What Are the Things That Could Derail the Improvement of Life on Earth?

We assume that wealth will grow, violence will decrease, and in general life will get better for life on Earth, if only things keep going roughly as they are now. What might happen to interrupt this process?

On a Timescale of Minutes to Years:

1. Weapons of mass destruction/acute ecocide. This breaks down into three categories:

a) nukes: there are a lot of them left. This one is frustrating because it's still an existential threat but it's been around for a long time, so people have become used to it.

Once one is is used deliberately or even explodes by accident, the taboo is broken, and more will follow in much shorter order than the interval between that event and Nagasaki.

b) any other such weapons, especially biological weapons.

c) The Singularity. Superhuman general artificial intelligence would still not necessarily be intelligent enough to be evolutionarily stable, and instead of a blossoming of ultra-intelligence, could just result in ultimate ecological castastrophe.

2. Natural events that could destroy parts of the infrastructure the modern economy relies on. Earthquakes weren't a big deal when you could rebuild your bark longhouse in a few annoying hours. Not so San Francisco. 9.0 earthquakes aren't that frequent, but they occur. Similarly, we don't even know how often Carrington-level events happen because until there were electrical lines to be affected, there was no way of knowing and no reason to care. Also related to Carrington events, refer back to item 1a; the result of a nuclear high-altitude EMP would be catastrophic.



Decades to Centuries:

3. Selection against intelligence by economic development, both within and between countries. That is, idiocracy. The most fertile countries are often the most disastrous. Related: the world and technology will not change any slower than they are now (unless one of the disasters in this list occurs) yet there are people (the majority?) who appear constitutionally unable to adapt to this level of change and think in abstract terms. The modern world ironically appears to make these people regress into more and more of a fundamentalist, tribal state where they assume, correctly, that they will not be able to understand the world at all, so they cling to tribal authority.

4. Consumerism and collapse/transparency of status hierarchies, making people unhappy with otherwise stable productive lives.

a) Consumerism: it has been argued that above a certain amount (usually given as US$70,000), gains to income translate increasingly marginally to happiness. However it is increasingly impossible to escape images of houses, mates, experiences that you're not getting even with your $70,000 and your nice home, spouse and vacation. Hence this principle runs up against the human irrationality that we would rather live in a neighborhood of $100k earners and make $120k, then a neighborhood of $200k earners and make $180k.

b) This same media technology also means that increasingly, we are de facto in a world culture where there are few isolated laboratories for meme innovation. In the past, even in neighboring dictatorships, at least the more flawed dictatorship might lose on the battlefield, with the slightly better practices of the other dictatorship winning out. But what will ever fix your shitty institution now? The Mongols aren't about to overrun the DMV for being too slow. Also, increasingly we cannot preserve the independence of our multiple overlapping status hierarchies and "healthily" isolate our social spheres from one another - so your boss, or that girl that was prettier than you in high school, can make fun of your for being the president of a local organization which otherwise would've give you a nice status boost to increase your QOL.


Therefore, to avoid acute events, we should focus on continuing nuclear disarmament, start taking biology more seriously before CRISPR gives us the equivalent to Rosenbergs working with ISIS, and increase focus on AI safety. We should also try to understand how to predict and protect against Carrington solar events and similar century-frequency geological and astrophysical threats.

To avoid the longer-onset ones: no solution here would seem palatable, but otherwise we face death by a thousand cuts. To fix #3, it would seem only eugenics by licensing reproduction would work within a country, but this is abhorrent in Western politics to liberals and conservatives alike. (A certain China does come to mind and they seem to have done "okay", and by "okay" I mean "the greatest developmental triumph in human history". Despite or because of one-child?) There is also the Brave New World style solution of a big reservation or favela for all the people who can't hack it in the future economy, but in Brave New World it was just a few misfits, as opposed to all their Epsilons and Deltas.

For #4, we could adopt cultural norms about media use - while this is already happening to some degree, it takes both personal discipline and is easily eroded by non-cooperators, i.e. your co-worker who you suspect will check their email on the weekend even if they said they wouldn't. Also, solving the "tyranny of territory" would speed the diffusion of good memes, even in a connected mono-culture world. ("Tyranny of territory" is that humans have to live on the surface of the Earth so organizations from families up to government have static boundaries. Charter cities are a nice idea but fall flat as long as they are within territories held by the cartel system of mutually-recognizing violence monopolists, i.e. states. That is, I can't tell my DMV, California, that I choose to use Minnesota's DMV, because at bottom guys with guns will come and make me cooperate.)

Passivity and Usefulness of Information Do Not Positively Correlate

Previously I posted that we shouldn't be surprised that media information that we receive passively isn't necessarily useful to us. It costs money for all the information to get transmitted so broadly, and the reason it happens is because the people on the other end think it is benefiting them, usually financially. This of course doesn't correlate positively with that information being useful to the recipient, and might even correlate negatively. If you put in effort to find information you used to make a decision, it is more likely to be useful to you. Robin Hanson approaches this same idea in his post Why Info Push Dominates.

World Series and Superbowl Ratings: How Much Do Home-Team Markets Influence Them?

This is cross-posted to my outdoor and sports blog MDK10 Outside Next up: how much does winning actually correlate with the franchise making money?.

It's been said that it's a television ratings disaster when the World Series comes down to two teams that are from smaller markets, and/or closer together. That is, the thinking goes that if St. Louis plays Kansas City, it's a Midwest series and people outside MO and KS don't care, and consequently a ratings disaster. Yet somehow this same concern isn't expressed for the Superbowl, which always seems curious.

