I’m with you on thinking this is a serious issue. I also think the LW community has done a very poor job of dismissing all such concerns, often with derision. A post I made on the subject got downvoted into oblivion, which is OK (community standards and all). I accept some of the criticisms, but expect to bring the issue up again with them better addressed.
Bart119
Karma: 113
LW in general seems to favor a very far view. I’m trying to get used to that, and accept it on its own terms. But however useful it may be in itself, a gross mismatch between the farness of views which are taken to be relevant to each other is a problem.
It is widely accepted that spreading population beyond earth (especially in the sense of offloading significant portions of the population) is a development many hundreds of years in the future, right? A lot of extremely difficult challenges have to be overcome to make it feasible. (I for one don’t think we’ll ever spread much beyond earth; if it were feasible, earlier civilizations would already be here. It’s a boring resolution to the Fermi paradox but I think by far the most plausible. But this is in parentheses for a reason).
Extending lifespans dramatically is far more plausible, and something that may happen within decades. If so, we will have to deal with hundreds or thousands of years of dramatically longer lifespans without galactic expansion as a relief of population pressures. It’s not a real answer to a serious intermediate-term problem. Among other issues, such a world will set the context within which future developments that would lead to galactic expansion would take place.
The OP’s point needs a better answer.
I have no commitment to ‘rational’ in the sense OP wants to eliminate. But what shorthand might one use for “applying the sorts of principles that are the general consensus among the LW community, as best I understand them”?
OK. Forgive my modest research skills. I’ve certainly seen lots of posts that assume that indefinite lifespans are a good thing, but I had never seen any that made contrary claims or rebutted such claims. I would welcome pointers to the best such discussions. It was not intended as a rant.
Interesting. Downvoted into invisibility. Because of disagreement on conclusions, or form? I suppose an assertion of over-application of rationality is in a sense off-topic, but not in the most important sense. And of course no one has to accept the intuitions (which qualify as Bayesian estimates), but are they so far off they’re not worth considering?
Over-applying rationality: Indefinite lifespans
My estimate was based on what I hear and read of others, not my own very limited experience.
Shaving: Less Long
As I see it, once you accept the idea that we are just a dance of particles (as I do too), then in an important sense ‘all bets are off’. A person comes up with something that works for them and goes with it. You don’t have any really good reason not to become a serial murderer, and no good reason to save the world if you know how. So most of us (?) pick a set of values in line with human moral intuition and what other people pick and and just go back to living. It makes us happiest. I claim you can’t be secretly miserable in an existential-angsty sort of way—there is no deeper reality which supports that. There may be deeper realities we aren’t seeing that we should worry about, but they are all within the scope of values we have chosen. But I’ve certainly had the experience that when I’m feeling bad I get reminded of the dance-of-particles situation and it further bums me out.
I see a decision about killing yourself as (in a way) constructing your future ‘contentment curve’ and seeing if the area above zero is larger than the area below. Rational people who get a painful terminal illness sometimes see lots of negative and that’s where physician-assisted suicide comes in. This is subject to the enormous, hard-to-emphasize-enough cognitive distortion that badly depressed people are terrible at constructing future contentment curves. Then irrreversibility comes in as an argument, and the suggestion that a person should let others help them figure it out too.
I modified my comment slightly to not refer to Truth. But I do think it is unreasonable to expect that people will agree on many values, e.g. whether art, psychotherapy, the worship of some particular concept of God, maximizing lifespan, hedonism, making money etc. are how best to live one’s life. Discussion and debate are fine (but not required). But if an opponent doesn’t convince me that premarital sex is wrong (for instance), he or she may not harass or coerce me.
When deciding how to allocate your time in life, one choice to make is what arguments to listen to and what not. You have to make a judgment on very little information. The older you get, the more you are likely to judge that a new argument isn’t of a kind to convince you (though it’s still a probabilistic judgment). Fortunately, others whose opinions you respect may listen, and if it’s really good they’ll alert you.
I like this post. You’re coming from religion, you’re seeking truth, you don’t want to toss out the religion completely. I think asking what self-identified rationalists have to say about that is entirely appropriate. As mwengler implies, a religious background is as good a place to get values from as anyplace else.
I was raised as an atheist, toyed with Quakerism for a while, but went back to atheism, but with a kinder view of religion. Quakers may not be great at cost-benefit tradeoffs, but they’ve been at the forefront of progressive values forever. I’m also a Unitarian-Universalist atheist, and enjoy the community a church provides (a mix of atheists and theists). We teach our kids about all major religions, and then let them choose their beliefs (most choose what amounts to atheism, but they have some idea who they share the world with. One parent said he brought his kids to UU Sunday School to “inoculate them against religion”).
But if I sing a line like, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty… only thou art holy, there is none beside thee, perfect in power, love and purity.” it makes me feel kind of teary and good. As does, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” What a great idea, that someone else is watching out for you, someone who knows best! Sometimes it can be helpful, for instance for reducing unproductive anxiety. 90% of me focuses on the fact it isn’t true and 10% on its value. For a questioning believer, maybe it’s 90-10 the other way.
All I ask of believers is to subscribe to what I’ve heard described as the liberal bargain. We do not expect to come to agreement on important issues of values and how life should be led. Persuasion is fine, but coercion is not. All you have to do is be a good neighbor, abiding by widely shared ethical beliefs: leave other people alone and treat them with a modicum of respect. Let the public schools teach (secular) science. We do interfere inside families enough to prevent child abuse, but that’s about it (and arguably we do too much of that). And I hope/expect that all a believer needs to buy into the liberal bargain is just a little bit of doubt.
