The problems of the world are perpetuated because the human race is perpetuated. There is a huge difference between those forms of action which consist of rearranging the pieces already on the chessboard of the human condition, and those forms of action which consist of changing the players, the rules, and the battlefield on which the game of life is played; and the way one should approach these two topics is completely different.
With respect to the first type of action, wanting to do good without concern for a personal payoff is only the relevant attitude for small-scale, interpersonal interactions. If you’re hoping to save the world, either alone or in the company of your friends and colleagues, then you have a different problem: almost certainly, there is something missing or something unrealistic in your idea of how the world works. You say it yourself: why aren’t other people already saving the world for you? So let’s think about this.
But first, I want to emphasize: I am not talking about topics like life extension or friendly AI. If you are wondering why the human race hasn’t made Ray Kurzweil president of the world and why health care debates don’t include national cryonics programs, that belongs in Part Two of this comment.
So, let’s consider some of the reasons why people aren’t already saving the world (more than they are, that is). First, most adults are trapped in the wage-slave black-hole of working full-time in order to stay alive. Second, human survival requires a division of labor which ensures that most adult lives must revolve around performance of narrow economic functions in this way. Third, people actually enjoy domination and luxury, victory in conflict and selfish sensate pleasure, and these are zero-sum pursuits. Fourth, every human life is blighted by pain, disappointment, ageing, and death, and early hopes end up appearing just as hopes, not as facts about what is possible. Fifth, through a combination of limited capacity and natural inclination, people tend to care most about a small subset of all human beings: family, friends, subculture, nation.
Now let us consider some factors peculiar to the situation of the person or culture which does want to save the world. Here we should distinguish between world-saviors who have identified an enemy—an enemy class of people, not an impersonal enemy like “ignorance” or “poverty”—and those who have a spirit of general benevolence which doesn’t blame anyone in particular. Human beings are well-adapted for hunting and so fighting a personalized enemy comes naturally. I have little to say about this much more common type of world-savior, except that they are probably part of the problem, especially from the perspective of the would-be purveyor of generalized benevolence. I have already given some reasons why the latter sort of world-savior is rare—why most people don’t have the energy, time, attitude or inclination to be like that—so what can be said about the people who do?
First, they are probably better off than most other people, either through material standard of living or perhaps early quality of life. For them, that way of being seems natural, and so it’s also natural to imagine that everyone could easily live like that.
Second, here we are often talking about people from the first world who want to make a difference in the third world. Well, there probably is considerable scope for improvement of life in that regard, and it’s happening as the mundane innovations which make the difference between medieval daily life and modern daily life percolate throughout the world. (Though let us also remember that specifically modern annoyances and pathologies are thereby spreading as well.) What I see here most of all is massive political naivete of various forms. Altruists want to improve health or human rights in countries that they know almost nothing about, even though their history and their internal politics will be decisive on the big scales where the altruists want to make a difference. If you come from outside, you are likely to be either an ineffectual meddler or a useful tool for someone older, smarter, and more knowledgeable than you. Maybe sometimes that person or faction that uses you would actually be the faction that you would want to back, if you knew all the facts; but most outsiders just won’t know those facts.
So I think that, if your aim is to do conventional (non-trans-human) world-improving (I won’t call it world-saving), the attitude you should aim for is not one of being indifferent to personal gain; the attitude you should aim for is one of not expecting to make a big difference. Because most likely, you won’t be making a big difference, or at least not a difference that is unambiguously an improvement. It’s not hard to be part of something bigger—there are plenty of movements and causes in the world—but narrowness of personal experience and the sheer complexity of life tend to make it very difficult to tally up the gains and losses associated with any genuinely big change.
