TannyTalk

Karma: −25

TannyTalk 5 Feb 2023 17:00 UTC
−3 points
on: Why slow progress is more dangerous than fast progress
Yes, I think fast progress is dangerous, because human beings are limited in how quickly they can adapt to change. Fast progress is dangerous because it further empowers violent men’s ability to crash the entire system.

TannyTalk 5 Feb 2023 16:57 UTC
−1 points
on: Starting the Journey as CEO of the Roots of Progress
The future of this civilization will be decided by our relationship with knowledge. Just as animals have to adapt to a changing environment or die, our relationship with knowledge has to adapt to a changing environment too.
Currently we’re operating from a “more is better” relationship with knowledge philosophy left over from the 19th century. That philosophy made sense in the long era of knowledge scarcity, an era we no longer live in. Today we live in a time when knowledge is exploding in every direction at an accelerating rate, a revolutionary new era very unlike the early knowledge scarcity era. New conditions require new thinking.
The idea that we should be generating more and more knowledge so as to obtain more and more power represents an immature understanding of the human condition. Such an assumption is instead bad engineering, as it doesn’t take in to account the limited nature of human ability.
https://progressforum.org/posts/zNx24zqq2kg45CuTb/our-relationship-with-knowledge

TannyTalk 5 Feb 2023 16:46 UTC
−6 points
on: A Catalog of Big Visions for Biology
The biggest threat to a better future, or pretty much any future worth living, is the marriage between violent men and the knowledge explosion.
How can biology help meet that threat? Could biology fundamentally change violent men? If not, could biology help remove violent men from the planet?
My vote, set all the other dreams above aside, and work on the violent men problem first. If that challenge is not met, whatever else might be achieved by biology is probably going to be erased by violent men sooner or later. As you know, the technology to make this happen is already in place, ready to go at a moment’s notice.
I’m working on the violent men problem on my blog. I don’t have a biology background, so assistance from those who do would be most welcome.
https://www.tannytalk.com/p/world-peace-table-of-contents

TannyTalk 23 Jan 2023 12:25 UTC
−2 points
on: The Global Zeitgeist of Progress in 2023 is Broken; this One Media Trick Could Help
Do we want to have media that contributes to a better future? Do we want to fuel content grounded in reason, logic, and common sense?
Focus on nuclear weapons.
There is no other factor within human control that can so quickly and so decisively end our hopes for a better future. The vast majority of other subjects being discussed in “constructive journalism” are really mostly a dangerous distraction from that which will decide our future.
Happily, we seem to be emerging from climate change denial, and now pretty much the entire population is alert to this danger, and receptive to plans to address this challenge. Unhappily, nuclear weapons denial disease remains rampant, pervasive, and durable, even at the very highest levels of our society.
This claim will now be disputed in following comments. The debate may be interesting for a few days, but then it will become boring, and we’ll drop right back in to nuclear weapons denial, and sweep it back under the rug so as to return our focus to sexier topics like AI. And this is the mechanism by which the brighter future you dream of will be destroyed.
Given the pervasive nature of nuclear weapons denial, every mention of these weapons in any media is an act of constructive activism. It’s not necessary to agree with any particular point of view. Just say the words “nuclear weapons” where ever you can, and you’re making a constructive contribution.
https://www.tannytalk.com/s/nukes

TannyTalk 17 Jan 2023 23:48 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Tyler Cowen’s comment on: Tyler Cowen AMA
The population of Florida is now 7 times larger than it was when I was born in the early 50s. A thousand people move here every day. Florida is still a place of incredible beauty...
https://www.tannytalk.com/s/nature
...but in 50 years it will likely look a lot like New Jersey. I’m happy to report that I will be dead then, and won’t have to witness the destruction of one of the most wonderful places on Earth.

TannyTalk 17 Jan 2023 23:44 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Tyler Cowen’s comment on: Tyler Cowen AMA
Well, nobody claimed that poor countries are safe and secure. The claim is that high technology countries are not safe and secure, and that speeding up the knowledge explosion will make them ever less safe and secure.
Trying to understand the dynamics of progress is great. If we are assuming without questioning that speeding up the knowledge explosion should obviously be our goal, then we have not yet understood the dynamics of progress.
What we are witnessing is an engineering failure of historic proportions. That is, we are failing to take in to account all relevant factors in our design of this technological society. We love the story that we are brilliant, so we cling to that, willfully ignoring that we are instead a very immature culture bordering on insane. What other word should we use to describe anyone who has a loaded gun in their mouth and is bored by the gun???