So I say go ahead and pray, go to church, whatever works. Churches do a lot of good works. You already know that God helps those who help themselves, which means you’re doing pretty much the same thing with or without a God.
I realize some people who were raised with religion and reject it have substantial anger against religion and need to denounce religion in strong terms. Sometimes they seem to want to make believers feel like idiots. I think that is unfortunate.
Thanks for pointers into what is a large and complex subject. I’m not remotely worried about things coming in from the stars. As for letting the AI out of the jar, I’m a bit perplexed. The transcripts are not available for review? If not, what seems relevant is the idea that an ideal encryption system has to be public so the very smartest people can try to poke holes in it. Of course, the political will to keep an AI in the box may be lacking—if you don’t let it out, someone else will let another one out somewhere else. Seems related to commercial release of genetically modified plants, which in some cases may have been imprudent.
I haven’t read much in the super-intelligent AI realm, but perhaps a relatively naive observer has some positive value. If we get to the point of producing AI that seems remotely super-intelligent, we’ll stick firewalls around it. I don’t think the suggested actions of a super-intelligent AI will be harmful in an incomprehensible way. An exception would if it created something like the world’s funniest joke. The problem with HAL was that they gave him control of spacecraft functions. I say we don’t give ‘hands’ to the big brains, and we don’t give big brains to the hands, and then I won’t lose much sleep.
Like CuSithBell, I’ll plead the restrictive relative clause interpretation, bolstered by the absence of a comma. I’ll also plead common sense as an ambiguity resolution tool. And not only do we have the existence of cultural Catholics, we’ve got as our first estimate a minimum (if every God-believing French person were a Catholic) of 41% of Catholics who don’t subscribe to a vital church teaching.
I think atheists sometimes have a one-dimensional extreme view of believers. I never was a believer really (though I tried to be a Quaker for a while). I am a Unitarian-Universalist for social reasons (one joking definition of UUs is “atheists with children”—and I’d encourage atheists to consider if it might meet their needs).
Believers know very well that there have been no unambiguous miracles lately, that really horrible things happen in the world despite a presumably benevolent God, and that the evidence for God is indirect. I think very few lie on their deathbeds with unalloyed peace and calm with the absolute conviction that they’re going to heaven.
They are also well aware that different factions even within Christianity reach different conclusions about what God wants them to do.
There’s a reason that religious communities are always dealing with doubters and speak of the need for having faith (despite a dearth of evidence), and understand that faith gets weaker and stronger. I think most have thought about losing their faith and what it would mean.
I don’t have any statistics to quote, but I bet the majority of believers have views that are nuanced at least to this degree.
58% of French people consider themselves Catholic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_France
34% of French people assent to: “I believe there is a God”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Europe
Of course, there are methodological issues and this doesn’t prove the matter definitively, but it certain suggests that a lot of French people are “cultural Catholics” the way we have “cultural Jews” in the US.
I think you (and most commenters) are treating this hypothetical believer in a rather disrespectful and patronizing fashion. I would think the ethical thing to do is to engage in a meta-discussion with such a person and see whether there are certain subjects that are off limits, how they feel about your differing views on God, how they would feel about losing their faith, etc. They might ask you similar questions about what might make you become a believer. You might find yourself incorrect about what might make them lose their belief.
It’s certainly possible to remain in a religious community without one’s faith intact—I think it happens to a large percentage of people in any religious group. Consider all the European Catholics who are essentially atheists.
I tend to fall on the side of those who say, “Wait, don’t panic”. Well, ‘panic’ would be a strong emotion of the kind you say you’re not having, but you’re obviously uneasy, and rightly so. Right to feel that way.
When ‘the system’ looks at you, they’re going to see a person who is functioning pretty well in the world. That’s the major thing they care about. And it’s no small thing!
Things are likely to change at your age, simply with the passing of time. Are you going to go to college? Get out of the house somehow? That could get you more perspective on your parents and more opportunity to see what life is like without them. Frequent advice to despairing young people is that “it gets better”. It usually does, and when it doesn’t, you at least get a better idea of the problem you’re trying to solve.
I might posit a LW tendency (bias?) to act as opposed to waiting. I think psychedelics would be a terrible idea, frankly. Way too much of a radical act.
Maybe setting the bounds of the problem would help some. I’m assuming:
Some form of representative democracy as political context, in the absence of any better systems.
A system of law protecting most property rights—no arbitrary expropriations.
Socialism no more extreme than in (say) postwar Scandinavian countries.
Libertarianism no more extreme than (say) late 19th century USA.
Regulated capitalism. The question is how much regulation or taxation.
Given those parameters, I don’t need the Communist Manifesto or any radical anarchist works. North Korea, the USSR, pre-1980 China aren’t so relevant.
If people disagree with any of those limits on the problem, I suppose just stating that would be of interest, perhaps with a link or two. I realize getting into arguments about such things could be counterproductive, but knowing of the existence of views outside of those bounds would be helpful.
I understand that. I said it was OK. But I thought Spectral_Dragon in particular might be interested, flaws and all. My observation of derision of such concerns is not about my post, but many other places which I have seen when researching this.