Thanks. The French example sounds like a regulatory definitions problem? I do not know the motivation for the Geneva one. I do not see how this substantiates the cultural scepticism point, and there seem to be many explanations that are more likely than a "cult of pain". Your point about Zurich demonstrates that innovations and changes in buildings are often complex due to institutions, laws and market environments.
If a "cult of pain" or a positive attitude towards suffering was the driver behind European policies, I would expect to see policy documents approving e.g. of death during heatwaves. Instead, EU documents usually emphasize this as a severe problem and a motivation to promote climate adaptation policy (see e.g. this one by the EEA).
I agree that thinking about positive-sum situations as zero-sum is bad, but one should be cautious about assuming other people's motivations. You make the strong claim that the policies that you list as examples are motivated by a cult of pain that developed due to a moral heuristic that developed during Malthusian times. This seems strange because there are more recent developments that should have a stronger, or at least equal impression on moral intuitions, like the suffering during the industrial revolution, or carbon emissions and climate change. The "cult of pain" explanation does not seem like a straightforward explanation for what you see as irrational collective/societal behavior.
Your question about "Germans silently suffering in their overheated apartments with no air conditioning" seems to be why they have no AC units. Possible answers are: because of the typical problems in housing markets, because of imperfect regulation, because of high electricity prices, because heat waves were perceived as less of a problem a while ago. Who said he or she does not own an AC unit in order to do "repentance for the carbon footprint of their holiday in Turkey the other year"?
Of course there are people who "believe in degrowth", but it is not a dominant attitude. The European Commission, for example, framed the European Green Deal as a "growth strategy that protects the climate".
1Would you please provide some references for these claims? For Germany, my assessment is the following:
- The permit requirements do not seem to be against AC in particular (perplexity link), but arise from all kinds of reasons like monument protection. You may find this annoying, excessive or wrong, but if some people have a preference for conserving old buildings, that is certainly different from a "cult of pain".
- As part of policies to increase energy efficiency, you may get subsidies for installing an AC unit (depending on the use case), here is a website by Bosch explaining the cases.
- Side note: In Germany, electricity is expensive; however, you can use your rooftop photovoltaics electricity for your electricity consumption including AC (which is cheaper than electricity from the grid and often coincides with times of high temperatures).
- Which consumer advice speaks against AC? The Verbraucherzentrale (German "consumer advice centers", associations that provide advisory services under a government mandate.) gives advices on what to take into account when buying an AC. They add a cost-benefit advice by noting that a fan can be much cheaper, due to high electricity prices (here, here).
- I don't see how the "Cultural scepticism" point could be verifiable, and in particular how to distinguish it from a lack of knowledge about AC units.
Thank you for writing this statement on communication strategy and also for writing this book. Even without knowing the specific content in detail, I consider such a book to be very important.
Some time ago, it seemed to me that relevant parts of the AI risk community were ignoring the need for many other people to understand their concerns, instead thinking they could "simply" create a superintelligent and quasi-omnipotent AI that would then save the world before someone else invents paperclip maximizers. This seemed to presuppose a specific worldview that I didn't think was very likely (one in which political action is unnecessary, while technical AI safety still has a reasonably good chance of success). (I asked the forum whether there were good intro texts for specific target groups to convince them of the relevance of AI risk but the only answer I received made me search somewhere else.) However, there is good outreach and a lot of policy work being done, and the discussion of communication strategies and policy strategies seems extremely necessary.
One of your arguments is that you have a "whole spiel about how it’s possible to speak on these issues with a voice of authority", referring to the Nobel laureates etc who warn against AI risk, and "if someone is dismissive, you can be like “What do you think you know that the Nobel laureates and the lab heads and the most cited researchers don’t? Where do you get your confidence?”" With respect to the Californian law proposal, you write: "If people really believed that everyone was gonna die from this stuff, why would they be putting forth a bill that asks for annual reporting requirements? Why, that’d practically be fishy. People can often tell when you’re being fishy." Sometimes, however, it seems suspicious when people appeal to authorities when asked to explain their ideas. Referring to Nobel laureates can be an introduction to your argument or you can refer to them later on, but to be convincing, you need to be able to actually explain the issue. Of course, you can use the authority argument in a supportive way, but that will not be enough, also because policymakers and everybody interested in policy debates receive contradictory claims about AI all the time.
Acting and talking "as if it’s an obvious serious threat" may be helpful to signal your seriousness. However, a very strong way of signaling that you are convinced of an issue is glueing yourself to a street or starting a hunger strike. However, though it's hard to say what a counterfactual world would look like, it seems that these actions did not meaningfully increase support for climate policy. It is hard to say how minds change (so people write whole books about it. But it seems that the effectiveness of a signal strongly depends on context and how much people have been prepared to what you are saying afterwards. (I assume that is why EY wrote the Sequences.)
If your discussion partner is already convinced of the relevance of the topic, then of course you should not be like "Sorry if I am even bothering you about such nonsense". By contrast, if the audience perceives your asks to be too radical relative to their prior, they may be deterred. You may then not even have the audience's attention to explain. In particular, it seems to me that talking about certain radical ways to stop AI risks, which has happened in the past, might be actively dangerous and offputting. Of course, demanding extremely radical action means that the audience realizes that you are very convinced of what you say. Yet they may also think you are a crank because serious people would not do that. You at least need to be have enough time to make your your point about the Nobel Laureates.
Yes, the Overton window may have shifted and be shifting, but sometimes the Overton window shifts back again. In 2019, Greta Thunberg's "How dare you" speech was possible (and had impact); nowadays it is not. This is possibly why "Most elected officials declined to comment" on your book and only "gave private praise".
"If people really believed that everyone was gonna die from this stuff, why would they be putting forth a bill that asks for annual reporting requirements?" This is another parallel to climate activists. If you are really serious about climate change, wouldn't you demand stopping most carbon emissions instead of agreeing that subsidies are paid to solar power? Maybe. But you can demand one thing and also support the other one. Some people or political groups will not agree that issue X is important and they will not agree to radical action against X, but still be okay with some weak action against X; that seems like normal politics.
Having too many links may be confusing, but some more may be better than just Amazon.
I do not understand how having more than one direct link to a bookshop increases the average number of clicks necessary to buy the book (or the number of clicks necessary for the Amazon customers).
I have no deeper knowledge about how such pre-order rankings work, so it seems there are two contradictory assessments:
- You seem to say that it's only really sure for Amazon (I am not sure whether you would also dismiss shops like Barnes & Noble).
- At least there is one person claiming that "a German pre-order from a local bookstore will make a difference".
On the German bookstore website, I can order either the American or the UK version. I assume it does not make a difference for the whole preorder argument? The American epub is cheaper and is published two days earlier:
I would not have to click on multiple links if multiple links were listed, I would still only have to click on one. I prefer other shops and I know people who actively avoid ordering from Amazon and are put off by exclusive Amazon links.
I thought the preorders argument was about the total of preorders, not just the preorders of Amazon. If that's right then I don't understand your sentence.
I won’t discuss tpoasiwid here, but I note that your claim is completely different from alleging that (1) there is a cult of pain that (2) is rooted in ethics that developed in malthusian times and (3) now drives policy choices. If everything that is relevant is tpoasiwid, then we do not need to claim anything about motivations driving policies.