There is a simple way to rapidly disrupt any social structure. The selection pressure which made humans unable to realize this is no longer present.
Theist
Karma: 248
“I accidentally changed my mind.”
my four-year-old
When the spiritual teacher and his disciples began their evening meditation, the cat who lived in the monastery made such noise that it distracted them. So the teacher ordered that the cat be tied up during the evening practice. Years later, when the teacher died, the cat continued to be tied up during the meditation session. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the monastery and tied up. Centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teacher wrote scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice.
-- Zen Stories to Tell Your Neighbors http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/zenstory/ritualcat.html
Some of the people you believe are dead are actually alive, but no matter how hard they try to get other people to notice them, their actions are immediately forgotten and any changes caused by those actions are rationalized away.
Fabulous story idea.
Ideas ahead of their time
[context added]
Rats had featured largely in the history of Ankh-Morpork. Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats—and then people were suddenly queing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around.
Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: “Tax the rat farms.”
-- Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett
Over time, wealth eventually causes the cultural changes we call “moral progress”.
This seems a non-sequitur to me. There are a number of examples where wealth and moral progress are found together, but there are also examples where they are not. China and oil-rich Arab states come to mind.
There is a lot to be gained by delegating to a central authority the responsibility of maintaining a credible threat of retaliation.
I’ll take the upvotes here as a request for explanation.
I see two things in the poem. The first that occurred to me was the best way to predict the future is to create it. The second is related: Observe the situation and put yourself in the best position to affect or determine the outcome.
Where does a ball alight,
Falling through the bright midair?
Hit it with your snout!-- unnamed neo-dolphin poet, Uplift War by David Brin
I think it would be more clear if it included the previous sentence:
Clearly, scientific education ought to mean the implanting of a rational, sceptical, experimental habit of mind.
Or perhaps just substituting “[Scientific education]” for “It”.
It’s bad luck to be superstitious.
“I can’t see it, so you must be wrong.”
my four-year-old
That’s an interesting point of view. It makes me wonder if there’s a useful definition of consciousness along the same vein as the “negative entropy” definition of life (meaning something is alive if it reverses entropy in its local environment).
One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means. Yet.
(Apologies to Alan Perlis etc)
This raises an interesting question: If you received a contact of this sort, how would you make sure it wasn’t a hoax? Assuming the AI in question is roughly human-level, what could it do to convince you?
“Neural Networks for Modeling Source Code Edits” https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.02818
Seems like a fascinating line of inquiry, though possibly problematic from the perspective of unaligned AI self-improvement.
The problem is that the visionary ideas ahead of their time are indistinguishable from the crank ones
Expressed very succinctly, thank you.
I suppose what I’m really wondering is whether there’s some feature which can be perceived in the structure of the idea and its ramifications which indicate that it is on the right track, which would distinguish it from crank. Clearly there’s nothing obvious or someone would have found it by now and made a bunch of correct predictions a long time ago. Still, it makes me wonder if there’s something remaining to be found there.
Perhaps there is nothing which it is like to be a bat.
It’s ok. The orange juice vouched for the cereal.