Does that problem significantly inform you about accuracy of Darwin’s position on the state and prospects of cryonics? If actual evidence doesn’t get warped too much, pessimism might be a good (not great) attitude to successfully pick holes in convenient illusions, and evidence screens off occasional craziness. So the relevant query is about the actual summary of Darwin’s case.
As I’ve pointed out, I think Darwin has a good track record when it comes to medicine predictions and cryonics forecasts in particular. (And with the former, his errors were more those of optimism than pessimism.)
As for his economics claims? I dunno. It seems pretty clear to me that marginal returns are shrinking in science & tech (consistent with his claims that we are not in a long-run sustainable situation), but this is an observation whose implications are very easy to overstate—the data is about about humans; that doesn’t rule out advances in things like nanotech much less any regime shifts like uploads or AGIs, or give us any clear deadlines like ‘2 centuries’ (diminishing returns seem clear in the Roman empire, too, centuries and maybe millennia before the final fall of Constantinople).
This may be a case where we could say with Napoleon, “the real truths of history are hard to discover. Happily, for the most part, they are rather matters of curiosity than of real importance.”
Does that problem significantly inform you about accuracy of Darwin’s position on the state and prospects of cryonics? If actual evidence doesn’t get warped too much, pessimism might be a good (not great) attitude to successfully pick holes in convenient illusions, and evidence screens off occasional craziness. So the relevant query is about the actual summary of Darwin’s case.
As I’ve pointed out, I think Darwin has a good track record when it comes to medicine predictions and cryonics forecasts in particular. (And with the former, his errors were more those of optimism than pessimism.)
As for his economics claims? I dunno. It seems pretty clear to me that marginal returns are shrinking in science & tech (consistent with his claims that we are not in a long-run sustainable situation), but this is an observation whose implications are very easy to overstate—the data is about about humans; that doesn’t rule out advances in things like nanotech much less any regime shifts like uploads or AGIs, or give us any clear deadlines like ‘2 centuries’ (diminishing returns seem clear in the Roman empire, too, centuries and maybe millennia before the final fall of Constantinople).
This may be a case where we could say with Napoleon, “the real truths of history are hard to discover. Happily, for the most part, they are rather matters of curiosity than of real importance.”