I find it disappointing they reference nuclear winter without qualifying that it is quite unlikely given today's arsenals. I would reccomend against sharing it in it's current state.
Agreed - I do not mean to imply nuclear holocaust would not be horrible.
I do not think the FLI should cherry pick extraordinarily high numbers to make that case though, and them doing so/us sharing them doing so eats away at our epistemic commons.
I'd really rather not show that video to a well informed friend as they'd go "Wait, but I know that's wrong" and then discount other things I say about X-Risk.
Fair point. I guess the key problem is the lamentable lack of research on nuclear winter compared to other possible forms of climate change.
Google Scholar for example shows only 14,900 entries for "nuclear winter", versus 2.6 million for 'global warming', and 3 million for 'climate change'.
So, we've got roughly 375 times as much research on global warming as on nuclear winter.
I was surprised this video wasn't cross-posted here yet. I found the visualization moving and an alarming reminder of just how bad a nuclear exchange would be.
AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
I find it disappointing they reference nuclear winter without qualifying that it is quite unlikely given today's arsenals. I would reccomend against sharing it in it's current state.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pMsnCieusmYqGW26W/how-bad-would-nuclear-winter-caused-by-a-us-russia-nuclear
But that analysis by Luisa Rodriguez still predicts a fairly bad nuclear autumn that could kill roughly 30 to 90% of humanity.
Agreed - I do not mean to imply nuclear holocaust would not be horrible.
I do not think the FLI should cherry pick extraordinarily high numbers to make that case though, and them doing so/us sharing them doing so eats away at our epistemic commons.
I'd really rather not show that video to a well informed friend as they'd go "Wait, but I know that's wrong" and then discount other things I say about X-Risk.
Fair point. I guess the key problem is the lamentable lack of research on nuclear winter compared to other possible forms of climate change.
Google Scholar for example shows only 14,900 entries for "nuclear winter", versus 2.6 million for 'global warming', and 3 million for 'climate change'.
So, we've got roughly 375 times as much research on global warming as on nuclear winter.