Look at example 9: cancer. That basically is a multicellular organism reverting back to micro-organisms. And in some sense it’s as depressing as Scott says: billions of years, and evolution still hasn’t figured out an immune system that can reliably put an end to that garbage?
In another sense it’s outright encouraging: billions of years of animals afflicted by cancer, and here we still are, and that wasn’t just good luck. The winning strategy seems to be “group selection”, where we think of organisms as a group of cooperating cells. Cancer may eventually take my group of cells down, but if by the time that happens there’s two or three independent groups running around preserving many of the same values (in this case genes, memes, etc) as my group had, those values live on.
In a third sense it’s much more depressing. Scott’s only identified solution category is to prevent runaway competition from destroying our values by governing all that competition with a singleton: a single agent or coordinated group so powerful as to be able to squelch any outsider or subgroup’s attempt to subvert human values, even if that villain is specifically making itself as effective as possible by sacrificing those values on the altar of efficiency. But in the cancer analogy, this is the sort of idea that would have ended up with the death of all multicellular life: even if a single megaorganism might be vastly better than run-of-the-mill organisms at defeating cancer (better immune systems via economies of scale, less energy wasted in zero-sum games against competing organisms, whatever), it only needs to lose once and it’s lost for all time. Back outside the analogy, either Scott makes his singleton perfectly stable, or it gets replaced by whatever manages to subvert it, and now whatever managed to subvert it is a singleton. FAI slips up and we get a universe tiled with smiley faces. Archipelago slips up and we get a boot stamping on a human face forever.
Cancer may eventually take my group of cells down, but if by the time that happens there’s two or three independent groups running around preserving many of the same values (in this case genes, memes, etc) as my group had, those values live on.
This opens up a different means of stopping societal cancers—closed borders. Prevent the infections from spreading to all of civilization.
Look at example 9: cancer. That basically is a multicellular organism reverting back to micro-organisms. And in some sense it’s as depressing as Scott says: billions of years, and evolution still hasn’t figured out an immune system that can reliably put an end to that garbage?
In another sense it’s outright encouraging: billions of years of animals afflicted by cancer, and here we still are, and that wasn’t just good luck. The winning strategy seems to be “group selection”, where we think of organisms as a group of cooperating cells. Cancer may eventually take my group of cells down, but if by the time that happens there’s two or three independent groups running around preserving many of the same values (in this case genes, memes, etc) as my group had, those values live on.
In a third sense it’s much more depressing. Scott’s only identified solution category is to prevent runaway competition from destroying our values by governing all that competition with a singleton: a single agent or coordinated group so powerful as to be able to squelch any outsider or subgroup’s attempt to subvert human values, even if that villain is specifically making itself as effective as possible by sacrificing those values on the altar of efficiency. But in the cancer analogy, this is the sort of idea that would have ended up with the death of all multicellular life: even if a single megaorganism might be vastly better than run-of-the-mill organisms at defeating cancer (better immune systems via economies of scale, less energy wasted in zero-sum games against competing organisms, whatever), it only needs to lose once and it’s lost for all time. Back outside the analogy, either Scott makes his singleton perfectly stable, or it gets replaced by whatever manages to subvert it, and now whatever managed to subvert it is a singleton. FAI slips up and we get a universe tiled with smiley faces. Archipelago slips up and we get a boot stamping on a human face forever.
Very good points:
This opens up a different means of stopping societal cancers—closed borders. Prevent the infections from spreading to all of civilization.