Our society lacks good self-preservation mechanisms

I sometime wonder why people think this outcome is bad.

Mind if I ask, but, as opposed to considering it good ?

Our western civilization lacks an effective long-term (order of 50 years plus) self-preservation system. Hence we should reasonably expect to either build one, or get wiped out.

This is a huge claim. You're claiming first of all that the odds of succumbing to a truly existential event are higher than not. You don't (IMO) provide evidence to support this - you provide some evidence that we may have had really catastrophic events in the past, but, again, only 100% is existential, and you do not finish off your examples - "Hitler could have won" and "Hitler could have won and created a repressive regime that lasted for the remainder of human history" are two very different claims, and the former is not existential. Second, you claim that if we take some steps, we can expect such events not to happen - it is because we lack an "effective long-term preservation system" that we can expect to be destroyed completely.

Thus, you have, to my understanding, made two claims: one about the likelihood of existential events, and one about the likelihood of us being able to mitigate them. Again, to my evaluation, you have provided compelling evidence for neither of these conclusions; indeed you've provided virtually no evidence for either of these conclusion (probability, not possibility). That is the root of my criticism of not providing solutions: you claim solutions are possible, desirable, and effective, and you do not provide any evidence to support this claim.

Thus, my criticism of your tone as "righteous" is because you seem to be making a strong, "deep" claim without providing adequate supporting evidence or argument. It is not a criticism of your word choice. I have absolutely no problem with people posting about problems that occur to them that they don't know how to solve. I do have a problem with people making strong claims with a definitive tone without providing adequate supporting evidence.

I admit this may all hinge on a disagreement in definition over "existential." I take existential to require true obliteration. Gray goo would reach this, as would the-simulation-loses-power or every-atom-splits or humanity-is-enslaved-by-something-forever. "Nuclear holocaust kills billions and it takes ten thousand years to recover" does not count in my mind, as it is not terminal. Similarly, "Hitler reigns for ten thousand years" is also non-existential (at least for humanity as a whole); If recovery occurs, even after a fairly large gap, it does not seem to count as existential. This view is consistent with Bostrom's definition in the linked paper. With a weaker definition of existential, it is quite possible that there is no disagreement here, in which I have the (smaller) criticism that you should have clarified this at the beginning.

I don't think that's the main thrust of his complaint. Lack of specifics is the main problem. If you say "Something must be done!" but not what, then the tone of the writing is moot, so far as righteousness-detectors go.

You confused me nonetheless. If you have a summery at the beginning (and I didn't perceive it as such), why do you put another, different one at the and, and mark it as the summary?

Also beware that reversed stupidity is not intelligence. The existence of the Flynn effect does not imply that "dysgenic" or "eugenic" (scare quotes because there's no value-neutral way to say what counts as an improvement) trends aren't worth thinking about. Suppose hypothetically that genetic trends were leading to lowered average potential intelligence, but that this effect was exactly cancelled by an environmental Flynn effect. This is only a win if you think the status quo is optimal; if you think that more intelligence is better within the range we can apprehend, then IQ not rising fast enough is sad for the same reason that falling IQ would be sad. Cf. the reversal test.

I actually find the inclusion of this as a "most likely" scenario mildly offensive, since Bostrom explicitly says he finds it seriously improbable:

"In any case, the time-scale for human natural genetic evolution seems much too grand for such developments to have any significant effect before other developments will have made the issue moot."

There's something... unpalatable about intellectuals bemoaning the "lesser folk" from breeding the species into oblivion, particularly when it seems to contradict both evidence and theory.

The fact that reproducation in our society is now only caused by wanting to reproduce is disturbing and is derivable without ever looking in a sci-fi book

Though that doesn't immediately make it non fictional evidence, dysgenic pressure (as well as the flynn effect and the possibility of genetic engineering as possible counters) is also being briefly mentioned in Nick Bostrom's fundamental paper Existential Risks - 5.3.

Thanks Carl, that paper is extremely relevant

correct

Toba supereruption and genetic bottleneck probably strongest example of near-miss.

Nazi Germany only lost WWII because Hitler made very silly mistakes.

I can't find it, but there's an article explaining how the Axis was more or less doomed from the start. In short, United States had twice the production capacity than all other participants combined. I'm saying Hitler's mistakes only hastened the inevitable.

We /did/ nuke each other - in Japan. Some people even died. Civilisation however, did not end. It seems pretty speculative to classify 20th century history as some sort of "near miss". 6 billion humans represents the enormous success of our species - each human is a backup copy of our DNA. To classify this as a "near disaster" seems strange.

We're much safer against even very rare natural disasters like Toba (and others that act through climate) than it was historically. The kind of disaster that could wipe as out gets less and less probable every decade. I'm not even sure if the kind of asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs would be enough to wipe out humanity now, given a few years of prior warning (well, it would kill most people, but that's not even close to getting rid of the entire humanity).

I seriously dispute the idea that we were very close to nuclear war. I even more seriously dispute the idea that it would have any long term effects on human civilization if it happened. Even in the middle of WW2 people's life expectancy was far higher than historically typical, violence death rates were far lower, and I'd even take a guess that average personal freedoms compared quite well to the historical record.

Not all libertarians are in an affectative death spiral, obvious or otherwise. It's true that many are, but I, for example, recognize tragedy of the commons scenarios and accept that some regulation can be useful to mitigate these problems. I believe there are some specific legitimate purposes of government, such as outlawing aggression, internalizing costs, and coordination (e.g., everyone drives on the right side of road, it would have worked for everyone to drive on the left, but as a society we had to pick one and go with it). Further, I think that every law should be validated to be achieving such an objective with minimal intervention.

I understand how you can form this view, seeing all the pro-business conservatives seizing on libertarian rhetoric to oppose regulation, but then neglecting the responsibility part when they want subsidies, or all the people who correctly notice that most laws are counterproductive and then incorrectly conclude that all laws are counterproductive. But when you claim that all advocates of libertarianism are like that, you are attacking a strawman.

I would have a much easier time taking libertarianism seriously if its advocates weren't all in obvious affective death spirals.

This kind of absurdly absolutist statement achieves nothing but display personal animus toward an ideology. It is true that many libertarians are in death spirals, but I know of no political group that does not have large numbers of supporters in Affective Death Spirals. In case you were unaware, this is a universal tendency for idea-based groups.

And politics is the mind-killer, no matter your politics.

I agree with this, though:

Libertarianism does not handle tragedy of the commons scenarios well at all, and that's exactly what most existential risks are.

Prepare for disappointment, then. My estimate of the chances of humans persisting for much longer is pretty tiny. Future civilisation is likely to be descended from current civilisation - but humans are much more likely to survive in museums than anywhere else. That outcome is not necessarily a disaster - it could be one of the best possible outcomes. Having humans in charge would be really, really bad for civilisation's health and spaceworthiness.

That's a function of the venue of this discussion. The blog's founder goes to existential risk conferences - and so here we see the opinions of his supporters.

Doom prophecies are an old phenomenon. The explanation appears to me to be mainly sociological: warning others about risk makes you look as though you are contributing positively. If the risk doesn't actually exist, then it needs manufacturing - so that you can still alert others to the danger.

Of course, the bigger the risk, the more important it is to tell people about it. Existential risks are the "biggest" risks of all - so they are the most important ones to tell people about. Plus, alerting people to the risk might help you to SAVE THE WORLD! Thus the modern success of the "doom" meme.