TannyTalk 17 Jan 2023 13:13 UTC
1 point
on: Tyler Cowen AMA
Cowen writes...
“For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up.”
Can you please explain why the goal should be to speed up the knowledge explosion?
We already have thousands of massive hydrogen bombs aimed down our own throats, an ever present existential threat that we typically consider too boring to bother discussing, perhaps because we haven’t the slightest clue how to rid ourselves of these weapons. And so, we’re ignoring that threat, while we race to develop AI and genetic engineering as fast as possible, new potential existential scale technologies which we also have no idea how to make safe.
Is this evidence of a species that is mature enough to benefit from ever more, ever greater powers, delivered at an ever greater pace, without limit?
https://progressforum.org/posts/zNx24zqq2kg45CuTb/our-relationship-with-knowledge

TannyTalk 16 Jan 2023 10:32 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Roger Parker’s comment on: Is Progress Real?
Yes, culture can improve, and has. Is our morality more effective? That’s a tricky one.
Consider that we have thousands of massive hydrogen bombs aimed down our own throats, and we generally find this ever present existential threat too boring to bother discussing. It seems we have a ways to go yet in achieving effective morality.
I think we’re basically agreeing that culture can both improve and deteriorate. The history of modern Germany perhaps offers one example of that. High culture, to primitive barbarism, and then back to high culture.

TannyTalk 14 Jan 2023 23:10 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Roger Parker’s comment on: Is Progress Real?
Hi Roger, I agree with comments. Yes, there has been important progress within the content of thought. But because that kind of morality is just ideas, it’s not permanent or durable. It can change quickly based on particular local circumstances. It is of course nonetheless an important project to keep working on.
Here’s an example which may add to what we’re exploring.
To my knowledge, every ideology ever invented has inevitably subdivided in to competing internal factions. The universality of this experience suggests the source of the division is something that all ideologies have in common. This can not be their content, for the content of ideologies varies widely. What all ideologies have in common is what they’re all made of, thought.
And so we see many very different ideologies all follow a similar path of internal division, due to the nature of the medium in which all the ideologies exist.

TannyTalk 13 Jan 2023 14:38 UTC
1 point
in reply to: rogersbacon’s comment on: Is Progress Real?
I liked this quote from the Edge article...
“With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and future strong artificial intelligence, however, learning from mistakes is not a desirable strategy: we want to develop our wisdom in advance so that we can get things right the first time, because that might be the only time we’ll have.”
It reassures me to find others writing on this subject, and making this point specifically. The issue of scale changes the progress equation in fundamental ways, erasing the room for error we’ve always counted on in the past.
We are required to defeat ALL existential threats, every one, because a single failure a single time with a single threat may be sufficient to bring the entire system crashing down, making other successes irrelevant. When we see existential threats in this holistic manner, it becomes clear that dealing with particular threats one by one by one is a loser’s game, and our focus should instead be on the process generating all the technological threats, the knowledge explosion. I would define that shift of focus to be an act of wisdom.
As example, if you get puddles all around your house every time it rains, the solution is not to focus on managing the pots you use to catch this and that drip. The wise solution is to go to the source of the problem, and get up on the roof and fix the leaks.

TannyTalk 13 Jan 2023 13:14 UTC
1 point
on: Peter Thiel’s Pessimism Is (Largely) Mistaken
“While it is easy to be pessimistic if you compare today to utopia, a much better perspective is to look at yesterday and see how far we’ve come in our journey to lift everyone from poverty.”
It’s easy to be pessimistic if we do the rational thing, and look at where we’re going next.
There is exactly no chance that we can keep nuclear weapons around forever and never use them. We don’t have the slightest idea of how to get rid of these weapons. And so we’ve decided to stop thinking about it.
Consider the man who has a loaded gun in his mouth, and is so bored by the gun that he’s rarely interested in discussing it. Would you consider this man rational? Would you hand him another gun, or give him more power of any kind? Or would you dial 911 for an emergency intervention?
This is the species which Thiel and other 19th century thinkers want to give ever more power at an ever accelerating rate. They’re insane. Just like the rest of us.

TannyTalk 13 Jan 2023 13:06 UTC
1 point
on: Peter Thiel’s Pessimism Is (Largely) Mistaken
I dunno. To me, Thiel sounds like just another “expert” stuck in the 19th century. That mindset made perfect sense in the long era of knowledge scarcity. But we no longer live in that old era, but in a new era characterized by knowledge exploding in every direction. People like Thiel don’t seem to grasp that we can’t just take a philosophy from one era and slap it down on a very different era, and expect everything to continue working.
Superabundance can be erased in literally 30 minutes. A well established fact that we know intellectually, but seem completely incapable of facing emotionally. And so we just ignore it, and cling blindly to the hero stories of the 19th century.

