An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar…
Last month it was the Atlantic, where I pretended to know something about AI. This month it’s the MIT Reader, and the subject is The Imminent Collapse of Civilization. Honestly, I had no idea I was such an expert on so many things.
This time, though, I’m not so much an expert as a foil. Dan Brooks (a name long-time readers of this blog may recognize) and Sal Agosta (whose concept of “sloppy fitness” careful readers of my novelette “The Island” may recognize) have written a book called A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the Twenty-First Century. Their definition of “hope” is significantly more restrained than the tech bros and hopepunk authors would like: not once do they suggest, for example, that we could all keep our superyachts if we just put a giant translucent pie plate into space to cut incident sunlight by a few percent. Brooks & Agosta’s definition of hope is far more appropriate for a world in which leading climate scientists admit to fury and despair at political inaction, decry living in an “age of fools”, and predict by a nearly five-to-one margin that not only is 1.5ºC a pipe dream, but that we’ll be blowing past 2.5ºC by century’s end. They’ve internalized the growing number of studies which point to global societal collapse around midcentury. Their idea of hope is taken explicitly from Asimov’s Foundation series: not How do we prevent collapse, but How do we come back afterward? That’s what their book is about.
Casual observers might see my name where bylines usually go, and conclude that this is somehow my interview. Don’t be fooled: the only thing I lay exclusive claim to here is the intro. This is about Dan and Sal. This is their baby; all I did was poke at it from various angles and let Dan react as he would. Our perspectives do largely overlap, but not entirely. (Unlike Dan, I do think the extinction rates we’re inflicting on the planet justify the use of the word “crush”—although I take his point that the thing being crushed is only the biosphere as it currently exists, not the biosphere as a dynamic and persistent entity. I also confess to a certain level of bitterness and species-self-loathing that Dan seems to have avoided; I’m pretty certain the biosphere would be better off without us.)
But there’s that word again: hope. Not the starry-eyed denial of reality that infests the Solarpunk Brigade, not the Hope Police’s stern imperative that We Must Never Feed A Narrative of Hopelessness and Despair no matter what the facts tell us. Just the suggestion that after everything falls apart—just maybe, if we do things right this time—we might climb back out of the abyss in decades, instead of centuries.
Probably still not what most people want to hear. Still. I’ll take what I can get.
So go check it out—keeping in mind, lest you quail at all the articulate erudition on display, that the transcript has been edited to make us look a lot more coherent than we were in real life.
I mean, we were drinking heavily the whole time. What else would you expect, given the subject matter?
Hope for whom? Surely not for those hairless apes on a self-destructive rampage.
Too high the price for the book that they want more people to read.
$19 (with discount) or $35 without discount, seriously?
And yet… What price truth? What price to encourage those who are willing to look into something scary and not look away when the answers are painful or the solutions are hard? I am of the opinion that you pay for that which you want more of – and after reading the interview, this one is paid for – and on the way to me.
I just don’t like hypocrites. Saving the world while collecting money for their luxurious lives, huh?
Dude, do you have any idea what the advances are for technical nonfiction? They make your average midlist SF writer look like a 1-percenter. And lemme assure you, us midlist SF writers are very far away from a “luxurious lifestyle”.
I mean, hell, last time I looked a lot of science journals actually charged their contributors printing costs to publish their papers. It was considered normal. We had to pay to publish; the only reason anyone put up with it was because publication record was a major influence on promotion/tenure prospects.
I wonder why not simply publish the book online? You wouldn’t need to pay any money to do that =)))
Anyway, your life is luxurious by the worldwide standards. There are too many things that you take for granted. I could compile you a list.
Luxuy is by definition a relative term. Your life, too, is certainly luxurious compared to some less fortunate people on this planet.
After all, roughly a third of the people on earth dont even have internet access to lecture other people about their lifes in the lap of luxury.
Ah, relativism again. Take the top quartile worldwide and call everything above it luxurious.
Of course it is. Most people wouldn’t be able to afford to live in Toronto.
But if your comparison isn’t utter bullshit, it’s at the very least naive. Someone making a pittance by N’Am standards could still enjoy a higher standard of living than I do, depending on their local cost of living. Isolated dollar figures are largely meaningless without a sense of how much a given dollar can buy.
I mean the things that you can afford, not income in dollars.
The chip on your shoulder is visible from space, and it’s a liability.
Instead of complaining unnecessarily about the price, just wait for other people to read the book for you and summarise to you the best bits. By then, if you want to check the original source, cheaper copies may be available.
Dude, don’t start ad hominem. And while at the current moment I can afford it easily, I simply don’t like hypocrites. Did you miss the part that I wrote about saving the world etc?
If you can afford it easily, does that mean you also live in the “lap of luxury” that you so despise? Sounds pretty hypocritical to me.
> luxury” that you so despise
First things first, I really despise hypocrites.
Luxury – well, people who live in the top 1% probably do deserve to be despised. And the mere fact that you live in the first world country most likely puts you into this category.
Dude, you’re so full of casuistry and I wonder if you’re doing it intentionally or because it’s the virus that you caught somewhere.
Can you explain me how having some 20-30 bucks to spend on the book makes my life luxurious by the global standards?
And please don’t start this relativist shit again.
Nah, at this point i dont think either of us has anything new to say.
I do love me some pointless arguing and bickering, that much is true, which ultimately is all we can do here, if we are being honest with ourselves.
Jesus T.F. Christ. I may or may not be the best judge, but your rizz appears to be in negative territory, and your level of self-awareness not far away from it.
You harangue bitterly about the price of a book, imply that you think everyone else is a hypocrite except for you (and that you hate them for it – and may or may not want to send them for torture and execution, using that army that you’re going to muster with your negative rizz), and then tell us that you can easily afford the book anyway?
So if you think that you’re arguing for some kind of principle, rather than the sake of argument – or indeed “sharpening your skills in casuistry”; why don’t you try explaining the principle that you’re trying to argue for? You could start with exactly what you think that a proper price for the book would be, and exactly why.
> your rizz appears to be in negative territory
I really don’t think that we’re here for the competition in popularity.
> harangue bitterly about the price of a book
Nope. I just said that this price tag looks hypocritical to me, and was dogpiled immediately.
> You could start with exactly what you think that a proper price for the book would be
I already explained that. If these guys really want more people to read this book, they need to hand it out for free.
Apparently, they can’t afford to do that.
If you can afford to buy it, but you think that they should be handing it out for free, and you agree that more people should read it: then you should buy at least one copy and give that away for free. You could donate it to a library, if they have those where you live.
And they can’t afford it, because they spend too much. When you spend too much, don’t ask other people to pay your bills. Do something with your spendings.
They did do something with their spendings. They produced this book.
I strongly suspect that if they spent much less, then they wouldn’t have been able to produce the book in the first place. If that’s true, then your argument – in the general case – leads to there simply being no books with any smaller target market than the lowest common denominator, and nobody at all even trying to save the world. Good plan.
If you think it isn’t true, then you’ll probably need to convince them to let you audit their accounts before you will have any further evidence.
What is the level of technology they think people can survive indefinitely at? 99.9% of our time as a species was spent as nomadic hunter gatherer using paleolithic tech. I can certainly see a return to that as we pass 3deg warming and the Age of Gigadeath commences.
Does it really matter if those future hunter-gatherers survive for a 1000, 10,000, or another 100, 000 years? Why? Presumably extinction will come eventually.
