Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Writing children's picture books, published by jessicata on the AI Alignment Forum.
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Here’s an exercise for explaining and refining your opinions about some domain, X:
Imagine writing a 10-20 page children’s picture book about topic X. Be fully honest and don’t hide things (assume the child can handle being told the truth, including being told non-standard or controversial facts).
Here’s a dialogue, meant to illustrate how this could work:
A: What do you think about global warming?
B: Uhh.. I don’t know, it seems real?
A: How would you write a 10-20 page children’s picture book about global warming?
B: Oh, I’d have a diagram showing carbon dioxide exiting factories and cars, floating up in the atmosphere, and staying there. Then I’d have a picture of sunlight coming through the atmosphere, bounding off the earth, then going back up, but getting blocked by the carbon dioxide, so it goes back to the earth and warms up the earth a second time. Oh, wait, if the carbon dioxide prevents the sunlight from bouncing from the earth to the sky, wouldn’t it also prevent the sunlight from entering the atmosphere in the first place? Oh, I should look that up later [NOTE: the answer is that CO2 blocks thermal radiation much more than it blocks sunlight].
Anyway, after that I’d have some diagrams showing global average temperature versus global CO2 level that show how the average temperature is tracking CO2 concentration, with some lag time. Then I’d have some quotes about scientists and information about the results of surveys. I’d show a graph showing how much the temperature would increase under different conditions. I think I’ve heard that, with substantial mitigation effort, the temperature difference might be 2 degrees Celsius from now until the end of the century [NOTE: it's actually 2 degrees from pre-industrial times till the end of the century, which is about 1 degree from now]. And I’d want to show what 2 degrees Celsius means, in terms of, say, a fraction of the difference between winter and summer.
I’d also want to explain the issue of sea level rise, by showing a diagram of a glacier melting. Ice floats, so if the glacier is free-floating, then it melting doesn’t cause a sea level rise (there’s some scientific principle that says this, I don’t remember what it’s called), but if the glacier is on land, then when it melts, it causes the sea level to rise. I’d also want to show a map of the areas that would get flooded. I think some locations, like much of Florida, get flooded, so the map should show that, and there should also be a pie chart showing how much of the current population would end up underwater if they didn’t move (my current guess is that it’s between 1 percent and 10 percent, but I could be pretty wrong about this [NOTE: the answer is 30 to 80 million people, which is between about 0.4% and 1.1%]).
I’d also want to talk about possible mitigation efforts. Obviously, it’s possible to reduce energy consumption (and also meat consumption, because cows produce methane which is also a greenhouse gas). So I’d want to show a chart of which things produce the most greenhouse gases (I think airplane flights and beef are especially bad), and showing the relationship between possible reductions in that and the temperature change.
Also, trees take CO2 out of the atmosphere, so preserving forests is a way to prevent global warming. I’m confused about where the CO2 goes, exactly, since there’s some cycle it goes through in the forest; does it end up underground? I’d have to look this up.
I’d also want to talk about the political issues, especially the disinformation in the space. There’s a dynamic where companies that pollute want to deny that man-made global warming is a real, serious problem, ...
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