Feel free to criticize or dismiss what I’ve said, but perhaps you will feel compelled to agree with one point. If it’s a mystery to you why the world is so bad, then something is lacking in your own understanding, and that places in doubt the effectiveness of any remedial action you may be planning. You may find that something or other is just so awful that you feel compelled to get involved, take a stand, make a difference, even though you’re uncertain about the consequences—that there just isn’t time to achieve a cold lucid understanding. That also is true; it’s been said that life can only be understood in retrospect, but has to be lived forwards. Nonetheless, if you do rush into something, don’t be surprised if you are surprised about what happens (or what doesn’t happen), and end up being just another entry in the world’s long log of follies and tragedies, rather than being the author of a genuine advance in the human condition.
Now for Part Two. We talk about these topics endlessly, so I will try to be brief. Here there is greater scope for changing the human condition, not just because ultratechnology might give us superlongevity or superintelligence, but because human nature itself here becomes changeable. But it’s going to be a lot easier to make something subhuman or inhuman than it is to make something better than human.
The psychology of the individual response to the prospect of a singularity deserves to be more explored. A lot of it has nothing to do with altruism, and is just about an elemental desire for survival and freedom. It can also become a rationale for daydreams and fantasy. One really unexplored psychological aspect has to do with singularity-inspired altruism. Most committed detractors of transhuman futurism can barely acknowledge that there is such a thing—it’s all power-tripping and infantile fantasy as far as they are concerned. However, it’s clear that quite a few people have had a sublime personal vision of utopia achieved because (for example) no-one has to die any more, or because scarcity has been abolished. Unrealized utopian dreams are as old as history; it’s a type of fantasy—an unselfish fantasy rather than a selfish one, but still a fantasy. Historically, most such visions have revolved around the existence of some wholly other reality in which all the negative features of this one are not present and are even made up for. More recently, we also have social utopianisms, which usually contain some element of psychological unrealism.
But now, in this era when natural and psychological causality are being decoded, and when the world and the brain might be reengineered from the atoms on up, it seems like you really could adjust the world to human beings, and human beings to the world, and create something utopian by its own standards. It’s this sense of technological power and possibility which is the new factor in the otherwise familiar psychology of utopian hope. If it ever takes a form which is shared by thousands or millions of people, then we might have the interesting spectacle of typical pre-singularity social phenomena—politics, war, nationalism—that is informed by some of these new futurist notions. But the whole premise of Part One of this comment is that none of these pre-singularity activities can really “create utopia” in themselves. So it’s best to view them a little coldly—perhaps sympathetically, if they aren’t wrongheaded—but still, they have at best a tactical significance, in the way that they shape how things will play out when we really and truly start to have rejuvenation technology, nanotechnology, and autonomous artificial intelligence. Those (and some others) are the factors which really could change the human condition, easily for the worse, possibly for the radical betterment that altruist utopians have always desired.
I don’t feel equal to the task of providing definitive advice to the person who aspires to make the right sort of difference to this change, the truly big change. But it’s probably unhealthy to become too dreamy about it, and it’s certainly unrealistic to start treating as a foregone conclusion, no matter how much happier that might make you. Also, it’s important to get in touch with your own inner selfishness, and try to understand to what extent you are motivated just by the desire not to die, and not specifically by the desire to optimize the posthuman galactic future. And finally, don’t ever expect the majority of pre-singularity humanity to unite behind you as one. Up until the end, however things play out, you and your cultural and political allies will only be one faction amongst many in a society which is still short-sighted by your standards, because it is preoccupied with the day-to-day crisis management arising from the collective political life of a society of millions of people.
One of the best things for the third world has been the cell phone. What could people do to improve the odds of the next cell phone being invented and promulgated?
5 minutes of thinking yielded only one “next cell phone” candidate: an education system that actually works.
I’d need to research this, but my ignorant guess is that most funding for education in the third world has been aimed at making it more closely resemble first world education. If people’s pet theories about education being broken are correct then we should instead be researching education systems that work, especially those that work given constrained resources. And then fund those.
Not sure if this is what you were getting at, but it at least seemed worth jotting down.
If you’re specifically interested in education, the shortest route might be the Khan Academy—whose effect is amplified by cell phones.
