hardball (ignoring social norms etc) makes me think they will not honour any agreements made. Because those rely on social norms too. Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal etc.

I've not found it super useful myself.

Maybe I was trying to use it for the wrong things?

It seems like a good way of creating better understanding for yourself, a less good way of building a community. That seems to be best done off-line.

The world is a giant ship with 8+ billion each with their own oar in the water. A vessel like that turns very slowly and with a danger on the horizon as complex and difficult to understand as climate change, we should not expect everyone to wake up overnight and be all-in on fixing the problem. But almost every trend shows that people are waking up, changing their habits, and shifting their priorities in the right direction.

We still subsidies fossil fuel extraction! When we stop doing that I'll think the ship is really turning. Other than that I think the bubble of people who care about this in increasing, but not having a huge impact on the direction we are actually moving.

I've been thinking about how best to get people the information they need to deal with the climate crisis.

I'm thinking about a community run portal to try and match person to the correct advice. E.g. someone with investments should find advice about how to invest to help. People interested in acting locally should find environmental groups to join. Activist people .

Google is fine if you know what you are looking for, but I have come across a few different times where I didn't know the correct terminology. E.g. I wanted to find something like a community energy group in my local area, but I didn't know what it was called.

I'm not currently sure how to do this. Some form of search engine where people put in information about themselves is a possibility. Or an advanced directory.

I wonder if you can monitor energy usage (with an external chip) and compare it to what is expected to catch major changes.

So for the FPGA you could load it with a risc-v arch and then run that arch through some performance load. If the energy usage has changed a lot it may well be doing something nefarious. Bonus points if you can have a (set of) reference fpga's in the cloud you can compare arbitrary work loads on so that it is harder to predict and be stealthy about nefarious activities.

Use side-channel sources of information, where possible, to drive down the scale of changes possible.

I bet that changes in society will accelerate. Nothing is the same except for change, but I argue the that second derivative of change is going to exponentially skyrocket.

Whenever people talk about change, I look at my flush toilet which uses the same technology which was invented in 1592. Feeding into a sewage system built in 1866. With waste water treatment standards from 1912. This helps ground me in expectations about how quickly things change.

There are countervailing forces to change as well. Society has had the internet for 20-30 years which has changed the means with which society forms opinions (for the better and worse), but it has had little impact on the actual method of government and laws. Nor has it changed how these things change much. Why not? Should we expect more changes in these things or not? This is all a bit unknowable.

We now exist in two-three ( western/china and possibly russia) spheres of influence in the on-line world. Lack of small disconnected regions has been hypothesised as a cause of china's stagnation. Will it be the same for us?

Another countervailing tendency is energy (or lack of it). Change requires energy and energy is problematic right now. We cannot agree how it should be produced (carbon is out, but nuclear and renewables are at loggerheads a bit) and it seems like it we have some negative feedback loops in progress already (increased numbers of droughts due to climate change will decrease the amount of food energy we can capture as a whole).

We’re now in a post-individual human world. We’re now in a world that is controlled by these emergent goals of the corporations. I don’t think there’s any turning back the clock on that. We are now in that world.

One of the things that worries me about this is that there are some things that corporations and governments aren't good at yet.

Lets call the root of the problem, adopting a new world view. Why is this important? Adopting new world views is very important for scientific advancement and for adapting to problems (climate change denial can be seen as a failure to adopt a world view).

If we accept organisations are the future, we need to create new organisational types that can adopt new world views more quickly, so that we can have more reactive and innovative organisations. New organisations tend to require new legislation, as what is a legal organisations is defined in law.

However our current organisations can chose to stop this legislation. So we might be left in a position where individuals are squeezed out of having any influence but not so much innovation is coming from the organisations either. It might be worth looking to see if this view is historically consistent with things like the stagnation in China.

So herding rabid cats seems to be the core skill.

Cat herding only makes sense if you have an idea of what should be done. Herding for the sake of keeping everyone 'on the same page' can be harmful. If you are trying to get a consensus this will squash small ideas before they have had a chance to prove themselves. Sometimes space and non-management is needed for things to sprout.

I would also argue that supporting efforts to understand where the methane is coming from would be good.

For example Methane Sat[1] looks like it can cover a wide area and is coming on-line in the time frame to do some good (2020).

[1] https://www.edf.org/climate/how-methanesat-is-different

And regardless of morals, it's an inherently insecure paradigm.

As well as this I think it slows communication of important issues and undermines trust. We need to be better at these things globally so that we can tackle the important global problems we are facing with climate breakdown etc.

The reasoned response to climate breakdown is to start taking it seriously at a global level.

Agreed! That should be the number one priority.

I also agree that it is unlikely that AGI will fix climate change for us in time.

What it might help with is adaptation. If all our attempts in trying to control the giant intricate set of climatic and ecological feedback loops we are disturbing don't work, then it might help us with designing appropriate technologies to cope with what the world has become.

Apparently vehicle to everything [1].

The car industry seems to love V2* terminology. V2H is connecting an electric vehicle to a home to provide power in an emergency.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/v2x-vehicletovehicle-or... [2] https://thedriven.io/2018/10/19/v2g-whats-the-state-of-play-...

Trying for agi could be part of a reasoned response to climate breakdown.

But I am not going count on getting a reasoned response any time soon.

It depends how much you worry about society going south because of climate breakdown (and how much you expect AGI to help or worsen the situation).

My current view is that the current political hot potato status of AGI means it won't be developed anytime before the climate crisis really kicks in. At this point fiat money becomes worthless due to emergency measures. Your best bet now to help your future self is to spend to prepare civilisation/your country/your neighbourhood/yourself for the ordeal.

Also due to the current political hot potato nature of AGI I would expect it to be seized/controlled by governments if anyone gets anywhere near close to developing it.

So I see little upside for investing and likely having a reduced capacity for adaptation if you do invest. You may have different ideas about the speed of development or badness of the climate breakdown though.

I think the trouble is the majority of those things are not new industries creating consumer goods or services. The majority of them are public goods that are hard to monetise. So they get neglected. Assuming those things can create more jobs assumes we that get better at allocating resources to them (either philanthropically, through the government or a societal way not yet dreamed of).

So while there is lots to do, it seems hard to think of huge numbers of jobs being created.

I could do with a sceptical take on some of my views on AGI. I think it somewhat predictable, taking into consideration some old/new ideas.

Interested in an off-ycombinator discussion?

I'm thinking about an AI safety index. Where a think tank rates governments on their AI readiness and preparation against threats (amongst other things).

That soft of thing might be part of the answer.

I think there will be at least a minimum of focus on safety and value alignment.

They may have to focus on safety and aligning it to the companies values (else test/weak versions are likely to destroy/negatively impact the company or at least be useless). Which is at least something.

Only hyperrational/intelligent value unaligned intelligent systems would avoid this pressure. I don't see the development going that way.

It would still be sub optimal though.