These sorts of assumptions are the default in the climate change literature. Few agricultural impacts studies account for crop migration or for the prospect that we might introduce new cultivars. I imagine the authors are following the lead of the climate literature there, though it obviously massively overstates the impact of cooling or warming
I also think this highlights a wider problem with the nuclear winter literature. The scholars in the field are very obviously biased. Robock and his collaborators write almost all of the papers but clearly have an agenda. Just take a look at Alan Robock’s website—flashing nuclear bomb gifs and pictures with Fidel Castro.
I followed Robock’s work in solar geoengineering and it was also clearly biased. He claimed that solar geoengineering would knock out the monsoons, but his paper actually showed that solar geo would reduce disruption to the monsoon. Researchers in the field expressed frustration about Robock’s meme, which he spread because he doesn’t like solar geo.
If you look at the nuclear winter literature in the 1980s, all of the scientists say “this is bullshit”. The only thing that changed with the second round of nuclear winter papers starting with Robock was that he used modern climate models. But the criticism was never about the climate model, it was about how much particulate matter would get into the atmosphere and how long it would stay there. So, the idea that modern science validated nuclear winter is just wrong.
A very prominent climate physicist told me that the assumptions in the Robock papers are turned up to maximise damage rather than to actually be plausible, and that people are scared to point this out because of the politicised nature of the debate on nuclear war
The smoke estimates in the Robock papers didn’t change despite a massive decline in the nuclear arsenal.
Thanks for taking the time to do this. I’m not really a fan of the way you approach writing up your thoughts here. The post seems high on snark, rhetoric and bare assertion, and low on clarity, reasoning transparency, and quality of reasoning. The piece feels like you are leaning on your reputation to make something like a political speech, which will get you credit among certain groups, rather than a reasoned argument designed to persuade anyone who doesn’t already like you. For example, you say:
As I understand it, this is meant to be a critique of longtermism. The claims you have made here just seem to be asserting that longtermism is not true, without argument, which is what pretty much every journalist does now that every journalist doesn’t like EA. But EA philosophers are field leaders in population ethics, and have published papers in leading journals on it, and you can’t just dismiss it by saying things which look on the face of it to be inconsistent such as “Try our own children, here and now. People get fooled into thinking that ‘long term’ means some distant future. And yes, in some important senses, most of the potential value of humanity lies in its distant future. But the dangers we aim to prevent, the benefits we hope to accrue? They are not some distant dream of a million years from now.” In what sense is the potential value of humanity in the future if the benefits are not in the future?
Similarly, on whether personhood intrinsically matters, you say:
Again, you are just asserting here without argument and with lots of rhetoric that you believe personhood matters independently of subjective experience. I don’t see why you would think this would convince anyone. A lot of EAs I know have actually read the philosophical literature on personal identity, and your claims seem highly non-serious by comparison.
On Alameda, you say
I agree that setting up Alameda was a very bad idea for lots of reasons. However, you claim here that the people who joined Alameda aside from Sam weren’t actually doing it for the common good. From my knowledge, this is false—they did honestly believe they were doing it for the common good and were going to give the money away. Do you have evidence that they didn’t actually donate the money they made?
When you say they proved that they were not loyal, are you saying they should have been loyal to SBF, or that they should have been loyal to Jane Street? Both claims seem false. Even if they should have stayed at Jane Street, loyalty is not a good reason to do so, and they shouldn’t have been loyal to SBF because he was a psychopath.
These general points aside, I agree that management of bad actors and emphasis on rule following are extremely important and should receive much more emphasis than they do.