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Would you be willing to specify the theory further? My immediate counterexample to that is that solving climate change and AI alignment both has a lot of resistance and that if all individuals went along the path of personally least resistance we would disappear as a species within a few centuries, but I assume I'm missing something.
[1] For scenario 1(herd immunity) to be a viable option we need that the virus doesn't mutate too fast and that that the reinfection rate is low enough. To my knowledge there is still a large uncertainty about either of those conditions.
[2] Some people in my circle are suggesting that we get rid of handshakes on a permanent basis, arguing that the expected spread of not only covid but also other regular germs. I am worried about costs associated with increased isolation but acknowledge that it would save lives.
Thanks for helping me realize that searching on Ecosia does squat when I'm not clicking adds. Looks like they make money per click and also per puchase through adds.
On the effectiveness of treeplanting: Would you mind linking to those calculations? Trees remove ~130 giga ton CO2 annually and with your number ecosias trees remove ~4*10^6 tonnes CO2 which is something like 10% of the worlds annual CO2 emission from fossile fuel. Granted, its a lot more complicated and it obviously isn't a feasible permanent solution given saturation and whatnot but it seems like an intuitive delaying measure, at least insofar as their forests take a good while to reach maturations.
On Ecosia: Their April financial statement says they spend 14% of their income on green investment so it's not exclusively treeplanting.
My first step starts out searching searching in Ecosia. I haven't looked deeply into the exact impact but there are offhand enough evidence to convince me that the positive impact is worth the cost of a slightly worse search engine than google and slightly less privacy than duckduckgo.
If I can't find a satisfying answer in Ecosia I switch to google.
Hi Greywolfember,
Thank you for the encouraging words.
As of now my primary focus is community growth and at the last meetup we were only 4 people. I suspect that adding a video would put extra pressure on our community members which I don't think is conducive to growth and will reduce the number of people willing to do presentations. If we can somehow find a way that accompany both of our wants I am open to talking more about it but I don't see any obvious way.
I was in a situation recently in which someone from one of my communities urged me to cut off my dreadlocks, so I have given a lot of thought to this. While my thoughts on this were on dreadlocks specifically they are at least to some degree generalizable onto CA.
I made a similar observation as your third argument: that contemporary society recognizes the property of individuals and coorporations but not of demographic groups. If an artist created some piece of art and someone else claimed that as their idea and made money on it while none of those money being returned back to the artist, most people would consider that ethically problematic. Many cultural artifacts of certain demographic groups are featured in designs, movies, stageperformances and such while none of the generated capital goes to the original group many of whom are living in proverty.
The most concrete argument I could think of in regards to dreadlocks is that there already exists a unfavorable bias towards black people in regards to getting jobs. There's a stereotype of black people in the US being lazy and having a poor workethic, and the stereotype of someone with dreadlocks is to be lazy, smoke pot, and have a poor work ethic. If a white person wears a black hairstyle and strengthens the stereotype there's a reasonably plausible causal link to making it more difficult for black people to get work and in the US not having a job quickly leads to .
While none of those arguments applies to my situation specifically I could understand a deontological viewpoint of discouraging CA in general to avoid the instances in which it does cause harm.
On a tangent I find the term African American infuriating due to it's blatant imprecise. People who come from south africa and are now living in the US would be white African Americans. America covers not one but two continents and yet only people from a single country within one of the continents call themselves 'Americans'.