TannyTalk 13 Jan 2023 12:53 UTC
1 point
on: Who wants a gift subscription to Jim Pethokoukis’s Substack?
He describes his substack this way....
“Discovering, creating, and inventing a better world through technological innovation, economic growth, and pro-progress culture.”
As a first impression, doesn’t sound promising. More 19th century philosophy. But all I know is that one sentence so, will strive for an open mind.

TannyTalk 13 Jan 2023 12:50 UTC
2 points
on: Is Progress Real?
You write, “Again, maybe it’s the pathological contrarian in me, but I have to call bullshit on all of this—moral progress does exist, man’s nature has changed and can change again”
It depends on what time frame we’re discussing. Certainly the human body and mind can continue to evolve as it always has. But neither have changed meaningfully for thousands of years, and are unlikely to do so for a long time to come.
Man’s nature is that we are made of thought psychologically. The content of thought changes all the time, but the nature of thought does not. The content of thought reflects the nature of thought, and so we see the same kinds of themes recur over and over. So long as the nature of thought, how it operates, remains static the human condition is unlikely to change in a fundamental manner.
Does moral progress exist? To know that we’d have to remove the scientific and resulting economic progress, and see how people act without such benefits. My guess is that the starving people of tomorrow will act pretty much like the starving people of the past.

TannyTalk 13 Jan 2023 12:28 UTC
1 point
on: Is Progress Real?
Wow, there’s a lot to chew on here.
rogersbacon wrote, ”...there is something grand, something beautiful and glorious, dare I say holy, in the act of passing knowledge on to the next generation”.
The problem for progress seems to be...
KNOWLEDGE: It’s easy to pass on knowledge and build upon it generation after generation.
WISDOM: It’s much harder to pass on wisdom. We try, and succeed to some limited degree, but given that wisdom is largely a function of life experience, it almost has to be rebuilt from the ground up in each individual.
Example: while one can learn physics from a book (easy transfer) one can not learn love from a book (hard transfer).
Thus, we see knowledge developing at one speed, and wisdom developing at a much slower speed. Over time the gap between knowledge and wisdom widens.
This phenomena might be compared to giving kids driver’s licenses. At first we’re giving driver’s licenses to 17 year olds. Then 16 year olds. Then 15. Then 14 etc. The cars keep getting bigger, while the drivers keep getting smaller. As this progression unfolds, sooner or later we arrive at crash.

TannyTalk 12 Jan 2023 22:26 UTC
1 point
on: Do you have a model of how to approach the problem of progress?
I suppose I would start with philosophy, with questions like....
Progress towards what?
Consider the Amish. Generally speaking, the Amish have to one degree or another opted out of technological progress. And so..
They don’t have nuclear weapons. They aren’t contributing to climate change. They don’t experience all the negative aspects of modern society that we calmly accept as being completely normal.
I’m sure this is an overly simplified view of the Amish, but I think you get the point. The experience of the Amish demonstrates that technological advances, and progress, are not automatically the same thing. In spite of their technological backwardness, the Amish have achieved a form a progress that in some respects is quite superior to our own.
Philosophy is, in part, a study of the assumptions underlying our behavior. If some core assumption is unexamined, and to some degree false, then whatever we build on top of that assumption is likely to be in some way problematic. The most efficient method of proceeding may be to examine our fundamental assumptions very carefully first, before investing vast resources in to some unexamined definition of progress.
Here’s an example. One of our most fundamental assumptions is that life is better than death. Pretty much everyone takes this to be an obvious given. And yet, there is no proof at all that this assumption is true. And so, when we spend trillions on our medical system with the goal of saving lives, we actually don’t have the slightest clue whether we’re doing the patients a favor or not.

TannyTalk 12 Jan 2023 21:50 UTC
1 point
on: Science is getting harder
If science is slowing down, that sounds like exactly what should be happening, so I hear this as good news.
QUESTION: Do we believe that human beings can successfully manage ever more, ever greater powers, delivered at an ever accelerating rate, without limit?
If we answer no, then we can be happy that the “ever accelerating rate” factor may be subsiding.
What seems to be missing from so much discussion of science is the understanding that human beings are a limiting factor on what can be successfully accomplished in the way of progress. It’s not science which is the limitation, but human maturity. Here’s an example to illustrate:
We currently have thousands of massive hydrogen bombs aimed down our own throats, an ever present existential threat which we typically find too boring to discuss, even in presidential campaigns when we are selecting a single individual to have sole authority over the use of these weapons.
This is the species which science is giving ever more powers.