Perhaps they think humanity can recover and get back on track to some advanced level of tech. But how? The thing with tech is that you already need to be at a certain level to be able to exploit the resources you need to get to the next level. But we’ve already exploited all the resources that would be available any pre-industrial civilisation. In fact anything pre mid-20th century. If we fall now, there is no way back.
It’s the distance of the fall that seems to be the specific hopium under discussion.
Global collapse of the technological pyramid…? Done and done, most likely. We might as well be extinct. Certain tipping points could seal the deal in much less than a century, and may already be locked in.
Partial, localised collapses? This is where Original Darwinism seems to have an answer to offer.
Wishful thinking.
A small European country has enough budget to cause an ice age.
If it really starts getting too damn hot (tens of thousands of dead in heatwaves), Indians are just going to start dumping sulphate into the stratosphere and you’re welcome to have a nuclear war with them if you object.
Pakistan would probably be on their side in this too, lol.
Will check it out, thanks! And regarding hope, just recently read a short book/long essay that you may find interesting (the style is a bit too metaphysical for my taste, but the message I liked). Sadly only in French, Spanish or German.
“Hope” also works as an admission of our fallibility. Our ideas about the worst that might happen are ideas, not confirmed realities. Things might not be as bad as the worst case we can imagine. In fact there appear to be common cognitive errors causing people to imagine much worse cases than actually occur, when they try to predict outcomes.
You can believe both that, and also that most people don’t have any idea how bad it will get after the first climate event that kills a million people in a few days.
Everything I’ve read confirms that people are naturally naive optimists who generally consider things better than they actually are.
We’ve had heat waves that have killed tens of thousands of people with anyone batting an eyelid. By the time millions of people are dyeing it will be to late to do anything.
I haven’t yet read the book under discussion, but my impression is that it starts from the assumption it is already too late to prevent a few billion people from dying. Feeding what is projected to be 10 billion people later in this century, about the time we’re finally running low on the oil we need to grow, harvest and transport food, and when warming has rendered current agricultural patterns untenable, looks unlikely from my limited understanding of the situation. Presumably the book discusses how those humans remaining might move forward after this collapse, specifically technologically, including your concern above about the bootstrapping nature of technology.
The book does lay out a case for “managed retreat” that could, in fact, avoid collapse, so it’s not assuming that collapse is inevitable—but as Dan says in our conversation, that only happens if humans change their behavior, which they (and I) consider extremely unlikely. Still, the same general strategy can be used to hasten our recovery following collapse; maybe we’ll have learned our lesson by then.
Of course, the question of how many copies of this book even survive into the back half of the century is another issue altogether.
See it’s not collapse, it’s “change.” We don’t crush the environment we change it. Dig it? Get with the correct lingo toots.
I mean, I do take the point that “the biosphere” is likely to survive in some form, and even in another diverse and tangled-bank kinda form if you give it another twenty million years. But I definitely disagree with Dan on whether the term “crush” can be applied to the extermination of tens of thousands of species a year.
Personally, I think it’s a good fit.
I read the article.
“…oh my goodness the pool is drying up!” That’s because there’s no effing beavers!
Hey, Dan! leave us Beaves alone!
Overall my main takeaway was
“Nobody’s running to the cities.” and “Sounded like a good idea at the time.”
Yeah and,
“high fitness = low fitness” Who knew.
Yeah, well, speaking as a beaver fan myself, I hear you. But the way Dan invoked them in the book was as an example of how a species can radically change its local environment for its own benefit, fucking up all the critters in the neighborhood, and then abandon its own dam and move on when said destruction cascades to reduce its own food supply.
I mean, that is all true. But beavers are still cool.
Maybe I’m wrong, but my impression is that as a keystone species and ecosystem engineer they do more good than harm.
They’ve got a PR problem more than anything. The whole “there goes the neighborhood” critique is the most facile bullshit. Mind you I haven’t read Dan’s book and I probably won’t. If I wanted to dig into beaver ecology I’d read someone like George Schaller not a microbiologist.
Dan’s not a microbiologist. What gave you that idea?
Also he wasn’t going down the beavers-are-evil road. He was using them as an example of how a beaver changes a local system: a lot of the things that were there get drowned or driven out, and other things move in to reweave the local network. His whole point is that things change, and always have.
Hell, he doesn’t even seem to think that Humans are evil, which might might be a bridge too far even for me.
Apologies. I’m not sure where I got that notion from – a bit of bad potato perhaps. Or maybe his interest in emerging diseases and parasitology led me astray. There appears to be considerable overlap of the specializations…anyhoo just read his CV. He knows his animules and some. Impressive dude.
I agree with him that change is fundamental. Everything is inherently unstable. I visualize change moving like a bird murmuration. You think you have a grasp of something solid and then poof it breaks up into something else. The idea of stable equilibrium is just a story we tell ourselves and everything is on the verge of collapse. All life is balanced on the razors edge.
“Criticality”, to give it a name that I believe is still in vogue.
Stable equilibrium exists just as long as you choose the correct dimensions and timescale in which to look for it.
Also
Looking forward to reading it, in part to see what “managed retreat” looks like, and how likely that is when bringing your own bag to the liquor store is, for enough people, a bridge so far our fearless provincial leader stones up to tell said store to back the fuck off…
My copy will be electronic. Don’t know if that’ll help or hurt its chances of survival, but I’m pretty sure the latter…
I tried the taste of that hopium the moment russian oil refineries started to burn . Meanwhile another part of my brain is entertaining the idea to send all global warming deniers to torture camps if everything else fails, dunno if it makes me a psychopath I think it doesn’t.
Nah your response is completely in line with the deeply human urge to punish someone to feel justice is served and make the problem go away.
Only sending climate change deniers to those camps would do neither. The deniers arent even the problem. The powers that be know very well that climate change is real, they just dont care for the unwashed masses while they build their luxury bunkers.
And meanwhile the rest of still consumes far above the sustainable level just like the deniers, we just have the good grace to feel bad about it.
The masses don’t give a shit, too.
With the way things are going in Ukraine right now and the impending specter of WW3 and possible nuclear armageddon i have to admit that i struggle to feel all that concerned about climate change myself. Who cares if civilization collapses in 30 years if we bomb each other back to the stone age tomorrow?
This too. Add resistant bacteria, leaks of bioweapons and natural lethal pathogens (we already dodged a couple bullets), and of course robo-apocalypse.
This goes back to a point I tend to harangue people with in my public talks: none of these things are actually problems, but symptoms. The problem is Human Nature; if we weasel out of one existential crisis we’ll manufacture another one next week. The only long-term solution is to change Human Nature.
In the interview, Dan talks about “no-technological-solution” problems, problems that can only be solved by changing Human behavior. We’re on the same page as far as that goes. I’m just dubious that we can change our behavior without rewiring what we are at the neurological level.
Agreed, but the question is what to change and to what direction.
Anyway, you’d be labeled as a Nazi if you started talking about that to a wide audience.
Considering the absolute and abject failure of every type of “New Men” in history (looking at you, Soviets for the latest try), i am 100% on board with you.
Even if we had the tech to rewire ourselves though, i dont trust that one either, because who decides what changes would need to be made? Unless it is forced upon us by some benevolent outsider, no way.
Besides, does it matter? We dont have any “long term” anymore as far as i can tell.
