actually, we played god many times in the past with positive results. for example:
eradicating smallpox
synthetic fertilizer and high yield crops
vaccines
water sanitation
antibiotics
surgery
genetic engineering
of course, sometimes it goes poorly too. but when it goes well it goes really well; I’m exceedingly grateful that i’m unlikely to ever die from smallpox or cholera or tetanus or appendicitis or starvation. let’s work on playing god well.
Fair enough, and I’m also grateful for those advances. I would just like to push towards good things without explicitly claiming the “playing god” mantle, which seems inherently arrogant to me; I would feel much better about someone who is trying to cure cancer if they didn’t say things like “playing god is good if you are good at it” and instead said things like “I want to advance human knowledge and try to make our lives better by defeating this disease.”
Look. I’m the last person who’s going to deny that the road we’re on is littered with the skulls of the people who tried to do this before us. But we’ve noticed the skulls. We’ve looked at the creepy skull pyramids and thought “huh, better try to do the opposite of what those guys did”. Just as the best doctors are humbled by the history of murderous blood-letting, the best leftists are humbled by the history of Soviet authoritarianism, and the best generals are humbled by the history of Vietnam and Iraq and Libya and all the others – in exactly this way, the rationalist movement hasn’t missed the concerns that everybody who thinks of the idea of a “rationalist movement” for five seconds has come up with. If you have this sort of concern, and you want to accuse us of it, please do a quick Google search to make sure that everybody hasn’t been condemning it and promising not to do it since the beginning.
We’re almost certainly still making horrendous mistakes that people thirty years from now will rightly criticize us for. But they’re new mistakes. They’re original and exciting mistakes which are not the same mistakes everybody who hears the word “rational” immediately knows to check for and try to avoid. Or at worst, they’re the sort of Hofstadter’s Law-esque mistakes that are impossible to avoid by knowing about and compensating for them.
And I hope that maybe having a community dedicated to carefully checking its own thought processes and trying to minimize error in every way possible will make us have slightly fewer horrendous mistakes than people who don’t do that. I hope that constant vigilance has given us at least a tiny bit of a leg up, in the determining-what-is-true field, compared to people who think this is unnecessary and truth-seeking is a waste of time.
actually, we played god many times in the past with positive results. for example:
eradicating smallpox
synthetic fertilizer and high yield crops
vaccines
water sanitation
antibiotics
surgery
genetic engineering
of course, sometimes it goes poorly too. but when it goes well it goes really well; I’m exceedingly grateful that i’m unlikely to ever die from smallpox or cholera or tetanus or appendicitis or starvation. let’s work on playing god well.
Fair enough, and I’m also grateful for those advances. I would just like to push towards good things without explicitly claiming the “playing god” mantle, which seems inherently arrogant to me; I would feel much better about someone who is trying to cure cancer if they didn’t say things like “playing god is good if you are good at it” and instead said things like “I want to advance human knowledge and try to make our lives better by defeating this disease.”
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