The cure for bystander apathy is getting one person to lead by example. Since in this case there are several prominent such examples, a Tragedy of the Commons scenario seems more likely to me.
You are right, it’s not possible to tell if this happens implicitly or explicitly (in which case there is nothing to be done anyway).
I’ll be damned—after all these years, a solution to the problem of evil.
I notice I am far less moved than I expected to be. Then again, I didn’t expect this to happen at all.
I don’t know that. I was taught about the asteroid years ago and haven’t had a reason to doubt it. The last time I came across the subject, was a video by kurzgesagt, explaining that the asteroid wrecked stuff up for years to come, causing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, among other things.
3blue1brown has an excellent youtube series “Essence of Calculus”—which presents the main intuitions geometrically, in a way that finally helped me remember the formulas for longer than a week. Each video is 15 minutes long and I haven’t seen a better introduction on the subject.
Edit: I realise the post I comment on might’ve been written before the Sequence on Changing Your Mind I so proudly point to.
I was recently talking to Ozy about a group who believe that society billing thin people is fatphobic, and that everyone needs to admit obese people can be just as attractive and date more of them, and that anyone who preferentially dates thinner people is Problematic. They also want people to stop talking about nutrition and exercise publicly. I sympathize with these people, especially having recently read a study showing that obese people are much happier when surrounded by other obese, rather than skinny people. But realistically, their movement will fail, and even philosophically, I’m not sure how to determine if they have the right to demand what they are demanding or what that question means.
No, they do not have the right to demand what they are demanding. Philosophically, they are demanding the end of free speech and the stigmatization of people’s sexual preferences. Imagine what you’d say to a Catholic, demanding we ban religious debates and declare that homosexuals are sinners, and go with that.
Oh, but the Catholics have feelings, too, and all those benefits of a religious community. I seem to remember a whole sequence on Changing Your Mind, the litanies of Gendlin and Tarski, etc. The truth is considered important, because it is useful to know, but also as an end in itself. Are we really ok with hiding it, lest some members of a particular group get offended? Do we think so little of them, that they couldn’t bear it? And if so, are we ok to never hear a debate on the topic, for the benefit of the emotionally fragile? I, personally, am not.
And since happiness is often a question of comparison with your peers—which is why social media is bad for you—I am not surprised fat people are happier without skinny people around. (Possible hindsight bias on my part? I am pretty sure I could’ve predicted that one.) This is also a potential explanation of the living standard/happiness discrepancies in developing countries—at first everyone is similarly poor, then some people are doing better and there is always someone more successful to compare yourself to.
In any case, maybe subjective feelings like happiness and self-esteem are not solely what we should optimize for. Maybe we should include things like life expectancy and quality, just in case feelings lead us astray. Then raising the standard of living starts to make sense, even if the happiness index lags behind considerably.
Ideally, I agree with the premise as a long term strategy, opposed to the short term tactics used at a campaign. But I am not convinced any of the active actors and policymakers would want the rise of the waterline. Why change the system, which elected you? What politician wants electorate, that would actually hold them accountable? What suicidal newspaper would want the question of gun violence answered?
It is possible the educational system is doing exactly what it is supposed to do, and raising the sanity waterline will have to be achieved on people’s own time.
Right now antifascists outnumber fascists and so could probably beat them in a fight, but antifascists didn’t come to outnumber fascists by winning some kind of primordial fistfight between the two sides. They came to outnumber fascists because people rejected fascism on the merits.
Um, there was this thing called World War 2, after which Eugenics lost a lot of its previous popularity as a Harvard discipline. And now it is difficult to keep your job in academia, if you show too much interest in intelligence variances between groups, let alone if you wonder how much of it is caused by genetics. And since a second Great War was not entirely unexpected after the Treaty of Versailles, it might be that Nazism lost because of its association with Germany, rather than the other way around.
(I am not saying the Nazis were scientifically correct, by the way. I am just wondering how often would communism be mentioned in campus, if the Cold War had become Warm, before being won.)
Also, the good guys always win—that’s how they get to be the good guys (at least for the next 100 years or so). Luckily, better weapons and economy usually ensure that the good guys also happen to have the better scientists and vice versa. That’s how progress is made.
A sane person, calling himself a feminist—not something one sees often represented in the media. Then again this is true of sane people in general—a fact I tend to forget. I wish you luck in defending the movement from the believe-all-women crowd. From the outside, it looks like they’ve already won.
Leaving feminism aside, there is one area, where liberalism doesn’t seem to win—namely income inequality.
And sure, as long as the majority is not squeezed into poverty, this may not be a problem. But since this is the first generation of US citizens to see their average lifespan get shorter, I am not so certain we are headed for liberal utopia after all.
Limited field of view and slow decision making, reliant on multiple complex systems for life support.
If a droid or a computer could fly an X-wing, it should.
I never said it was just Islam. But you are right—it is not Christians, but rather white people, that are held to a higher standard in this regard (at least by USA liberals).
Fallacies leading to inability to take action in accordance with their values is one explanation for people’s apathy.
Another is that they simply prefer their own short term comfort more than most other values they would care to espouse. I know this to be the case for at least one person, and I am pretty sure there are more.