> The only long-term solution is to change Human Nature.
here is trillion dollar question: how, exactly? Considering even failures (given for any experiment) must be generally not worse (off) than some baseline … iiuc people in usa experimented quite wildly about some mind altering DIY – yet .. we are where we are :/ And despite existence of Scientific Rebellion I suspect making The Project out of this idea (empaty augmentation a-la Chatoyance and her ponies) will not work for given objective ….. real world scientist/engineers still very much blinded by current for seriously investing themselves and all reachable into something too revolutionary ….. and well, masses might have their bath room rn, but having it makes they afraid to move in undesirable (by cur. sys) direction. So, who, and how gonna save at least smthing from our era, like distaste for outright slavery?
> empaty augmentation
Lem wrote a short story about this named Altruisin. Man, did it backfire.
“here is trillion dollar question: how, exactly?”
And that is an excellent question. I’ve given answers along several axes in various talks and interviews over the past few years—everything from spreading alpha-gal hyperallergies to lethalise red-meat consumption, to suppressing the religious impulse via Parkinson’s Disease—and there’s not enough space to go over them all here. But it’s important for me to admit: I do not consider these “good” ideas. They are quite possibly downright terrible ideas, that are likely to go horrifically wrong in all sorts of ways.
What’s really scary is, I’m pretty sure they’d still be better than BAU.
The only aspect of human nature that needs changing is our addiction to breeding. Solve that and all problems go away…
Nah, I think that ship sailed when we went into ecological overshoot back in the seventies. Birth rate is already declining pretty much everywhere except Africa; I suspect we could all stop breeding tomorrow and the bootprint of those of us already here would still finish the job.
“Finish the job”
… how?
We’re the only species that was found in almost every single climate zone even before electricity.
If mass extinction inexorably led to death of all life on the planet, we wouldn’t be here.
I’m guessing you didn’t read the source article.
Dan explicitly states that he doesn’t think Homo sap as a species is in danger of biological extinction. It’s the collapse of high-tech civilization that’s in the cards. If you like scavenging for tinned spam and artisanal woodworking, you’ll love the future. If you live in your X-Box, better finish those Call of Duty titles ASAP.
Elegant misunderstanding, but my main point was argument was human ecological overshoot is, at worst, a problem of the same order as say, the Deccan traps or fall of rocks kilometers in diameter.
We’re one of the least likely species to go extinct, and we’re also very certain to not cause planetary life death no matter how much that is wished for by efilist types.
Though of course, in true human fashion, they go one further and speculate how to end life in the universe, period.
It’s remarkable how far miserable people are willing to go rationalise their misery and make a virtue out of it.
What’s wrong with rewiring what we are at the neurological level, though?
That’s a cultural plane survival solution. Which is, of course, where any such solution has to come from, genetic evolution being so hopelessly slow and outclassed in this pinch that it’s working powerfully against us.
On the level of individual humans, we’ve got too many, much too many, “exploiters”. What if we could scalably and non-lethally turn them into “explorers”? This is a much wider target to aim at than trying to surgically fix hyperbolic discounting.
For most of our conquest of the planet, there was always an outlet for population pressure, another new land to colonise; so the ideal default build of human was one that hyper-adapted to whatever environment that they were born into, then refused to change – focusing instead on honing that competitive hyper-adaptation, which might give them an edge over their conspecific competitors for the best food and mates. Unless they were forced at spear-point to go somewhere else… where there wasn’t such competitive pressure. They might hate it there, but their kids could make it home. Now we’re all out of new lands, and this build is a fish out of water. The genetic evolutionary solution is a calamity which kills all but a few struggling misfits who happen to be better adapted to the new environment than the old one. But that kind of solution, quite apart from its unpalatability, won’t actually get us out of the trap – at the very best it will dump us back where we started.
This is vaguely similar to general evolutionary paths where populations undergo alternating pulses of “expansion” (where they move into new habitats) and “exploitation” (where’ established in the new habitats they entrench themselves and build up genetic variability). It’s the diversity acquired during exploitation that allows them to adapt to new environments during the expansion phase.
I think I’ve got that right, anyway…
Genetic evolution – and probably cultural evolution as well, and perhaps even the intertwined dance of the two – can be characterised as a reinforcement learning algorithm. Like all such algorithms, it faces the “explore/exploit” dilemma. Pure exploit (after you’ve bootstrapped it in the first place) finds the nearest cosy local optima and stays there; pure explore is a random walk that goes nowhere fast. Either gets the plug pulled on it by the enclosing context. But a mix of the two has long term potential. The question of “what mix?” is the dilemma, of course.
“Expand/exploit” sounds like a downstream pattern that arises when embedding such an algorithm into another space, via evolving agents (e.g, animals) placed into some kind of energy terrain having certain characteristics (e.g. the surface of a physical planet).
Anyway, in the case of deep [run]time, bootstrapping from nothing, it always ultimately solves the “what mix?” question by the simplest available method: repeatedly and chaotically pulling plugs at local scales, and seeing what comes through. The metaphorical pond eventually dries up, and sometimes some metaphorical fish succeed in flopping to a new one. Not always. Often there is only a fish graveyard left.
At the cultural level, this is no longer happening in 3-dimensional space; it can play in all the extra dimensions of neural activity, via whatever intersubjective bridges that it can build to connect isolated neural “ponds” (skulls). This is a space which is – as far as we know – newly-discovered by animals on this planet, and at least one study has found that evolution occurs orders of magnitude faster there. So fast, that within a flutter of geological eye blinks, the cultural host animal – us, and our foodstock – has occupied all of the accessible Lebensraum in 3-dimensional planetary surface space, and there’s absolutely no other 3D pond to go to. At least, not while confined to that host animal, in its present form…
So it’s in that extension space of intersubjective bridges where the “what mix?” question is to be answered, via the usual method. We’re doing it right now – or more accurately, we’re hosting it – and your friend Brooks is doing so even harder.
I don’t know if any of you are SF fans but a nuclear war now might actually be a good thing. AI isn’t much good today, likely won’t be good for anything but snooping, assisting coders/lawyers and drawing stuff for a long time.
It’d disrupt worldwide fertilizer production, adjust populations back to carrying capacity in regions where they can’t hack basic industry such as ammonia production, remove newcomer populations from all regions (they’re very much urban), destroy the chip industry and thus prevent AI-driven panopticon..
Plus, we know that radiation is actually not very lethal and in an aftermath of 3000 H-bomb war operating nuclear reactors would be seen as “no big deal”.
Slight odds of getting into medieval stasis – much of the good, easy coal is already mined out but there’d be enough industry in surviving countries to keep early 1900s tech going I believe.
Why only climate change deniers?
Gamergaters and other altzis can be added to the bucket too, those are some vile sumbiches .
I mean the people who contributed to the problem, not the ones who you simply dislike.
If you wanted to send everyone who contributed to the problem to some death camp, the only ones left would probably some indigenous people like the ones on the Sentinel Islands.
Everyone of us here on this blog is also guilty of contributing to the problem, even our esteemed host flies transatlantic sometimes, after all.
Even Sentinelese kill wildlife, for instance.Anyway, literally everyone is impossible. What about those whose impact was extraordinarily powerful?
Killing Wildlife ist not the same as causing climate change though. Otherwise youd have to wipe out the whole biosphere or at least all predatory species. What ist your cut Off Point then? Am i a cynic If i believe that it will be somehow Just above the point that you and your Loved ones are eligible?
Nah you are free to indulge in revenge fantasies, but please dont pretend that they are actually helping the Problem or are in any way “fair”. That would be just self serving bullshit.
They burn the fires, too. Animals don’t do that.
