What if someone proposed banning GoF research via the following way: release a harmless virus which is engineered to make people more amenable to banning GoF research. That’s what a pivotal act proposal looks like me. You were supposed to destroy the dark side, not join them!
Slightly stronger analogy: release a harmless virus which grants universal immunity to other viruses. That’s what a pivotal act proposal looks like.
This idea has various technical problems, but let’s pretend that those are solved for the sake of this discussion; the interesting question is whether one ought to deploy such a virus if it were technically feasible and worked as advertised. I claim the answer is “yes, obviously”. Waiting around for government bureaucracies to approve it as a treatment and deploy it through the traditional medical system would take a decade, optimistically. Probably multiple decades before it reaches a majority of the population (if ever). How many people die of viruses every ten years?
You were supposed to destroy the dark side, not join them!
I sometimes advise people that it is useful to self-identify as a villain. The central reason is that Good Is Dumb:
A common recurring thread in fiction is the idea that the hero, for various reasons, will engage in stupid or illogical actions largely because it is the “heroic”, sometimes idealistic thing to do.
Problem is, peoples’ sense of what’s “good” tends to draw rather heavily on fictional portrayals of good and bad, so people trying to be “good” end up mixing in a large dose of outright stupidity. No fictional hero ever sacrifices one bystander to save ten.
Objecting to pivotal acts on the basis of “you were supposed to destroy the dark side, not join them” sounds to me like a very central example of Good Is Dumb. Like, sure, one can make up reasonable reasons to oppose the pivotal act, but I think that the actual original objection for most people is probably “this sounds like something a villain would do, not something a hero would do”.
I sometimes advise people that it is useful to self-identify as a villain...
Perhaps “antihero” is better here? The “heroic” tend to be stupid and rely on the laws of narrative saving them. Villains tend to have exciting/intricate/dastardly… but overcomplicated and fatally flawed plans.
My first thought on “No fictional hero ever sacrifices one bystander to save ten”, was of Zakalwe (use of weapons) - but of course he’s squarely in antihero territory.
Does an organization’s ability to execute a “pivotal act” overlap with Samo Burja’s idea of organizations as “live players”? How many are there, and are there any orgs that you would place in one category and not the other?
My current belief is that there is no organization has the know-how to execute a pivotal act, so I would place all live orgs in one category and not the other.
That’s fair. Maybe I was more trying to get at the chances that current live orgs will develop this know-how, or if it would require new orgs designed with that purpose.
What if someone proposed banning GoF research via the following way: release a harmless virus which is engineered to make people more amenable to banning GoF research. That’s what a pivotal act proposal looks like me. You were supposed to destroy the dark side, not join them!
Slightly stronger analogy: release a harmless virus which grants universal immunity to other viruses. That’s what a pivotal act proposal looks like.
This idea has various technical problems, but let’s pretend that those are solved for the sake of this discussion; the interesting question is whether one ought to deploy such a virus if it were technically feasible and worked as advertised. I claim the answer is “yes, obviously”. Waiting around for government bureaucracies to approve it as a treatment and deploy it through the traditional medical system would take a decade, optimistically. Probably multiple decades before it reaches a majority of the population (if ever). How many people die of viruses every ten years?
I sometimes advise people that it is useful to self-identify as a villain. The central reason is that Good Is Dumb:
Problem is, peoples’ sense of what’s “good” tends to draw rather heavily on fictional portrayals of good and bad, so people trying to be “good” end up mixing in a large dose of outright stupidity. No fictional hero ever sacrifices one bystander to save ten.
Objecting to pivotal acts on the basis of “you were supposed to destroy the dark side, not join them” sounds to me like a very central example of Good Is Dumb. Like, sure, one can make up reasonable reasons to oppose the pivotal act, but I think that the actual original objection for most people is probably “this sounds like something a villain would do, not something a hero would do”.
Perhaps “antihero” is better here? The “heroic” tend to be stupid and rely on the laws of narrative saving them. Villains tend to have exciting/intricate/dastardly… but overcomplicated and fatally flawed plans.
My first thought on “No fictional hero ever sacrifices one bystander to save ten”, was of Zakalwe (use of weapons) - but of course he’s squarely in antihero territory.
Does an organization’s ability to execute a “pivotal act” overlap with Samo Burja’s idea of organizations as “live players”? How many are there, and are there any orgs that you would place in one category and not the other?
My current belief is that there is no organization has the know-how to execute a pivotal act, so I would place all live orgs in one category and not the other.
That’s fair. Maybe I was more trying to get at the chances that current live orgs will develop this know-how, or if it would require new orgs designed with that purpose.