The problem with the abstract seems different from what you describe (I only read the abstract). It looks like a kind of fallacy of gray, arguing for irrelevance of (vast) quantitative improvements by pointing out (supposed) absence of corresponding absolute qualitative change. It’s similar to a popular reaction to the idea of life extension: people point out that it’s not possible to live “forever”, even though this point doesn’t make the improvement from 80 to 800 years any less significant. (It’s misleading to bite the bullet and start defending possibility of immortality, which is unnecessary for the original point.) This pattern matches most of the goals outlined in the abstract.
That’s part of the frustrating thing—there are many parts which do look exactly like the fallacy of grey (thanks for reminding me of the name, I simply couldn’t remember it) and he seems to recognize it a bit in some of the later parts like where he describes how a defender of Bostrom might point out that the goal of the fable was to motivate us to eliminate one particularly bad dragon.
But he also took pains to explicitly state at one point his concern with fundamental limits, so anyone who looked at just the abstract or just (all the many) parts that looked like fallacy of grey could instantly be smacked down as ‘you clearly did not read my paper carefully, because I am not concerned with the transhumanists’ incremental improvements but with the final goal of perfection’.
The paper is muddled enough that I don’t think this was deliberate, but it does impress me a little bit.
Annoyance was the feeling I got, as well. It seems to me that in the places he does not commit the fallacy of grey, he only restates limits that any LW-style transhumanist understands—ie, in an EM scenario without a friendly singleton, there will still be disease, injuries, and death; even given a friendly singleton, with meaningful “continuous improvement” we only get about 28,000 subjective years until the heat death of the universe, etc.
The problem with the abstract seems different from what you describe (I only read the abstract). It looks like a kind of fallacy of gray, arguing for irrelevance of (vast) quantitative improvements by pointing out (supposed) absence of corresponding absolute qualitative change. It’s similar to a popular reaction to the idea of life extension: people point out that it’s not possible to live “forever”, even though this point doesn’t make the improvement from 80 to 800 years any less significant. (It’s misleading to bite the bullet and start defending possibility of immortality, which is unnecessary for the original point.) This pattern matches most of the goals outlined in the abstract.
That’s part of the frustrating thing—there are many parts which do look exactly like the fallacy of grey (thanks for reminding me of the name, I simply couldn’t remember it) and he seems to recognize it a bit in some of the later parts like where he describes how a defender of Bostrom might point out that the goal of the fable was to motivate us to eliminate one particularly bad dragon.
But he also took pains to explicitly state at one point his concern with fundamental limits, so anyone who looked at just the abstract or just (all the many) parts that looked like fallacy of grey could instantly be smacked down as ‘you clearly did not read my paper carefully, because I am not concerned with the transhumanists’ incremental improvements but with the final goal of perfection’.
The paper is muddled enough that I don’t think this was deliberate, but it does impress me a little bit.
Annoyance was the feeling I got, as well. It seems to me that in the places he does not commit the fallacy of grey, he only restates limits that any LW-style transhumanist understands—ie, in an EM scenario without a friendly singleton, there will still be disease, injuries, and death; even given a friendly singleton, with meaningful “continuous improvement” we only get about 28,000 subjective years until the heat death of the universe, etc.