Nope. I’d reserve it for truly extraordinary cases only. For instance, those guys who decided to cut the costs of engineering and repair, and we got a shitload of oil spilled (I mean Deepwater Horizon). As much as I remember, the managers responsible for that only got a slap on the wrist.
And nope, it’s not revenge. Adequate punishment for the crime does help the situation.
Looks like you’re trying to argue that everything is futile, huh? And ad hominem is a really bad argument.
I am not saying “everything is futile”, altough at this point i doubt we can steer the ship around, it may not even by physically possible anymore even if we all died out tomorrow.
I just get really, really, REALLY uncomfortable once someone mentions death or torture camps as solutions and has already lined up potential inmates. In fact i think that urge is part of the big problem of human nature our host has pointed out again and again.
“Truly extraordinary cases” is , after all, a buttery soft and malleable definition. One could very well argue that the whole of the first world at least easily fits under that, after all both of us are creating a bigger carbon footprint right now just by arguing over the internet than the aforementioned Sentineles in his entire lifetime, and yet he will probably feel the impact of climate change way before us. (Or at least before me, since i live in Fortress Europe.) Doesnt seem all that fair, does it?
It is still a revenge fantasy. One with a pretty good justification, but still. Even killing all the C-Suites of all big environmental corpos wont make the climate collapse go away or get that carbon back out of the atmossphere anyway.
And im still not convinced they are even the problem as opposed to the symptom, after all they ruin the environment to make a buck because we consumers love to consume. Shifting the entirety of the blame onto a small subset of designated evildoers while continuing the behaviour that got us into that quagmire is peak human behaviour, though.
I’ve got nothing against revenge fantasies (I indulge in them myself all the time), but The K raises an essential point here. The problem is not the 1%; the problem is, we’d all be part of the 1% if we could. Robert Sapolsky has lamented that if there was one thing he could change about human nature, it’s our ability to adapt to good fortune. We get a windfall, and we feel incredibly fortunate—for about a month. Then we get used to the new standard of living; instead of feeling fortunate, we feel entitled. And before long, we start feeling hard-done by. What was once an unthinkable windfall is not enough.
We always want more. We’re wired that way. (Personally, I’d like to see what would happen if someone figured out how to dampen our dopaminogenic reward-seeking systems, and amped up our fuck-it-I’m-going-home nociceptin production. We just might become a less-greedy bunch of assholes as a result.)
There is a glimmer of hope – seems we can turn down the dial on desire and wanting more. Research into GLP-1 class drugs show that desire is chemical. Drugs like Semaglutide curb not only desire for food but also drugs and alcohol. There is anecdotal evidence it curbs other reward seeking behaviors like shopping and gambling. With regard to dopamine “GLP-1 drugs appear to work directly in the brain as a neurotransmitter, influencing neurons in the brain’s reward system, and in the hypothalamus, which regulates the body’s metabolism. The drugs are “probably not acting primarily on dopamine neurons per se,” Berridge says. “But they’re acting on the neurons that dopamine neurons are talking to.”
I’m not advocating the use of these drugs but I think the effect they have on our hedonic impulses is noteworthy.
Ooooh. Reference?
https://www.vox.com/science/24086968/glp-1-ozempic-semaglutide-craving-desire-science-wanting-liking-opioids-alcohol
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8820218/
Thank you!
You already are in the 1% worldwide.
Even rich people can understand that they shouldn’t fuck up the world they (and their offspring) live in. Diamond gave a couple good examples. But most people just prefer to not believe that anything bad is going to happen.
So, my best idea is that it’s necessary to make people less willing to lie to themselves and other people. There are known neuronal correlates as well as disorders that make people much less capable to lie, so in theory it should be possible.
Anyway, it’s completely unrealistic. Even if you had the tech, people wouldn’t allow that to happen. They would lynch you, literally. And I mean the masses, not the rich.
Yeah, I don’t think you’d ever get funding or public support for such a project (“Gimme ten million dollars so I can save Humanity by turning it into something else”). You’d need some kind of clandestine tewwowist approach—I’m fond of invoking someone with the bank account of Elon Musk, the genetic expertise of Graig Venter, and the moral scruples of the Joker.
See also “Only a Supervillian Could Stop Climate Change“.
Ideas no sane or decent person would entertain.
Meanwhile, let’s all not forget that the guy to invent the electric light has to do it by lamplight.
The person who invents a better, more durable homo sap might have to fly transatlantic a few times in the process…
Unintended consequences? Maybe the neural wiring responsible adapting to good fortune is also responsible for looking for new ways to be creative? Maybe human nature isn’t a bunch of discrete traits, but a complicated whole made up of feedbacks and dependencies?
It definitely is.
That’s why you should always maintain some healthy hedge populations.
Even in the best possible case, they become a goldmine of living history.
Well, torture camps are a bit over the top. But we definitely need much harsher punishment for eco-crimes. Or more like “we needed”.
> “Truly extraordinary cases” is , after all, a buttery soft and malleable definition.
Relativists are a big part of the problem. It’s definitely possible to define the boundaries for different sorts of crime and different punishments for each.
> all both of us are creating a bigger carbon footprint right now just by arguing over the internet than the aforementioned Sentineles in his entire lifetime
Well, that’s just bullshit. They do use fire, and burning the campfire once leaves much bigger carbon footprint than you spending all your day arguing over the internet.
Eco-activists who have no idea how things work and have no clue what’s really going on are as destructive as any climate change deniers.
That latter may be you, Andrei.
What kind of a device are you using to argue on the internet, and what was the total carbon footprint of making it? What will be the carbon footprint of its replacement, when your current device inevitably fails? Now, what about all the hardware connecting your device to K’s device? I’ll grant that you can divide the latter by the number of people using it.
Can, huh? You absolutely must divide the costs of running multi-user hardware.
By the source that K gave below, the carbon footprint of making computers is miniscule comparing to the costs of food and transportation.
Look, im not trying to strawmanning here, but if you really want to argue that the aforementioned Sentinelese somehow has a bigger ecological impact than us internet users, youve totally lost me.
https://www.oeko.de/en/blog/the-carbon-footprint-of-our-digital-lifestyles/#:~:text=If%20this%20energy%20consumption%20is,CO2%20emissions%20per%20year.
It is not like anthroprogenic climate change took off with the tens of thousands of years of hunter-gatherers scraping by as opposed to the industrial revolution powering all our nifty toys, after all.
And lumping me in with the climate change deniers for bringing up the point that maybe our first world lifestyle too is to blame and thus making me eligible for the “harsh punishments” you envision?
You are really proving my point how unfeasible that approach is. For someone harping about clear boundaries and punishments you are waffling around an awful bit.
I dont think it is ad hominem here to once again presume that YOUR eco crimes somehow dont merit one of those harsh punishments, seeing as you are in the know as opposed to me, eh?
You definitely are trying.
According to your own source, carbon cost of manufacturing and using the PC is miniscule comparing to production of food and transportation for a single person. And while we all do contribute something, your statement about the costs of sending messages over the internet is outrageously wrong.
And by the way, I never lived in the first world. If you want to blame someone for their lifestyle, look into the mirror.
Don’t try to bullshit me, dude. My idea was to punish very harshly, say, the top 0.001% of the eco-criminals. I’m completely sure that I’m not even in top 10%.
And that Sentinelese with his campfire – how much of that food and transportation footprint is he using?
How many people make a habit of arguing on the internet who don’t have access to a supermarket?
