One thing that is rarely appreciated, or tallied up, is the improvement in the general human condition through technology.
Lifespan, size, intelligence. Indoor plumbing. Dentistry. Vaccines. General medical practices. Infant mortality rates. Childhood mortality rates.
Singularitarians like to wax poetic about the predicted wonders of the future, but most people would find the progress already made quite compelling if it was actually shown to them, and the wonders of that progress might make them more open to the greater wonders we believe the future holds.
I think a death pool could be kind of fun. I suppose I’m rather morbid that way.
But between disease, war, and death, pick a year and a place to be born, and using mortality tables, plot out expectations on when and how you die, and what diseases and ailments you have. How many calories you lived on. How much you weighed. What was government like. What was crime like? Maybe we should all be cats, and get nine lives, run some randomization, and see how the nine lives end.
Most straightforward—did you make it to your current age, and if not, how did you die? Child mortality was pretty bad for most of human history.
Something like that. I think random sampling would be more fun than just showing the expectation. Instead of a one shot, you could go year by year, giving some sense of the passage of time, and then using the conditional mortality tables, if available.
Adding in actual dice rolls would add to the sense of personally being a causal factor in the process. It comes down to what kind of data you can get, and how energetic you’re feeling.
I think this game would generalize well to all sorts of things—health, finances, etc. And, more to the point of Singularitarian progaganda, you could project out the same thing into the future, with different assumptions on accelerating returns.
Simulation is a nice way to get an intuitive feel for lots of processes. Back in grad school, I taught a neural network course, and there’s nothing quite like seeing the magic of self organizing and learning systems simulated visually. I remember watching simulations of learning algorithms for things like balancing a stick upright. A strange magic that seems inevitable once you see it in operation.
One thing that is rarely appreciated, or tallied up, is the improvement in the general human condition through technology.
Lifespan, size, intelligence. Indoor plumbing. Dentistry. Vaccines. General medical practices. Infant mortality rates. Childhood mortality rates.
Singularitarians like to wax poetic about the predicted wonders of the future, but most people would find the progress already made quite compelling if it was actually shown to them, and the wonders of that progress might make them more open to the greater wonders we believe the future holds.
Can you come up with any traditions that would highlight the progress of past technology, and that you’d definitely want to do at a party?
I think a death pool could be kind of fun. I suppose I’m rather morbid that way.
But between disease, war, and death, pick a year and a place to be born, and using mortality tables, plot out expectations on when and how you die, and what diseases and ailments you have. How many calories you lived on. How much you weighed. What was government like. What was crime like? Maybe we should all be cats, and get nine lives, run some randomization, and see how the nine lives end.
Most straightforward—did you make it to your current age, and if not, how did you die? Child mortality was pretty bad for most of human history.
Like rolling an RPG character, but from human history? That could be workable, with the right preparation...
Something like that. I think random sampling would be more fun than just showing the expectation. Instead of a one shot, you could go year by year, giving some sense of the passage of time, and then using the conditional mortality tables, if available.
Adding in actual dice rolls would add to the sense of personally being a causal factor in the process. It comes down to what kind of data you can get, and how energetic you’re feeling.
I think this game would generalize well to all sorts of things—health, finances, etc. And, more to the point of Singularitarian progaganda, you could project out the same thing into the future, with different assumptions on accelerating returns.
Simulation is a nice way to get an intuitive feel for lots of processes. Back in grad school, I taught a neural network course, and there’s nothing quite like seeing the magic of self organizing and learning systems simulated visually. I remember watching simulations of learning algorithms for things like balancing a stick upright. A strange magic that seems inevitable once you see it in operation.