I'd never seen actual data on this. So, I got data for all Superbowls through 2013, and all World Series from the same period (starting in 1968).

The inputs I looked at (i.e. things that could influence viewership) were as follows: 1) total combined home market size of each team in the championship (i.e. greater metro area)[a][b], 2) driving distance between the two teams, and 3) time zone distance between the two teams. The logic for using home market size is obvious. The idea behind using distance is that the farther apart the two teams, the greater ratings might be because the broader the appeal of the game (i.e. maybe people in L.A. don't care about Seattle, but if Seattle is playing some East Coast team, well that's different, and ratings would be better; vs. if the championship were between San Diego and Los Angeles, maybe people in the Northeast wouldn't care, and ratings would be worse.) I also looked at time zone distance for this same reason.

My outputs were: 1) absolute viewership, and 2) viewership as a percentaqge of national population. Because the average audience can change over time, I also tried looking at each year in comparison to the 11-year moving average that bracketed the year (average calculated from 5 preceding and 5 succeeding years). I then looked at scatter plots of the data.

The answer is that there is no relationship. That is, the television ratings of both the World Series and the NFL are NOT influenced by home market size or distance of the competing markets from each other. So if the A's and the Giants play each other, fine! (Not counting any earthquakes that might be induced thereby.) So it turns out that demography is NOT destiny, at least not in football and baseball ratings. The highest R^2 for a linear trend anywhere in these comparisons was a worthless 0.08; there's no point in showing you some uninformative crappy scatterplots.

Just for grins I also looked at ratings against the Excitement Index calculated for the playoffs since 2001 (were the games snoozefests or edge-of-your-seat games); if there were exciting playoffs, there might be better ratings. Again, no relationship.

It's clear from the graphs below (total viewership over time, then % of US population viewing over time) that even if baseball isn't more sensitive to geography, it has other issues.


[a]In cities which have two teams I ran two versions, one which assumed that everyone in the home market would follow their home team when it's in the championship, and another that assumed only half the sports population would support each team.
[b]It's clear that there are some strange geographic distributions of fans around the country, but for simplicity's sake I just used metro area population to get a number for home market.

Clever Consumers: Terrible For Ad-Based Revenues

Have you ever clicked on an ad that was embedded in an RSS feed? Ever? I never have. In general, the kinds of people who use Readers are pretty good at filtering - at using technology that does it for us, and at having cognitive strategies that let us sort what we actually see. We're not the kind of people advertisers dream about. Advertising relies on being able to redirect attention, and (usually) cause us to make irrational decisions.

And now Google Reader is gone. I imagine that over the next few years, we're going to lose a lot more free, ad-supported services that we good-filterers, high-information users enjoy, because we're terrible advertisees. I still haven't paid for Newsblur but I think the days of free, high-information (not data-intensive) services will soon be past.

Why You Should Avoid News

Great piece, available here. One of the points is that it makes us passive, a conclusion which this argument also converges upon. "News" here is not just the constant novelty, which is a source of many of the problems, but the way that what we call news is assembled, the motivations of the distributors, and the reinforcement of our own biases with this form of information. My favorite non-obvious point is that new "sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement".

Passivity of Information Correlates with Low Value

In general, the more passively you've acquire information through media, the less value it will have to you, and the less it can be trusted to be free of intent to manipulate your behavior.

We can evaluate passivity and usefulness both in terms of comparing propositions, and comparing various media. For example: say running in salt water cures plantar fasciitis, a painful condition of the tissues on the bottom of the foot that afflicts runners. This would be fantastic, since it would be cheap and easy to do. But no one can make money from such a cure, so there would be no commercials for it, no campaigns, no radio spots. You would have to learn this by looking it up online or digging through running magazines. The key is to think of incentives; a running magazine will make you like them more and buy more issues if they bring you information like that.

There is a difference in passivity of information absorption between various media. It costs money and effort to disseminate information through mass media (especially TV and radio; i.e., those which have a fixed number of outlets, and which by their nature require little effort to absorb.) These passive media are asymmetric, so the information-senders are not especially likely to have utility functions that are closely aligned with information-consumers. That is to say, the information senders are most likely to expend that money and effort only when they believe they're getting something in return, which is not necessarily anything that the information consumers are interested in providing them.

Usually, that's money (from advertising or from a product purchase), but sometimes it can be political power, as in propaganda or political campaigns. In addition, if people have irrational beliefs about the future value of their spreading information (e.g. from religion), that may also cause them to go to great lengths in the same way, although this only occurs a minority of the time.

In some cases, TV and radio companies and stakeholders have information that they do not want information-consumers to have; that is, disseminating this kind of information has negative utility, because this information often lets the information-consumers make more rationally self-interested decisions about how to weight the information they're receiving. This is why investigative journalism exists.

Print is the least passive medium and books are not aggressively marketed, so on a per-hour basis of books consuming one's attention (vs. televsion or radio), we would guess that the end consumer is benefiting more from the content. Books are typically not great vehicles to sell products (other than themselves); there are few commercials in books. Since there are now applications that passably turn print into (more passive) audio, one prediction is that books will begin to be released automatically with sound file versions (or intended only as sound files), and that the information in these books will be on average less valuable to consumers.

This principle does not necessarily hold with acquaintances who bring information (passively) to your attention, because their utility function is more likely to align with yours. You can trust a restaurant tip from a friend who likes you and wants you to be happy, more than a television commercial for that restaurant.