Carl Shulman: belief

Transcript context

…I'd say you're somewhat getting the benefit of the fact that I've done fewer podcasts so I have a backlog of things that have not shown up in publications yet. But yes, I've also had a very weird professional career that has involved a much much higher proportion than is normal of trying to build more comprehensive models of the world. That included being more of a journalist trying to get an understanding of many issues and many problems that had not yet been widely addressed but do a first pass and a second pass dive into them. Just having spent years of my life working on that, some of it accumulates. In terms of what is a day in the life, how do I go about it? One is just keeping abreast of literature on a lot of these topics, reading books and academic works on them. My approach compared to some other people in forecasting and assessing some of these things, I try to obtain and rely on any data that I can find that is relevant. I try early and often to find factual information that bears on some of the questions I've got, especially in a quantitative fashion, do the basic arithmetic and consistency checks and checksums on a hypothesis about the world. Do that early and often. And I find that's quite fruitful and that people don't do it enough. Things like with the economic growth, just when someone mentions the diminishing returns, I immediately ask hmm, okay, so you have two exponential processes. What's the ratio between the doubling you get on the output versus the input? And find oh yeah, for computing and information technology and AI software it's well on the one side. There are other technologies that are closer to neutral. Whenever I can go from here's a vague qualitative consideration in one direction and here's a vague qualitative consideration in the other direction, I try and find some data, do some simple Fermi calculations, back of the envelope calculations and see if I can get a consistent picture of the world being one way or the world being another. I also try to be more exhaustive compared to some. I'm very interested in finding things like taxonomies of the world where I can go systematically through all of the possibilities. For example in my work with Open Philanthropy and previously on global catastrophic risks I wanted to make sure I'm not missing any big thing, anything that could be the biggest thing. I wound up mostly focused on AI but there have been other things that have been raised as candidates and people sometimes say, I think falsely, that this is just another doomsday story there must be hundreds and hundreds of those. So I would do things like go through all of the different major scientific fields from anthropology to biology, chemistry, computer science, physics. What are the doom stories or candidates for big things associated within each of these fields? Go through the industries that the U.S. om anthropology to biology, chemistry, computer science, physics. What are the doom stories or candidates for big things associated within each of these fields? Go through the industries that the U.S. economic statistics agencies recognize and say for each of these industries is there something associated with them? Go through all of the lists that people have made of threats of doom, search for previous literature of people who have done discussions and then yeah, have a big spreadsheet of what the candidates are. Some other colleagues have done work of this sort as well and just go through each of them to see how they check out. Doing that kind of exercise found that actually the distribution of candidates for risks of global catastrophe was very skewed. There were a lot of things that have been mentioned in the media as a potential doomsday story. Things like something is happening to the bees, will that be the end of humanity? This gets to the media but if you take it through it doesn’t check out. There are infestations in bee populations which are causing local collapses but they can then be easily reversed, just breed some more or do some other things to treat this. And even if all the honey bees were extinguished immediately, the plants that they pollinate actually don't account for much of human nutrition. You could swap the arable land with others and there would be other ways to pollinate and support the things. At the media level there were many tales of doomsday stories but when you go further to the scientists and whether their arguments for it actually check out, it was not there. But by actually systematically looking through many of these candidates I wound up in a different epistemic situation than someone who's just buffeted by news reports and they see article after article that is claiming something is going to destroy the world and it turns out it's like by way of headline grabbing and attempts by media to like over interpret something that was said by some activists who was trying to over interpret some real phenomenon. Most of these go away and then a few things like nuclear war, biological weapons, artificial intelligence check out more strongly and when you weigh things like what do experts in the field think, what kind of evidence can they muster? You find this extremely skewed distribution and I found that was really a valuable benefit of doing those deep dive investigations into many things in a systematic way because now I can answer a loose agnostic who knows and all the all this nonsense by diving deeply. I really enjoy talking to people who have a big picture thesis on the podcast and interviewing them but one thing that I've noticed and is not satisfying is that often they come from a very philosophical or vibes based perspective. This is useful in certain contexts but there's like basically maybe three people in the entire world, at least three people I'm aware of, who have a very rigorous and scientific approach to thinking about the whole picture. There’s no university or existing academic discipline for people who are trying to come up with a big picture and so there's no established standards.…

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