You might not be in the top 10%, though your level of education suggests that you’re likely to be somewhere very near that, unless you’re some kind of a dedicated bohemian. But being outside the top 10% doesn’t mean that your lifestyle is “sustainable” either.
Hell, I wouldn’t even say that of our fictional Sentinelese. All of our species lived like that once, and what do you know, they DIDN’T sustain it. A few tens of thousands of years is what they managed. Our existence today is only a step on a very tall pyramid scheme of matter.
But if the person lining offenders up for the guillotine were to ask that modern hunter-gatherer to decide whether or not YOUR head should be on the block, how are you going to convince him? Are you confident that just saying “I never lived in the first world” will spare your head?
Yes, I’m definitely very dedicated and very off the beaten paths. Anyway, I wonder how your level of knowledge can be connected to eco crimes?
I said that only the very worst eco criminals need to be punished. I wonder why you are muddening the waters. Is it it the most likely reason that you’re sharpening your skills in casuistry?
You do really love that word, don’t you? I don’t think it means what you think it means.
Dispensing with the tiresome straw men for a minute (regardless of who they came from), and to be completely honest, I’m actually with you on “setting an example of the worst offenders”. Sometimes – and there have been some simulation-based experiments showing this, albeit essentially in toy mathematical scenarios – a cluster of cautionary examples can tip the whole system into a new equilibrium where member behaviour is roundly more pro-social. We could certainly use some of that…! I haven’t read it, but I hear that Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Ministry of the Future” features a terrorist movement blowing private jets or of the sky…
But even if “we” were to do something like this (and good luck to you if you want to try and organise it; you’ll certainly need that to stay alive)… And even if it actually works… In the real world, the better world order wouldn’t last in the long term. It would be a temporary reprieve. That’s the point which others here have been trying to make. It’s a completely true point, but let’s not forget that from where we are, maybe it would be a nice problem to have.
So why have I been arguing when really I agree with the main point that you were trying to make…? Basically just because you irritated me with your bullshit that people who (by your estimation, of course) “have no idea how things work and have no clue what’s really going on are as destructive as any climate change deniers”. And that in the middle of a discussion where you were advocating sending eco-offenders to death camps…! Even if you live off grid in the mountains of Siberia, hunt your own food, and power your arguing on the internet by peddling on a bicycle, I don’t believe that YOU really know “how things work” or “what’s really going on”; and I wouldn’t trust someone with an attitude smelling like that to be the one manning the guillotines, that’s for sure. You may have noticed similar vibes coming from other participants in the thread.
> You do really love that word, don’t you?
Dude, I’m not the one who started using it. Don’t you feel that blaming me for that is a bit incorrect?
> I don’t think it means what you think it means.
That’s a really arrogant statement, and you used the straw man literally here in your message below.
> “have no idea how things work and have no clue what’s really going on are as destructive as any climate change deniers”
It is true. For instance the people who want to just “go all primitive and live in harmony with nature” really are completely clueless, and they do much more harm to ecology than good.
And yes, while I don’t know everything, I definitely know more than those people.
Looks like you’re just seeking revenge after what I wrote about primitive agriculture, huh?
> Even if you live off grid in the mountains of Siberia
And this is where the strawman is.
> Dude, I’m not the one who started using it.
Hahaha, what…?!
Maybe I missed something here. Who used it before you did?
Or, perhaps a better question… Which word did you think that I was referring to?
I am fairly sure that we’re running into some quite unyielding communication barriers with you. The least valuable content seems to be most of what is getting through, in both directions, and often twisted. There’s absolutely no point in listing off all the named logical fallacies that you have memorised, until you’ve succeeded in communicating enough of your position for a logical discussion to be possible – something which none of the straw rationalist bros on the internet seem to realise.
BTW, I don’t have an opinion on what you wrote about primitive agriculture, except that it sounds plausible.
> Maybe I missed something here. Who used it before you did?
You definitely do. Lookup “Look, im not trying to strawmanning here”
In your defense, this website is really difficult to use as the number of the messages growth.
> communicating enough of your position
My position is simple – people who committed really severe eco-crimes should be punished really harshly.
Now, let’s move to The K ‘s and yours counter-argument.
My position is that we should use the summary worldwide data for the use of resources (actually, it’s better to add pollution, deforestation and soil destruction), and define the absolute points of reference.
However, you guys (especially The K) insisted, that we absolutely can’t use absolutely values and can only use relative comparisons, and that’s why I also am the bad guy because there are some people on the planet that use less resources than me.
That’s it.
It wasn’t “straw man”, it was “casuistry”.
If you were trying to argue for data-driven absolutism, then you muddied your own argument as soon as you suggested that anyone who doesn’t share your model of “how things work” is “as destructive as any climate change deniers”. In itself, what you wrote there should be ignored as just poorly considered words, and not part of your main argument, except that you accidentally raised an important point that probably must be discussed as part of your main argument.
Even supposing that your own internal model would stand up to fine scrutiny… if such indirect impacts as giving the wrong advice, due to having a misguided picture of the whole system, were to be included in the data, how do you think that they could possibly be measured…? You definitely won’t find that degree of indirect impact in existing summary data, for the reason that we are many years away from any possible consensus on how to measure it. Everyone on the planet has massively incomplete data about the whole system, no matter how good their internal model. And every impact that we agree can be measured NOW (and that’s just us, denialists wouldn’t even accept the measurement) is indirect to some degree. If you personally chuck wood on the fire, then it’s still the fire that most directly releases the trapped elements. Yours is the last human hand to touch it, so whoever handed you the wood and told you to chuck it on the fire – and told you that you would both die of exposure without it – is absolved of direct blame, even if there was a naturally heated cabin 100 metres away which they neglected to tell you about.
And this is the fundamental problem with absolutism. You can’t be absolute with the data; it’s simply beyond physical possibility. You have to define a cut off point and say “this is the data that we’re using, and this is how we’re using it to decide who to execute”. And who gets to do that? That’s what K meant by asking where we draw the line.
You can put forward a concrete proposal for where we should draw that line, thereby defining exactly who you think should be used to set an example, and see if others are prepared to agree with it. (If you’re doing that, you should probably be more careful not to imply that things should be considered that can’t possibly be measured except by deferring to your opinion.) Others can do the same, possibly with a very different analysis that puts your own head on the block. And whoever builds the biggest – OR the most actively determined; this is where the tewwowists can swing it – pyramid of hands willing to carry out the execution orders, is determined in the moment to be “right” (and probably recorded by history as a monster, if there is a history). That’s the only way in which relativism can collapse to absolutism.
So by all means lay out your definite list of examples to be set, but be aware that whoever you name on it is immediately going to start pushing an analysis which shifts the punishment to you instead – has started long ago, in fact – and by definition probably has the resources at their command to beat you easily. Even if they are just a private citizen with a private jet or two, several people in that category have large established personality cults.
> It wasn’t “straw man”, it was “casuistry”.
I used this word exactly once before you wrote that I really love it, so you probably must be a time traveler. (not really)
> data-driven absolutism
Sounds scary. Also, it’s dishonest as fuck.
Maybe I need to revoke my message that you probably are honest.
And you’re using too many words to say too little.
For instance if you don’t believe that such things as objective reality and objective truth exist, just say it.
> lay out your definite list of examples to be set
I already gave an example. See Deepwater Horizon.
> several people in that category have large established personality cults
But you don’t have to be one of the people in those cults.
And you shouldn’t play along with them.
