Miquel Banchs-Piqué (prev. mikbp)
Bio
I studied Physics, hold a MSc in Photonics and was working for some years in a micro-cavitation lab. Then, as I wanted to work in improving the long-term future, I switched and did a PhD in applied foresight. Since then, I work as foresight researcher, first in the Centre for Foresight and Internationalisation of the Łukasiewicz Network and currently in Fraunhofer ISI. I helped to design Nüwa, a 1M people Mars city-state ranked top 10 in the Mars Society contest 2020, and have experience in sustainability projects and social volunteering. I'm very interested in the relation between global energy and progress, and their consequences for the environment, which may pose a global catastrophic risk. Dad of 2 still in that period when there's no time for anything else than taking care of them and working.
How others can help me
- Career advise
- Advise on avoiding sidetracking and help narrowing commitments
- Help becoming efficient and effective
- Find deep intellectual connection
- The opportunity to work with/for brilliant people and learn from them
- Career opportunities, especially within EA organisations
- Advise on upbringing kids
How I can help others
- Active listening
- Advise on living with few / frugality
- Share experiences as expat / making a life abroad
- First principles reasoning
- Finding bullshit (lack of logic, ungrounded reasoning, lack of generality, biases...)
- Explaining / giving info about: physics and off-world settling, foresight / futures research, the energy system, the Economy for the Common Good (ECOnGOOD)
Posts 17
Comments106
It breaks my heart a bit tbh, but I’ve long accepted it probably won’t happen.
I know far to less about economy for having a strong opinion about it, but I feel the same way.
Have you heard about the movement EconGood that came out of the book Economy for the common good by C. Felber? I find their proposals very reasonable and I would like to know what EAs think about it. I made a couple of comments mentioning it in the forum but the movement is too unknown, probably really few EAs have heard about it outside say Germany, Austria and maybe Spain.
There is an Avaaz signature campaign to "Establish National Licensing systems for AGI before it is fully achieved" (started by the director of the Millennium Project, Jerome Glenn) you may want to sign.
I'm not sure how fitting such a petition is for the forum, that's why I put it here. If somebody more involved (forum admins, maybe?) thinks it is worth for it to have a real post, please do it.
Yes, it is frustrating the downvoting-without-explanation dynamics of this forum. From the one side, forum admins encourage people to write more rather than less and then people downvoting without giving any reason. Maybe they don't realise it, but that's harming the forum and the movement. Anyway, thanks for the moral support.
And actually, since some time I tend to think that he's probably been vastly less net-good in the past than I previously thought. Not really because of him, but because Chinese companies are beating everyone, including Tesla, with their EVs (and I don't think he's had any influence in China betting hard for EVs, though I might be wrong here); so if Tesla would have not existed, the adoption of EVs would just have been only delayed for few years (and mostly only in the west). So his net-positive contribution -for me and now- seems much lower than it seemed before.
I like your posts. They are short and informative.
I really wonder how you manage to have the time to work, take care of the kids and do other stuff like writing... good posts. It is not only that the topic is usually interesting, but writing short informative posts is usually much more time-consuming that writing the same post as a long and not specific/without links version. How do you do it?
I agree in general but I strongly miss something in the lines of:
Each problem is different, the roots of a single problem are ill defined and they usually span along probably endless levels... and, most importantly, problems are nested. One should be aware of this otherwise one cannot address the most interesting question which is whether, overall, it is more helpful/effective to address a problem in a superficial level or in a deeper one.
In some cases the number and severity of problems is going to fade by addressing them directly, but sometimes they are only going to get worse with time if a deeper parent problem is not addressed. You gave examples of the first type. An example of the second type are problems stemming from climate change. If we'd not do anything to stop the climate to continue warming, we could move cities further from the coast, rebuild and protect us from more extreme weather events, etc.; but these problems would continue to reproduce only getting worse with time.
"Solving a problem doesn’t require addressing the root cause of it", yes; but sometimes, not doing it produces more and more problems. The aim is not solving problems, the aim is having so few problems as possible. And these are significantly distinct aims.