Note that I didn’t say “What’s the next cell phone?”, I said “what improves the odds of the next cell phone?”
Math and/or science and/or engineering research? Free markets? Invent a lot of stuff rather than trying to identify the right thing in advance?
To my mind, the most interesting thing about cell phones is that they increased individual capacity in first world countries by making communication easier, but they increased individual capacity much more in third world countries because cell phones require less infrastructure.
Buckminster Fuller’s idea of ephemeralization (doing more with much less) might be a useful clue.
The other clue might be that people in third world countries may need to have their own capacities increased more than they need help—they have enough intelligence and initiative, they just need better tools.
Yes, I realise that I was interpreting your question at the wrong level. My 5 minutes of thinking were fairly unfocused this time.
My answer to “what improves the odds of the next cell phone” would of course be “create a thriving community of rationalists dedicated to self-improvement and making the world better”. If you’re asking what I’d do other than that then it’s a good question I’d need to think about.
5 minutes of thinking yielded only one “next cell phone” candidate: an education system that actually works.
Actually, I think cell phones will do that. They don’t yet, but as smartphones get cheaper and infrastructure improves, internet access will become a human universal; and at the same time, there are projects like Khan Academy that turn internet access into education. There is still lots of work to be done—the phones themselves are still too expensive, a lot of countries don’t have affordable wireless internet service fast enough for educational videos, and there aren’t enough good videos or translations into enough languages. These developments are probably inevitable, but they can also be sped up.
It’s difficult to know which idea is the correct one as I don’t know what the limiting factor is; why more cell phone-level inventions aren’t already occurring.
Hypotheses are: lack of motivation, lack of ideas, lack of engineering competence, too much risk/startup capital.
For “motivation” the obvious suggestion is some sort of X Prize.
For “ideas” my suggestion would be to develop a speculative fiction subculture, with a utopian/awesomeness/practicality focus. See what ideas pop out of the stories that might actually work.
For “engineering competence” we’re back to education again.
For “business risk” all I could think of was a sort of simulated market ecosystem, where people are modeled as agents seeking health, status and other goals and where new products aren’t introduced into the real marketplace until they show reasonable probability of success in the simulated one.
Another angle about getting in touch with your own inner selfishness.… I doubt that cell phones were invented by people who wanted to make the world a lot better. I suspect they felt personal irritation at being tethered to a location when they wanted to talk on a phone.
There was idealism attached to birth control earlier in the process, but there was still a common human desire to have sex without a high risk of producing children.
Tools for improving the world have to be attractive enough for people to want to use them. What’s been getting on your nerves lately? Can you tell what you used to want, but you’ve gotten resigned to not having it?
The credential problem is one that I think could use some solving, and I have no idea where to start. People spend a tremendous amount on education—and sometimes on “education”, and a lot of it isn’t spent on actually becoming more capable, it’s spent on signalling that one is knowledgeable and conscientious enough (and possibly capable of learning quickly enough) to be worth hiring.
I’m not saying that everything spent on education is wasted, but a lot of it is, and capable people who can’t afford education have their talents wasted.
It’s possible that credentials are the wrong end of the problem to attack. People behave as though there’s a capital shortage, which could also be expressed as a people surplus relative to capital. Maybe what we need is more capital.
Some of the Thiel fellows are working on combating the credential problem. Dale Stephens is the only one I know off the top of my head, but I think there might be others.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that I was limiting my scope to non-trans-human world improvement. If my initial focus is on “conventional” causes then it’s because I believe most of humanity isn’t ready to tackle existential risk, AI and transhuman issues until we can tackle the problems we’re having here and now.
I was also a little misleading in suggesting that the reasons the world was so bad are somehow mysterious to me. They were, but not so much any more—I may be completely wrong but at least I see the issue as no longer mysterious. This post was more about my personal journey than about where I’ve ended up. Inferential distance and all that.
If my initial focus is on “conventional” causes then it’s because I believe most of humanity isn’t ready to tackle existential risk, AI and transhuman issues until we can tackle the problems we’re having here and now.
