level 3 is “okay, we just won’t be idiots about doing superficially useful looking things to the environment”
But a key point is that 3 is, fundamentally, a skill-issue.
And maybe, given our human-capability levels, it’s functionally a skill-issue for everyone.
But it’s a pretty common pattern for someone to try to do [something] (using a basically hopeless methodology, often), fail, and then declare that [something] is beyond the ken of man, and we must be humble in the face of our ultimate ignorance and impotence.
See for instance the way many (in my opinion, midwit) people declare that there is irreducible mystery, or that no one worldview and accommodate all of the problems of society.
I think you’re missing something here though. There’s a part of Green that’s not just for the “trees and rivers” kind of nature. It’s also for relationships, physiology, and sociopolitics. If you’re working with a system that humans currently have a serious skill issue with them you probably want to take a somewhat Greenish stance.
The question then becomes whether we ever run out of systems where we have a skill issue. I suspect—for example—that sociopolitics and relationships will stay skill issueish even if humans became superintelligent, since we’d be able to engage in more complex and complicated relationships up to our level of skill issue.
This part of green is a kind of small-c conservatism towards these systems. The other part is a reference and love of those systems. I think the first part is the instrumental part, and the second is the terminal part.
I definitely have the terminal part, and while I’m not completely oxytocin-insensitive I do sometimes think my oxytocin system is wired up in an unusual way. Without the terminal part you get (spoilers for Greg Egan’s Diaspora)
The worldview put forward by Diaspora which is pure blue/white where people and emotion’s don’t have any value and the only thing worth doing is scientific discovery, and when you run out of worlds and physics to discover you can either do maths forever or kill yourself.
Which is a worldview I find rather depressing. I sure hope that interpersonal relationships can be indefinitely complicated (or more complicated things can exist) for the sake of the future Everett branches in which any Green-loving humans succeed in getting a good future.
But a key point is that 3 is, fundamentally, a skill-issue.
And maybe, given our human-capability levels, it’s functionally a skill-issue for everyone.
But it’s a pretty common pattern for someone to try to do [something] (using a basically hopeless methodology, often), fail, and then declare that [something] is beyond the ken of man, and we must be humble in the face of our ultimate ignorance and impotence.
See for instance the way many (in my opinion, midwit) people declare that there is irreducible mystery, or that no one worldview and accommodate all of the problems of society.
I think you’re missing something here though. There’s a part of Green that’s not just for the “trees and rivers” kind of nature. It’s also for relationships, physiology, and sociopolitics. If you’re working with a system that humans currently have a serious skill issue with them you probably want to take a somewhat Greenish stance.
The question then becomes whether we ever run out of systems where we have a skill issue. I suspect—for example—that sociopolitics and relationships will stay skill issueish even if humans became superintelligent, since we’d be able to engage in more complex and complicated relationships up to our level of skill issue.
This part of green is a kind of small-c conservatism towards these systems. The other part is a reference and love of those systems. I think the first part is the instrumental part, and the second is the terminal part.
I definitely have the terminal part, and while I’m not completely oxytocin-insensitive I do sometimes think my oxytocin system is wired up in an unusual way. Without the terminal part you get (spoilers for Greg Egan’s Diaspora)
The worldview put forward by Diaspora which is pure blue/white where people and emotion’s don’t have any value and the only thing worth doing is scientific discovery, and when you run out of worlds and physics to discover you can either do maths forever or kill yourself.
Which is a worldview I find rather depressing. I sure hope that interpersonal relationships can be indefinitely complicated (or more complicated things can exist) for the sake of the future Everett branches in which any Green-loving humans succeed in getting a good future.