Nick Bostrom has a good paper on Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development, which argues that under most reasonable ethical systems that aren’t completely selfish or very parochial, our philanthropic activities ought to be devoted primarily toward preventing disasters that would cause the extinction of intelligent life.
Some people who haven’t thought about the Fermi Paradox carefully may overestimate the probability that most of the universe is already occupied by intelligent life. Very high estimates for that probability would invalidate Bostrom’s conclusion, but I haven’t found any plausible arguments that would justify that high a probability.
I don’t want to completely dismiss Malthusian objections that life in the distant future will be barely worth living, but the risk of a Malthusian future would need to be well above 50 percent to substantially alter the optimal focus of philanthropy, and the strongest Malthusian arguments that I can imagine leave much more uncertainty than that. (If I thought I could alter the probability of a Malthusian future, maybe I should devote effort to that. But I don’t currently know where to start).
Thus the conclusion seems like it ought to be too obvious to need repeating, but it’s far enough from our normal experiences that most of us tend to pay inadequate attention to it. So I’m mentioning it in order to remind people (including myself) of the need to devote more of our time to thinking about risks such as those associated with AI or asteroid impacts.
Life, the Universe, and Everything
Book review: Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink.
This well-written book might help a few people lose a significant amount of weight, and many to lose a tiny bit.
Some of his advice seems to demand as much willpower for me as a typical diet (e.g. eat slowly), but he gives many small suggestions and advises us to pick and choose the most appropriate ones. There’s enough variety and novelty among his suggestions that most people are likely to find at least one feasible method to lose a few pounds.
A large fraction of his suggestions require none of the willpower that a typical diet requires, but will be rejected by most people because their ego will cause them to insist that only people less rational than them are making the kind of mistakes that the book’s suggestions will fix.
Most of the book’s claims seem to be backed up by careful research. But I couldn’t find any research to back up the claim that approaches which cause people to eat 100 calories per day less for days will cause people to lose 10 pounds in ten months. He presents evidence that such a diet doesn’t need to make people feel deprived over the short time periods they’ve been studied. But there’s been speculation among critics of diet books that our bodies have a natural “set point” weight, and diets which work for a while have no long-term effect because lower body weights cause increased desire to return to the set point. This book offers only weak anecdotal evidence against that possibility.
But even if it fails as a diet book, it may help you understand how the taste of your food is affected by factors other than the food itself.
I had been skeptical of reports that low sodium diets produce health benefits (suspecting they were fighting the symptoms of high blood pressure rather than an underlying cause), but a new study has provided strong enough evidence to change my diet.
It’s time to switch from regular to low sodium soy sauce, and I’m going to reduce my seafood consumption (since I’ve started taking Omega-3 fish oil capsules and am eating more walnuts, my reasons for eating seafood have diminished).
I am often when people who produce bad results via poorly thought out policies are said to have good intentions.
Too many people divide intentions into two binary categories – good and bad. I prefer to see intentions as ranging along a continuum, with one extreme for plans that involve meticulous research to ensure that the results that the wisest people would expect are consistent with altruism, and the other extreme for plans where anyone can see that the expected results will be unnecessary harm. Most intentions fall in the middle of this spectrum, with people not intending any harm but allowing their expectations to be biased by their self-interest (often their self-interest in appearing altruistic).
It’s unrealistic to expect people to change the way they describe intentions so that it fully reflects such a continuum, so I’ll encourage people to take a smaller step and replace the current Manichean dualism with three categories of intentions – good (resulting from unusual effort to ensure desirable results), normal (i.e. most intentions), and bad (where we expect that the person was aware that the results involve unnecessary harm).
I recently took a simple genetic test to determine whether I have genes for fast or slow caffeine metabolism. The result says that I’m a fast metabolizer, which indicates that caffeine use reduces my risk of heart attacks rather than increasing it.
This kind of testing is just becoming affordable, and it seems like many more tests of this nature should become common soon.
There has been a fair amount of research suggesting that beyond some low threshold, additional money does little to increase a person’s happiness.
Here’s a research report (see also here) indicating that the effect of money has sometimes been underestimated because researchers use income as a measure of money, when wealth has a higher correlation with happiness.
There’s probably more than one reason for this. Wealth produces a sense of security that isn’t achieved by having a high income but spending that income quickly. Also, it’s possible that people with high savings rates tend to be those who are easily satisfied with their status, whereas those who don’t save when they have high incomes are those who have a strong need to show off their incomes in order to compete for status (and since competition for status is in some ways a zero sum game, many of them will fail).
I normally don’t repeat things that are reported on Marginal Revolution since I assume it would be redundant for most readers of my blog, but this story about the relative importance of sports and coups in Fiji is amusing enough that I can’t resist.
A recent report that the dangers of a large asteroid impact are greater than previously thought has reminded me that very little money is being spent searching for threatening asteroids and researching possible responses to an asteroid that threaten to make humans extinct.
A quick search suggests two organizations to which a charitable contribution might be productive: The Space Frontier Foundation‘s The Watch, and FAIR-Society, Future Asteroid Interception Research. It’s not obvious which of these will spend money more effectively. FAIR appears to be European and doesn’t appear to be certain whether contributions are tax-deductible in the U.S., which might end up being the criterion that determines my choice. Does anyone know a better way to choose the best organization?
While checking out a possibly interesting hiking group, I stumbled on this amusing site: God Hates Figs.
Book Review: The Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite the Health-care System by Nortin M. Hadler
There appears to be a large discrepancy between how effective most people think modern medical practices are and the evidence that experts have presented suggesting that it does very little to extend life. This book gives the impression of describing a pattern of ineffective or harmful practices that might be offsetting the benefits of the practices that are known to work. But there are enough flaws in his argument that I can’t decide how much of his conclusions I should accept.
He starts by saying he’s a Popperian, but often acts like he’s following some other, more dogmatic, philosophy. I’m particularly annoyed at his certain feelings of inevitability that we will die by about age 85:
I am aware of no data to support the premise that we can alter the date of death. … When high-functioning octogenarians decline, it is because their time is approaching.
He starts by making a plausible claim that many people get cardiovascular surgery when there’s no evidence that it will benefit them (and is likely to create some risks).
But starting in the next chapter it becomes easy to find flaws in his arguments. He raises some plausible doubts about the evidence for statins, but then tries to imply that if the imperfect evidence that’s available shows that less than 2% of people who are prescribed statins will benefit, then we should doubt that those people ought to take statins.
He presents evidence that prostate cancer treatments save fewer lives than is commonly thought. It appears that sometimes the treatment merely changes the cause of death to something else. Yet he concludes that the treatment is useless, when the data he presents indicate nontrivial benefits. He hints that the evidence doesn’t meet the usual standard of statistical significance, but feels comfortable concluding (without even saying how close it is to being statistically significant) that the lack of proof is strong evidence of ineffectiveness.
He has a somewhat interesting proposal that the final phase of drug testing be done by the FDA rather than by drug companies. If the FDA were run by angels, that would solve a number of problems with the existing regulatory incentives, but with an FDA run by humans it would replace them with new problems. For instance, the choice of which drugs to test is something that only a few special interest voters (i.e. mainly those working for large drug companies) would understand, so their interests would be likely to influence those choices to the benefit of those companies.