Suppose your objective was, not to do good, but to make discoveries in some branch of science; biology, for example. And suppose you said
“If my initial focus is on ‘conventional’ biological research then it’s because I believe most of humanity isn’t ready to research futuristic topics X, Y, Z until we can answer the questions we are already asking in biology.”
This response would make no sense, because you don’t conduct scientific research by getting “most of humanity” to do it. Specialized research is conducted by the very small minorities who have the means, motive and opportunity to do it.
Similarly, the only reason that the readiness of most of humanity to do something would matter to you, is either if you intend to have them doing it as well, or if you intend to seek their approval before doing it.
Seeking the approval of 7 billion people for something is a formula for never doing it. And trying to get even 1% of 7 billion people to do something … that’s 70 million people. Who ever gets 70 million people to do the same thing? The state, by forcing them to do it; giant corporations, by marketing a product to them; maybe extremely influential cultural institutions, like the Catholic church; that’s about it.
Can you explain what logical relationship there is between “the degree to which one should focus on conventional causes” and “the degree to which most of humanity is ready to think about the Singularity”?
Thanks for this thoughtful reply. I’ll outline my position briefly.
The biological research example is not analogous because in biology, the necessary institutions and infrastructure already exist. In the field of effective world improvement this isn’t the case. (If you convince me that current large charities and aid organizations are near-optimal then I’ll update accordingly).
My “most of humanity” comment was misleading and I apologize for this. I merely meant that I would be seeking to reach a lot of people outside the LW & “transhumanist” communities, as I may need to reach beyond these communities in order to find people with the right skills, goals, passions, etc. An organization with a purely transhumanist focus might seem off-putting.to such outsiders.
The payoff of creating a very influential cultural institution would be very great and so could be seen as worth the low probability of success.
[EDIT: I’m not sure I can provide a meaningful answer to your question. My current plan is essentially “a bit of the conventional stuff, a bit of the transhuman stuff” and I’m prepared to drop either strand if it turns out not to be useful. That’s all.]
The problems of the world are perpetuated because the human race is perpetuated. There is a huge difference between those forms of action which consist of rearranging the pieces already on the chessboard of the human condition, and those forms of action which consist of changing the players, the rules, and the battlefield on which the game of life is played; and the way one should approach these two topics is completely different.
With respect to the first type of action, wanting to do good without concern for a personal payoff is only the relevant attitude for small-scale, interpersonal interactions. If you’re hoping to save the world, either alone or in the company of your friends and colleagues, then you have a different problem: almost certainly, there is something missing or something unrealistic in your idea of how the world works. You say it yourself: why aren’t other people already saving the world for you? So let’s think about this.
But first, I want to emphasize: I am not talking about topics like life extension or friendly AI. If you are wondering why the human race hasn’t made Ray Kurzweil president of the world and why health care debates don’t include national cryonics programs, that belongs in Part Two of this comment.
So, let’s consider some of the reasons why people aren’t already saving the world (more than they are, that is). First, most adults are trapped in the wage-slave black-hole of working full-time in order to stay alive. Second, human survival requires a division of labor which ensures that most adult lives must revolve around performance of narrow economic functions in this way. Third, people actually enjoy domination and luxury, victory in conflict and selfish sensate pleasure, and these are zero-sum pursuits. Fourth, every human life is blighted by pain, disappointment, ageing, and death, and early hopes end up appearing just as hopes, not as facts about what is possible. Fifth, through a combination of limited capacity and natural inclination, people tend to care most about a small subset of all human beings: family, friends, subculture, nation.
Now let us consider some factors peculiar to the situation of the person or culture which does want to save the world. Here we should distinguish between world-saviors who have identified an enemy—an enemy class of people, not an impersonal enemy like “ignorance” or “poverty”—and those who have a spirit of general benevolence which doesn’t blame anyone in particular. Human beings are well-adapted for hunting and so fighting a personalized enemy comes naturally. I have little to say about this much more common type of world-savior, except that they are probably part of the problem, especially from the perspective of the would-be purveyor of generalized benevolence. I have already given some reasons why the latter sort of world-savior is rare—why most people don’t have the energy, time, attitude or inclination to be like that—so what can be said about the people who do?