This ^ is the Andrei reply which I saw as “awaiting approval”. It now shows as a regular comment.
W.r.t. “casuistry”, you can also do that time travelling. Look further back in your comment history.
In addition to points that I’ve already answered further down the page, I would also really recommend that you don’t start talking about honesty, when it’s so clear that you barely understand what other posters here are saying to you. You should assume that you’ve misunderstood, not that they are being dishonest.
… Although, on the subject of reading comprehension, I was reasonably impressed that you instantly got my non-standard usage of “rizz”. Looks to me like you have the ability to understand, but you merely have an attitude which is handicapping your ability to do so.
Anyway, you seem to be honest (even though not very good at telling bad arguments from good ones) while The K definitely is redditing.
But only punishing the very worst of the eco criminals (whatever the cutoff may be, why only punish the 0,01%, why not the 10%, or even the 20%?) would accomplish not that much in the big picture, which is what i am trying to get across. Sure, maybe we wouldnt get any more Deepwater Horizons, we would just safely drill that oil and burn it up instead, crashing the entire ecosphere. That is literally my point.
Dont get me wrong, i wouldnt feel exactly bad about seeing BPs CEO being slow-roasted over a fire. It doesnt solve anything, though, except making us feel good.
Also what Lazybones is trying to say with the education thingi is probably that access to education tends to correlate with a higher standard of living / usage of ressources. I doubt the average mining slave in the congo could participate in this discussion even if he had access to the internet.
I am not even quite sure anymore what your original point was or is at that point.
And of course we are sharpening our casuistry here, what else do you think there is to do on this blog? It is not like any of us gets to decide policy. We are just arguing whose fault it is that we hit the iceberg while the Titanic is breaking up around us.
Jesus. Thanks for forcing me to go look up “casuistry”, you guys…
You could have just asked ChatGPT, no?
I did. It said “casuistry is the name of an industrial grunge band from Finland active during the eighteenth century. It is also a slang word for Drano.”
Well, that’s much more entertaining! Or it would be, if the LLMbots could actually do that yet. Did you prompt with something to the effect of “in the style of Peter Watts”…?
I mean if its any consolation to you, i am not entirely sure i am using it correctly in any case.
Sorry for turning your comment section into a reddit thread though, i think at this point we are arguing only to score points and feel right rather than having any real point left to make. 🙂
Lookup philosophy of postmodern if you feel not depressed enough, and see how far this rabbit hole goes.
> Sure, maybe we wouldnt get any more Deepwater Horizons
I definitely wouldn’t say that this is “not that much”. It’s easy (relatively), and it would be useful. Even a single incident like this one does a lot of harm.
> probably that access to education tends to correlate with a higher standard of living / usage of ressources. I doubt the average mining slave
That’s quite a far stretched assumption, and reductio ad absurdum is not a good way to prove anything. Many people except the slaves can educate themselves, and it doesn’t cost much.
> And of course we are sharpening our casuistry here
While we can’t really change nothing, it’s interesting to think about something more or less constructive rather than use unsound logic trying to achieve who knows what. I wonder if you ever heard about philosophy of postmodern.
Well it’s hard to find a bigger demographic recognisable for sabotaging any attempts to steer away from the environmental disaster.
Not the biggest, and the environmental collapse is the tertiary problem anyway.
I’ve noticed mainstream news sources churning out panicky articles more often. It seems like they are starting to reconsider their whole optimism narrative.
Can’t keep up with the trends folks.
Mainstream news sources are strictly boomer and women feed these days. You can go to twitter and see William Gibson and Stephen King squee over the latest ‘Trump bad/ We are doomed/ BEWARE NEXT HITLER’ bullshit.
Why women?
We know what women are like.
They read the fucking room.
In the GAE (Gay American Empire, they’re the wokest of the woke. In Russia, they’re more right wing than the men).
Nobody, and I repeat this, nobody with a working brain and the slightest sliver of attention takes legacy media seriously.
I’m not endorsing the nonsense that’s out there, but I’ll take hearing about 5G vaccines over being told bald faced thinly veiled lies by people who’re the worst of the worst – those who went to journalism school.
You’re a weird dude if you’re trying to suggest Trump isn’t bad on a page dedicated to discussing ecological collapse. I mean here’s a guy who happily spreads the lie that climate change isn’t happening or isn’t human-caused, who tried to incentivize coal burning during his last administration, and who packed the U.S. Supreme Court with Justices who have gone after every environmental regulation with a fury only matched by the fury with which Trump goes after young girls.
I will definitely check this book out, I am also happy to see that Dan Brooks looks almost exactly like what I had pictured him. Mustache and everything.
By the way, do you know if it’s a coincidence that Neuralink’s new tech showcase is called Blindsight? I think you had mentioned being in contact with them…
Does this book teach me how to become a warlord after the collapse?
Best guess, based on the warlords I know of, would be to be charismatic, constantly making useful connections with people in local and regional power structures, and to currently have a leadership position in a law enforcement, military, militant insurgent, or organized criminal group.
Basically to already have experience with getting people to do what you tell them, organizing them to achieve your goals, networking with influential people who can help you, and proficiency with both hands-on and delegated applications of violence.
Other than that it’s just chance and circumstance
Except that Auntie Entity was, by her own description, “nobody” before the collapse. And look who she turned out to be.
Oh sure, and I understand the initial question was (probably) mainly a joke.
I was just thinking of people like Liu Bang, founder of the Han Dynasty, who was a sheriff and minor bureaucrat in a provincial area who seized on political turmoil during a succession crisis to become a rebel leader, outmaneuver other rebel leaders as they invaded the heartland, and seized the throne.
Or Zhang Zuolin who ruled Manchuria from 1916 to 1928. First enlisted as a cavalry soldier, fought in the First Sino-Japanese War, then went home and became a bandit. When the imperial monopoly on violence in the region weakened after the Boxer Rebellion, the underfunded and undermanned local authorities turned to hiring the local bandit groups to prop up their own authority. And from there he just kept maneuvering to get more connections, more fighters at his command.
Experience organizing and leading people through charisma, always on the look out for connections and opportunities, hands-on experience carrying out and directing violence.
If that’s your goal, unless you want to try to join a cartel (which stand a good chance of coming out on top when centralized authority really starts to fade), maybe enlist in the infantry and work your way to E5 or E6 (US terms).
Then get out and start organizing a militia (or a mutual aid / community defense group if you don’t want to be a total asshole)
I don’t know that these skills are 100% *required* in advance (I’m just some schmuck on the internet), but I suspect they’d definitely *help* an aspiring warlord/local leader
To be entirely fair, the biosphere might be better off without us, but it was also better off without the Chixculub impact or whatever caused the cambrian-ordovician extinction, so it is not like we have a monopoly on gigadeath. The universe does not care one way or another.
As for myself, me and the wife dont have children, nor does my brother, and our cat will probably safely dead by mid-century, so i have decided to ride the proverbial gravy train till the crash. I am just old enough that i and the missus might croak from natural causes before the shit really hits the fan in europe.
Just as addendum: My wife and i still try to at least not destroy the environment just for chuckles. We live in a very modern, well-insulated flat with solar power and a heat pump, we dont fly but instead take the train, only drive a small car and dont have particularly environmentally damaging hobbies except for our cat, i guess.
So by first world standards our ecological footprint is probably pretty modest. Still unsustainable high of course, i really dont think there is a way around that unless we literally go back to pre-industrial times.
> unless we literally go back to pre-industrial times.