I am somehow convinced that a perceived loon like Elon Musk opening 20 positions for AI safety researchers, $10 million yearly salary, will have much better luck recruiting, than an elite university offering $100 000 (or the potential candidate’s current salary, whatever). In the first case, 5% existential risk for humanity will finally become intolerable. In the second—not so much.
Edit: people leaving Neuralink citing “premature push for human experiments” are evidence against my previous paragraph.
If my job consists of 20 different tasks, and for each of them there is a separate narrow AI able to outperform me in them, combining them to automate me should not be that difficult.
“and that one reason we’re not smarter may be that it’s too hard to squeeze a bigger brain through the birth canal”—should be pretty much obliterated by modern Caesarian, but do we see burst of intelligence in last decades?
Reliable contraceptives, combined with unprecedented safety, mean that intelligence is not the evolutionary advantage it once was. People unable or unwilling to use condoms are selected for. Idiocracy is upon us.
Another possibility is that modern Caesarian has not been widespread enough, for long enough, for its effect on intelligence to be noticeable just yet.
Edit: On a related note, I thought of an amusing just so story. I wonder how much of the increase in allergies in the 1st world countries is due to latex allergy being an evolutionary advantage (as opposed to environmental reasons and the access to corticosteroids making a paranoid immune system advantageous in its own right). Probably not much, but amusing to think about.
It is only their culture that’s under “siege” and it’s a different kind of siege involving no laws or planned attempts to erase their cultural ways...
A redneck has seen gay marriage legalised in his lifetime, while homosexuality is still illegal in 71 countries. Islam seems to get a lot more leniency on this topic, compared to Christianity.
Rural British and American Rednecks aren’t certainly seeing their resources appropriated by the powers behind the immigrants.
If I remember my history correctly, the Industrial Revolution didn’t go so smoothly for the Rural Brits either.
And from a certain point of view (Marx, mainly) a redneck is exploited by the same people pillaging the resources of Burkina Faso (and everywhere else).
Whatever one’s opinion on capitalism, seeing the claim that small countries are exploited for resources, while rednecks are not, is bizarre to me.
After reading these, I am updating from “greedy capitalists + corrupt officials” to “greedy capitalists + corrupt officials + litigation costs”. I expect the administrative bloat is more or less the same in US and Europe, while litigation and official, legal lobbying is not.
Inflation isn’t calculated correctly and the market isn’t free.
It’s what you’d expect to see in an oligarchy—politicians promising less regulation for new businesses or universal healthcare both won’t deliver. Unlike OP, who delivers consistently.
On the inflation point, googling CPI: “The Controversy Originally, the CPI was determined by comparing the price of a fixed basket of goods and services spanning two different periods. In this case, the CPI was a cost of goods index (COGI). However, over time, the U.S. Congress embraced the view that the CPI should reflect changes in the cost to maintain a constant standard of living. Consequently, the CPI has evolved into a cost of living index (COLI).
Over the years, the methodology used to calculate the CPI has undergone numerous revisions. According to the BLS, the changes removed biases that caused the CPI to overstate the inflation rate. The new methodology takes into account changes in the quality of goods and substitution. Substitution, the change in purchases by consumers in response to price changes, changes the relative weighting of the goods in the basket. The overall result tends to be a lower CPI. However, critics view the methodological changes and the switch from a COGI to a COLI as a purposeful manipulation that allows the U.S. government to report a lower CPI.” (https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/consumerpriceindex.asp)
I once listened to a fellow, arguing that “truth” should have a moral component in its definition, so that only statements beneficial to humanity could be considered “true”. On the other hand, dangerous knowledge of civilization ending viruses was harmful, and could only be considered “technically correct”, but never “true”. He was carving reality so haphazardly, as to only be able to call “true” The Bible and “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoevsky. Although, how he imagines to have achieved this before humanity has ended, escapes me.
I haven’t listened to him since.
Meanwhile, my own definition of what a woman is, is hopelessly outdated. Others in my position have tried to argue semantics. I will not repeat their mistake. I will instead make the testable predictions that the instances of penetrative rape in female prisons will increase slightly, that female sports are about to experience unprecedented improvement and new records across the board, and that some people will discover how much harder it is to reverse hormonal therapy and surgery, compared to removing a hair dryer from a car.
Why argue semantics, if we can compare anticipation of future experiences?
Great post!
However, I have the following problem with the scenario—I have hard time trusting a doctor, who prescribes a diet pill and consultation with a surgeon, but omits healthy diet and exercise. (Genetic predisposition does not trump the laws of thermodynamics!)
In general, I don’t know of any existing medicine that can effectively replace willpower when treating addiction—which is why treatment is so difficult in the first place.
Psychology tells us that, on the individual level, encouragement works better than blame. Although both have far less impact than one would hope.
I think the official title is “motivated scepticism”.
There is more to productivity than not engaging in pleasurable hobbies. I am willing to extend EY the benefit of the doubt and believe he has done some cost/benefit analysis regarding his time management.
In any case, the point is mute—he is not publishing fiction anymore.
I’d ask for everyone to be given Wolverine’s healing factor. This would be really helpful and enough to start taking the scenario seriously.
As a side note, Teenage Matrix Overlords are indistinguishable from god from where I am standing.