First, they are probably better off than most other people, either through material standard of living or perhaps early quality of life. For them, that way of being seems natural, and so it’s also natural to imagine that everyone could easily live like that.
Second, here we are often talking about people from the first world who want to make a difference in the third world. Well, there probably is considerable scope for improvement of life in that regard, and it’s happening as the mundane innovations which make the difference between medieval daily life and modern daily life percolate throughout the world. (Though let us also remember that specifically modern annoyances and pathologies are thereby spreading as well.) What I see here most of all is massive political naivete of various forms. Altruists want to improve health or human rights in countries that they know almost nothing about, even though their history and their internal politics will be decisive on the big scales where the altruists want to make a difference. If you come from outside, you are likely to be either an ineffectual meddler or a useful tool for someone older, smarter, and more knowledgeable than you. Maybe sometimes that person or faction that uses you would actually be the faction that you would want to back, if you knew all the facts; but most outsiders just won’t know those facts.
So I think that, if your aim is to do conventional (non-trans-human) world-improving (I won’t call it world-saving), the attitude you should aim for is not one of being indifferent to personal gain; the attitude you should aim for is one of not expecting to make a big difference. Because most likely, you won’t be making a big difference, or at least not a difference that is unambiguously an improvement. It’s not hard to be part of something bigger—there are plenty of movements and causes in the world—but narrowness of personal experience and the sheer complexity of life tend to make it very difficult to tally up the gains and losses associated with any genuinely big change.
Feel free to criticize or dismiss what I’ve said, but perhaps you will feel compelled to agree with one point. If it’s a mystery to you why the world is so bad, then something is lacking in your own understanding, and that places in doubt the effectiveness of any remedial action you may be planning. You may find that something or other is just so awful that you feel compelled to get involved, take a stand, make a difference, even though you’re uncertain about the consequences—that there just isn’t time to achieve a cold lucid understanding. That also is true; it’s been said that life can only be understood in retrospect, but has to be lived forwards. Nonetheless, if you do rush into something, don’t be surprised if you are surprised about what happens (or what doesn’t happen), and end up being just another entry in the world’s long log of follies and tragedies, rather than being the author of a genuine advance in the human condition.
Now for Part Two. We talk about these topics endlessly, so I will try to be brief. Here there is greater scope for changing the human condition, not just because ultratechnology might give us superlongevity or superintelligence, but because human nature itself here becomes changeable. But it’s going to be a lot easier to make something subhuman or inhuman than it is to make something better than human.
The psychology of the individual response to the prospect of a singularity deserves to be more explored. A lot of it has nothing to do with altruism, and is just about an elemental desire for survival and freedom. It can also become a rationale for daydreams and fantasy. One really unexplored psychological aspect has to do with singularity-inspired altruism. Most committed detractors of transhuman futurism can barely acknowledge that there is such a thing—it’s all power-tripping and infantile fantasy as far as they are concerned. However, it’s clear that quite a few people have had a sublime personal vision of utopia achieved because (for example) no-one has to die any more, or because scarcity has been abolished. Unrealized utopian dreams are as old as history; it’s a type of fantasy—an unselfish fantasy rather than a selfish one, but still a fantasy. Historically, most such visions have revolved around the existence of some wholly other reality in which all the negative features of this one are not present and are even made up for. More recently, we also have social utopianisms, which usually contain some element of psychological unrealism.