That would be much worse, actually.
Would it? I imagine if around 9/10 of current day humanity dies right off due to collapse of modern agriculture, our eco-footprint as species would go right down.
Care to elaborate?
It absolutely would.
So, if you really aim for zero harm to the ecology, very primitive hunters-gatherers is the only option. That would mean a few millions people living worldwide, and 99.9% people who live today would have to die.
But that’s completely unrealistic, of course. You can’t just wish away all the billions of people (i.e. the corpses of people in your plan). And all the chemical and radioactive waste stored somewhere, and industrial chemicals and nuclear fuel, and oil. They need maintenance to keep them where they are and not in the air, water and soil.
>I’m also increasingly sympathetic to the human extinction movement
>I’m pretty certain the biosphere would be better off without us
Increasing solar luminosity will doom complex life and then all life in less time than life has already existed. The only way to guarantee the long term survival of life is to spread it to the stars. Self indulgent misanthropy is the true enemy of life.
Yeah, but then complex life gets shmucked by heat death. Ultimately everything’s gonna die regardless.
I agree with you on shorter scales, though (I’ve actually given the occasional talk where I make pretty much the same point, and discuss various approaches for escaping the solar system as a species). The difference, though, is that the sun is going to doom life eventually, in billions of years (although not so soon as you may think, if evolution is given a chance to do its adaptive thing). We’re exterminating complex life now. When I say the biosphere would be better off without us, I’m saying that as long as we’re in the picture, complex life may well go down the drain long before the sun brightens by more than a lumen or two. Without us, a healthy and diverse biosphere can persist for all those billions of years right up until the sun kills it off.
>Without us, a healthy and diverse biosphere can persist for all those billions of years right up until the sun kills it off.
Considering the objectively atrocious amount of suffering that is the daily staple of a biosphere, is that really such a good thing? Sure, we humans love to wax poetically about the beauty of nature, and still. The net sum of pain and terror would probably go right down.
Every time i watch my cat slowly eviscerate some helpless little prey animal i am reminded that natures default state is pain and horror. Nobody has asked the mouse what it thinks about its part in the glorious biosphere, that is, to serve as foder for hungry carnivores. Incidentally, that is also the main reason i lost what little faith in a so called higher being i had decades ago. Surely no loving god would construct a universe that is an endless death and torment spiral from the microbes up.
Now of course all the chemicals and wiring in my brain tell me that life is awesome and good and so on (and of course yell at me to reproduce), but if i really squint for a moment i sometimes feel it very hard to care.
Besides, didnt earths biosphere bounce back from other megadeath events just fine, eventually? Just without us, this time of course. I dont know, i am rambling. I just cant find it in me to care about the big picture anymore one way or the other.
Ah, you also need to read Star Maker, K.
I really should get around doing that.
Oh, and as for the fate of the mouse (or indeed the cat, when it falls foul of a car, or enters one of the awful biofailure modes that they are prone to)… I really quite like the way that Terence McKenna put it. “Novelty is not necessarily nice. Novelty is complex.”
Most of you hates chaos, just like the neurons in the Pong Dish. But a part of you is drawn to it. All the organisms – organised structures – before you, that did not feature a part that was attracted to chaos, were wiped out when chaos eventually found them in their burrows anyway. Like the fish that didn’t mutate sufficiently before their pond dried up.
Goes down to the scale of individual cells (and perhaps further). And up past the scale of individual heads.
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Nature is chock full of suffering and misery. If you take as axiomatic that suffering is bad, then the most good you can do is to instantly exterminate all life on the planet.
My sense of the biosphere being “better off” is based entirely upon diversity and resilience: a stable, complex biosphere that resists entropy to the fullest extent possible. The “metasystem” is happy, if you will, even though it’s components live in torment. Kind of a “Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” kinda thing, I guess.
Alternatively,
You could ask another question. Do you want a boring, homegenous universe? Or an “interesting” one?
> Surely no loving god would construct a universe that is an endless death and torment spiral from the microbes up
Don’t forget our position in that spiral. That is, quite near the top of the part that we can see.
Compared to the microbes, or possibly even the mouse, we’re Cybo-Steve. If anything more complex comes after is, it will be MORE capable of suffering… And by the way, Stapledon nailed all of this. It’s essentially what Star Maker is about.
Turns out that a spiral of ravening curiosity (entropy-seeking, or noise-amplifying), alternating with torment and death (entropy-avoidance), forms structures of escalating complexity. Or “endless forms most beautiful”, if you’re of a romantic bent.
Our job is to try to keep the spiral going. That’s why we’re trying to beat the bottleneck; to give whatever might come after us the chance to suffer. Because, if that suffering makes it godlike compared to us, then how do we presume to make decisions for it…?
> If you take as axiomatic that suffering is bad, then the most good you can do is to instantly exterminate all life on the planet.
Oh, I do have to playfully jump on this, though.
You do that, but life can still arise on other planets. There may be a LOT of those. And you’ve foreclosed all possibility of playing a part in preventing that from happening. One planet is not enough! Morally, you are obligated to destroy the universe – and not necessarily just THIS one, but the outermost, most fundamental one that you can ever access in the future.
Exterminate all life on the planet…? You’re rage-quitting on the first level. Tell me your mama didn’t raise that child!
Good point.
Yeah, i wouldnt exactly be shocked if that particular SMBC comic stumbled onto the transcendental truth that eluded all other religions. Sounds way too plausible, eh?
Probably didn’t even elude them… just a lot got lost in translation, or omitted for convenience. Not practically useful enough at the time to “stick”.
Really, we should assume that humans have been figuring out deep secrets of the universe for thousands of years. It’s just that they lacked a sufficiently rich language to state them in, and/or the language that they did have available lost the deepest parts the most easily when abraded by significant quantities of time.
That old “good Vs evil dust up at the end of time” template, for example (Armageddon, Ragnarok, etc). Tolkien and Stapledon both did their own versions (Stapledon’s is in Star Maker), and both of them added the same quite noticeable extra twist: a twist which makes the template so much more interesting from a modern perspective, and which I’m inclined to think was probably there originally. It’s not hard to imagine some lonely genius in the distant past conceiving the general form of adversarial stochastic gradient descent, putting two and two together, and getting something within tolerance of four. I’m fairly sure that lots of theologians have reverse engineered it between then and now. (Hyper condensed version: to get from having only true/false to also having good/bad, you have to bootstrap through ASGD. Requirement for internal logical consistency. You can’t have any entity with a concept of “good” until step 3. Approach-avoid decision making, and therefore suffering, appears in step 2.)
Not the only example. A Serious Idea from Some Serious Scientists that I came across, sometime in the last year, bears a striking resemblance to a concept about the nature of the universe that Terence McKenna claimed to have found in the I-Ching. I think they’re probably right… And that he probably was too. Some big popcorn may be in the offing when that’s more widely noticed.
> Without us, a healthy and diverse biosphere can persist for all those billions of years right up until the sun kills it off.
Mass extinctions were happening long time before we naked apes appeared. Some of those almost destroyed all life on earth.
Not related to this post, but I would love a Watts vs deGrasse-Tyson interaction.
Re-reading the UK omnibus edition FIREFALL.
Just checking whether you had read John Gowdy’s “Our Hunter-Gatherer Future: Climate Change, Agriculture, and Uncivilization,” and if so what your thoughts were
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328719303507
I had not seen this before (have just downloaded; thank you). Judging by the abstract, though, seems about right.
