We’re semi-evolved monkeys created by a blind idiot god that has fortuitously created something with intellectual escape velocity. Everything we achieve as a result, we are by definition only just rational enough to achieve it, or it would have happened earlier.
That is a generic explanation; rather like saying that a bridge collapsed because the inspectors didn’t do their job. It doesn’t tell us whether people fall short of rationality because of purely intellectual shortcomings (e.g. innumeracy), or whether there are also emotional and willful elements at work. Green’s psychological ideas can even be expressed in the language of biases and heuristics: sane psychology results from an “evasion bias”, and existential psychology corrects for that using an “uncertainty heuristic”.
And yet, society does not treat modern life-saving medicine as a talkshow curiosity, nor the urge to rally to support the victims of disasters, including the “impersonally caused badness” of natural disasters. So her diagnosis seems wide of the mark.
How often do people talk about preventing earthquakes or tsunamis? Maybe you could lubricate the tectonic plates so they roll more smoothly, or dissipate the tidal wave before it reaches the shore… Now, doesn’t that sound like a child’s response to a disaster? Not just helping the survivors, but naively wanting to stop it from ever happening again.
Adults are in general far more resigned to the idea that life will always be a string of disasters. But it’s usually only a few young adults who then draw the logical conclusion that life is a mistake and we should all stop reproducing and commit suicide. It’s the willingness to go on living in a gloomy world, without fixing it or fleeing it, that really typifies “sanity”, I think. (By this criterion, LW is certainly not a sane site, since it has an apocalyptic eschatology whose outcome people hope to affect.)
I actually agree that Celia Green’s explanation for this state of affairs, in its pure form, doesn’t quite add up. It must derive from the experience of having her own proposals repeatedly shot down; she must have eventually concluded that people just don’t want truth or transhumanity. In reality, there would be other factors at work as well, such as a simple feeling of helplessness, as well as the cognitive inefficiencies at all levels that were inherited from the idiot god. But resentment of other people’s freedom, and a taste for sabotage and suffering, are also part of human psychology, and one should consider to what extent such morbid factors are responsible for the resistance to one’s favorite futurist schemes (along with legitimate criticisms).
Has she expressed any view about the people who actually are going for the big ones
Not to my knowledge. She has an aphorism, “If the human race took death seriously, there would be no more of it”, but it could be construed as support for transhumanism (no more death) or as support for antinatalism (no more human race).
Has her fanbase, as you call it, done anything new with these ideas?
Again, not to my knowledge.
Earlier, I likened Green to Schopenhauer, and there is another similarity in that Schopenhauer had many decades of sporadic contact with academia before his ideas began to achieve genuine currency. Green has had associations with a number of academics (H.H. Price, Hans Eysenck, Michael Lockwood), but her thought remains unknown and unremarked within the system.
That is a generic explanation; rather like saying that a bridge collapsed because the inspectors didn’t do their job.
For specifics, I could say “read the Sequences”, but I’m sure you have done already.
How often do people talk about preventing earthquakes or tsunamis?
It seems to me that people talk about it to the extent that they have ideas for what we could actually do about it—which is not a large extent. Earthquakes and tsunamis are huge, and we, even with our technology, are tiny. People have in fact considered what might be done to relieve stresses in earthquake zones, but haven’t come up with much. It’s easy to say that if they weren’t in such denial about death they find a way. Too easy.
Maybe you could lubricate the tectonic plates so they roll more smoothly, or dissipate the tidal wave before it reaches the shore… Now, doesn’t that sound like a child’s response to a disaster? Not just helping the survivors, but naively wanting to stop it from ever happening again.
Wanting, with nothing more, is indeed the response of a child, a child that has no idea what would be involved or how to seriously set about finding out, and expects the big folk to take care of it.
That is a generic explanation; rather like saying that a bridge collapsed because the inspectors didn’t do their job. It doesn’t tell us whether people fall short of rationality because of purely intellectual shortcomings (e.g. innumeracy), or whether there are also emotional and willful elements at work. Green’s psychological ideas can even be expressed in the language of biases and heuristics: sane psychology results from an “evasion bias”, and existential psychology corrects for that using an “uncertainty heuristic”.
How often do people talk about preventing earthquakes or tsunamis? Maybe you could lubricate the tectonic plates so they roll more smoothly, or dissipate the tidal wave before it reaches the shore… Now, doesn’t that sound like a child’s response to a disaster? Not just helping the survivors, but naively wanting to stop it from ever happening again.
Adults are in general far more resigned to the idea that life will always be a string of disasters. But it’s usually only a few young adults who then draw the logical conclusion that life is a mistake and we should all stop reproducing and commit suicide. It’s the willingness to go on living in a gloomy world, without fixing it or fleeing it, that really typifies “sanity”, I think. (By this criterion, LW is certainly not a sane site, since it has an apocalyptic eschatology whose outcome people hope to affect.)
I actually agree that Celia Green’s explanation for this state of affairs, in its pure form, doesn’t quite add up. It must derive from the experience of having her own proposals repeatedly shot down; she must have eventually concluded that people just don’t want truth or transhumanity. In reality, there would be other factors at work as well, such as a simple feeling of helplessness, as well as the cognitive inefficiencies at all levels that were inherited from the idiot god. But resentment of other people’s freedom, and a taste for sabotage and suffering, are also part of human psychology, and one should consider to what extent such morbid factors are responsible for the resistance to one’s favorite futurist schemes (along with legitimate criticisms).
Not to my knowledge. She has an aphorism, “If the human race took death seriously, there would be no more of it”, but it could be construed as support for transhumanism (no more death) or as support for antinatalism (no more human race).
Again, not to my knowledge.
Earlier, I likened Green to Schopenhauer, and there is another similarity in that Schopenhauer had many decades of sporadic contact with academia before his ideas began to achieve genuine currency. Green has had associations with a number of academics (H.H. Price, Hans Eysenck, Michael Lockwood), but her thought remains unknown and unremarked within the system.
For specifics, I could say “read the Sequences”, but I’m sure you have done already.
It seems to me that people talk about it to the extent that they have ideas for what we could actually do about it—which is not a large extent. Earthquakes and tsunamis are huge, and we, even with our technology, are tiny. People have in fact considered what might be done to relieve stresses in earthquake zones, but haven’t come up with much. It’s easy to say that if they weren’t in such denial about death they find a way. Too easy.
Wanting, with nothing more, is indeed the response of a child, a child that has no idea what would be involved or how to seriously set about finding out, and expects the big folk to take care of it.