But now, in this era when natural and psychological causality are being decoded, and when the world and the brain might be reengineered from the atoms on up, it seems like you really could adjust the world to human beings, and human beings to the world, and create something utopian by its own standards. It’s this sense of technological power and possibility which is the new factor in the otherwise familiar psychology of utopian hope. If it ever takes a form which is shared by thousands or millions of people, then we might have the interesting spectacle of typical pre-singularity social phenomena—politics, war, nationalism—that is informed by some of these new futurist notions. But the whole premise of Part One of this comment is that none of these pre-singularity activities can really “create utopia” in themselves. So it’s best to view them a little coldly—perhaps sympathetically, if they aren’t wrongheaded—but still, they have at best a tactical significance, in the way that they shape how things will play out when we really and truly start to have rejuvenation technology, nanotechnology, and autonomous artificial intelligence. Those (and some others) are the factors which really could change the human condition, easily for the worse, possibly for the radical betterment that altruist utopians have always desired.
I don’t feel equal to the task of providing definitive advice to the person who aspires to make the right sort of difference to this change, the truly big change. But it’s probably unhealthy to become too dreamy about it, and it’s certainly unrealistic to start treating as a foregone conclusion, no matter how much happier that might make you. Also, it’s important to get in touch with your own inner selfishness, and try to understand to what extent you are motivated just by the desire not to die, and not specifically by the desire to optimize the posthuman galactic future. And finally, don’t ever expect the majority of pre-singularity humanity to unite behind you as one. Up until the end, however things play out, you and your cultural and political allies will only be one faction amongst many in a society which is still short-sighted by your standards, because it is preoccupied with the day-to-day crisis management arising from the collective political life of a society of millions of people.
This should be a top level post.
One of the best things for the third world has been the cell phone. What could people do to improve the odds of the next cell phone being invented and promulgated?
5 minutes of thinking yielded only one “next cell phone” candidate: an education system that actually works.
I’d need to research this, but my ignorant guess is that most funding for education in the third world has been aimed at making it more closely resemble first world education. If people’s pet theories about education being broken are correct then we should instead be researching education systems that work, especially those that work given constrained resources. And then fund those.
Not sure if this is what you were getting at, but it at least seemed worth jotting down.
If you’re specifically interested in education, the shortest route might be the Khan Academy—whose effect is amplified by cell phones.
Note that I didn’t say “What’s the next cell phone?”, I said “what improves the odds of the next cell phone?”
Math and/or science and/or engineering research? Free markets? Invent a lot of stuff rather than trying to identify the right thing in advance?
To my mind, the most interesting thing about cell phones is that they increased individual capacity in first world countries by making communication easier, but they increased individual capacity much more in third world countries because cell phones require less infrastructure.
Buckminster Fuller’s idea of ephemeralization (doing more with much less) might be a useful clue.
The other clue might be that people in third world countries may need to have their own capacities increased more than they need help—they have enough intelligence and initiative, they just need better tools.
Yes, I realise that I was interpreting your question at the wrong level. My 5 minutes of thinking were fairly unfocused this time.
My answer to “what improves the odds of the next cell phone” would of course be “create a thriving community of rationalists dedicated to self-improvement and making the world better”. If you’re asking what I’d do other than that then it’s a good question I’d need to think about.
If we had a huge community of those rationalists, what more would we need?
Actually, I think cell phones will do that. They don’t yet, but as smartphones get cheaper and infrastructure improves, internet access will become a human universal; and at the same time, there are projects like Khan Academy that turn internet access into education. There is still lots of work to be done—the phones themselves are still too expensive, a lot of countries don’t have affordable wireless internet service fast enough for educational videos, and there aren’t enough good videos or translations into enough languages. These developments are probably inevitable, but they can also be sped up.
OK I’ll answer your actual question this time.
It’s difficult to know which idea is the correct one as I don’t know what the limiting factor is; why more cell phone-level inventions aren’t already occurring.
Hypotheses are: lack of motivation, lack of ideas, lack of engineering competence, too much risk/startup capital.
For “motivation” the obvious suggestion is some sort of X Prize.
For “ideas” my suggestion would be to develop a speculative fiction subculture, with a utopian/awesomeness/practicality focus. See what ideas pop out of the stories that might actually work.
For “engineering competence” we’re back to education again.
For “business risk” all I could think of was a sort of simulated market ecosystem, where people are modeled as agents seeking health, status and other goals and where new products aren’t introduced into the real marketplace until they show reasonable probability of success in the simulated one.
Another angle about getting in touch with your own inner selfishness.… I doubt that cell phones were invented by people who wanted to make the world a lot better. I suspect they felt personal irritation at being tethered to a location when they wanted to talk on a phone.
There was idealism attached to birth control earlier in the process, but there was still a common human desire to have sex without a high risk of producing children.
Tools for improving the world have to be attractive enough for people to want to use them. What’s been getting on your nerves lately? Can you tell what you used to want, but you’ve gotten resigned to not having it?
The credential problem is one that I think could use some solving, and I have no idea where to start. People spend a tremendous amount on education—and sometimes on “education”, and a lot of it isn’t spent on actually becoming more capable, it’s spent on signalling that one is knowledgeable and conscientious enough (and possibly capable of learning quickly enough) to be worth hiring.
I’m not saying that everything spent on education is wasted, but a lot of it is, and capable people who can’t afford education have their talents wasted.
It’s possible that credentials are the wrong end of the problem to attack. People behave as though there’s a capital shortage, which could also be expressed as a people surplus relative to capital. Maybe what we need is more capital.
Some of the Thiel fellows are working on combating the credential problem. Dale Stephens is the only one I know off the top of my head, but I think there might be others.
I like your thinking
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that I was limiting my scope to non-trans-human world improvement. If my initial focus is on “conventional” causes then it’s because I believe most of humanity isn’t ready to tackle existential risk, AI and transhuman issues until we can tackle the problems we’re having here and now.
I was also a little misleading in suggesting that the reasons the world was so bad are somehow mysterious to me. They were, but not so much any more—I may be completely wrong but at least I see the issue as no longer mysterious. This post was more about my personal journey than about where I’ve ended up. Inferential distance and all that.
Suppose your objective was, not to do good, but to make discoveries in some branch of science; biology, for example. And suppose you said
“If my initial focus is on ‘conventional’ biological research then it’s because I believe most of humanity isn’t ready to research futuristic topics X, Y, Z until we can answer the questions we are already asking in biology.”
This response would make no sense, because you don’t conduct scientific research by getting “most of humanity” to do it. Specialized research is conducted by the very small minorities who have the means, motive and opportunity to do it.
Similarly, the only reason that the readiness of most of humanity to do something would matter to you, is either if you intend to have them doing it as well, or if you intend to seek their approval before doing it.
Seeking the approval of 7 billion people for something is a formula for never doing it. And trying to get even 1% of 7 billion people to do something … that’s 70 million people. Who ever gets 70 million people to do the same thing? The state, by forcing them to do it; giant corporations, by marketing a product to them; maybe extremely influential cultural institutions, like the Catholic church; that’s about it.
Can you explain what logical relationship there is between “the degree to which one should focus on conventional causes” and “the degree to which most of humanity is ready to think about the Singularity”?
Thanks for this thoughtful reply. I’ll outline my position briefly.
The biological research example is not analogous because in biology, the necessary institutions and infrastructure already exist. In the field of effective world improvement this isn’t the case. (If you convince me that current large charities and aid organizations are near-optimal then I’ll update accordingly).
My “most of humanity” comment was misleading and I apologize for this. I merely meant that I would be seeking to reach a lot of people outside the LW & “transhumanist” communities, as I may need to reach beyond these communities in order to find people with the right skills, goals, passions, etc. An organization with a purely transhumanist focus might seem off-putting.to such outsiders.
The payoff of creating a very influential cultural institution would be very great and so could be seen as worth the low probability of success.
[EDIT: I’m not sure I can provide a meaningful answer to your question. My current plan is essentially “a bit of the conventional stuff, a bit of the transhuman stuff” and I’m prepared to drop either strand if it turns out not to be useful. That’s all.]