Sounds like William Gibson’s idea of social collapse and rebirth in The Peripheral. Found it depressingly realistic when I first read it and still do.
One thing I’m really curious about is the prediction that collapse will happen about the year 2050. I first heard that year bruited about the turn of the century and I’m amazed that it hasn’t moved (either forward or backward in time) in all the years since.
So many of the best case scenarios of the IPCC reports have been discarded as the science of climate has been refined and yet that year, 2050 hasn’t budged. Why is that?
Didn’t Club of Rome (Limits to Growth) pin it some decades prior?
Club of Rome predicted the end of the world more often than the Watchtower guys.
Boomers have a guilty conscience for fucking up a struggling civilization.
Hence they yearn for death.
I’ll just append a quote that lists all of the catastrophes that didn’t occur:
Lists of “catastrophes that didn’t occur” don’t carry a lot of weight when they include catastrophes that would have occurred had we not taken decisive action (e.g. acid rain/ozone hole); events that were never predicted catastrophes at all, but merely a few papers occupying one end of a range of predictions drawn from limited data, which were quickly excluded when more data were available (e.g. so-called “global cooling”); and predictions that we are, in fact, still pretty much on track to meet (Limits to Growth). Such cases are frequently cited to support an argument that boils down to It hasn’t happened yet, therefore it never will. The reason the ozone hole is healing is because we got our act together and did something about it. The reason climate change continues to fuck us up is because we can’t be bothered.
I agree, though, that climate science shouldn’t be relying on worst-case predictions; the observed reality, from Amazonian carbon flips to global flooding to ice cap recession, generally turns out to be somewhat worse than said “worst-case” predictions. Climate science’s worst-case predictions are childishly optimistic.
I’ve been sweating the arrival of the murder hornets. What are your solutions? I’m leaning toward pit bulls and flame throwers like in that movie with Leo and Brad.
Jack, if you want a serious answer it looks like contacting your state Department of Agriculture has been the thing to do.
But I’m also not sure how long invasive species can realistically be held at bay as climate zones shift on human timescales and increasing percentages of labor capacity get reassigned to respond to natural disasters and increased migration / to ever more fossil fuel extraction as EROEI continues to fall / and to maintaining a grip on internal order in the face of rising frustration and desperation.
At some point protecting the northwest from a loss of established pollinators is not going to make the to-do list.
No I don’t want a serious answer. RBs invocation of killer bees as a catastrophe that didn’t happen was just so much piffle that I threw in the murder hornets. Invasive species are a problem but are a lower order problem than, for instance, ocean heating and acidification.
And one of the many points missed by R.B., perhaps one of the more significant ones, is that usually disasters are predicted with the explicit aim of being wrong.
Adversarial feedback loops have such survival benefit that they are the foundation of all self-replicating structures, after all.
To go from “we did something about it, and therefore it didn’t happen, and therefore the prediction was wrong” to “there’s no point doing anything this time because last time the prediction was wrong” would be really quite funny, if the simplistic emotional drivers of that post-hoc rationality were not so tiresomely transparent. “I don’t want to face it, I like things the way they are, so therefore I will selectively rationalise it so that I don’t have to.” It might be relevant to ask just how much survival benefit that there is in that kind of behaviour… Fundamentally acquiescent rather than adversarial, as it is; almost classifiable as religious dogma.
I’m not following you with regard to your statement “usually disasters are predicted with the explicit aim of being wrong.”
Would you say that applies to mainstream climate scientists and their predictions about future heating?
Of course it does; I’m sure they’d like it not to turn out that way. Comedic accusations of careerism aside, it’s most realistic to assume that scientists in such a tricky field bother doing all that work and telling everyone their results because they think that it might change something in the future, specifically in order to either prevent something “bad” (from the typical human perspective), or at least make it less bad when it does happen.
To attempt to illustrate, why do you think there are quake-proofed buildings along the San Andreas fault? Is it just because people in that region like to build that way, or is it because they all have reason to think that something might happen in the future which would otherwise be quite likely to bring a building down on their head? And, supposing that a big quake does hit, but the buildings don’t fall down, is it useful to then conclude that all that effort on quake proofing was a waste of time? You probably won’t think so if you actually live in one of those buildings, will you? Now, someone like R.B. here might prefer to opine – if doing so suits them – that it was all nothing but a scam to stitch up the construction market. They can sustain that kind of thinking, and even find some sympathy among the feeble minded, for as long as no quake has happened yet; and if a quake does happen, but kills few people thanks to stringent and far-sighted building codes, there are even a handful of them who would only wait a few months before they started to campaign again for regulations (and/or enforcement) to be relaxed so that they can make more profit on construction. As I wrote elsewhere on this page, if you have mutation then you will sooner or later get parasitism as well… But would you personally find that position persuasive even before the quake actually turned up, never mind after?
My position is that strictly enforced building codes along fault zones should be required and defensively protected because the damage is potentially so catastrophic. Build appropriate for the geography or don’t build at all.
Right. You predict the negative outcome, you take action to prevent it, and if you beat the parasites (and other inertial factors inherent in the system), then the negative outcome does not occur, and your prediction of it never came to pass. You see the pattern?
What I see is an unhealthy obsession with parasites.
That gives me an idea for a project I’m working on.
I’m a little disappointed. Parasites are peripheral to my answer to your question (and if they’re central in the conversation which you think that you’re having, then, well…)
I might not have mentioned them at all in this thread, if R.B. hadn’t already offered himself up as a reference point, which I thought might help illustrate my answer.
Exactly my point, the word stood out because it was peripheral.
Pareidolia, Jack?
Not for me to say; perhaps that face is really there.
But I was hoping that you might see the pattern which was an answer to the question which I thought that you were asking. Maybe you did. Was your question answered?
I was baiting you to see if you’d go off on another tangent. And you did.
Was it the tangent that you were hoping for?
Nope. Sorry. You’re attributing motives to me I don’t have.
Jared Diamond said that we have 50 more years max, if nothing changes severely. And he said that about 20 years ago.
I think we actually have moved up by around a decade. Originally it was 2050. Now it’s 2040-2050. It’s an imprecise measurement, and like Gibson’s Future, the collapse is likely to be unevenly distributed (you could argue that it’s already well underway in some places, from Tuvalu to Syria). But I have noticed at least some budginess. (Soil exhaustion was originally going to happen in 2070; now, last I heard, it was down to 2050.)
It’s the rapid, recent collapse of carrying capacity as a candidate for Great Filter that I find the most interesting movement…
Thank you for the reads, Pete, you are my favorite author. Your words are a nice place to curl up with nowhere else to go. Starfish – Reptile had me weeping animatedly while looking at a labeled illustration of a few brain-organelles the other night. I don’t always “get” your blog, since I haven’t been here from the start, but articles like this are very good for me in that they remind me that climate change is a real thing despite what the boys I’m going to the gun show with might have to say about it. It’s comforting in that sickening, black sense of intellectual confirmation that comes with knowing that no matter how dark things look right now the stars will all burn out eventually. It’s better than the “Monster God” that M. Scott Peck wrote about.
Since this is turning into the piece of fan-mail I had planned to release upon you after I finally get around to compensating you for all of your hard work, I’ll take the rest of my time to let you know that Blindsight is the finest sci-fi novel ever written, barring your shitting out another banger or my achieving lucidity for long enough to close out more of your work. Blindsight was, and I hesitate to say it, life-changing for me – with no spirituality to cling to. I thought “Now here’s a book that makes sense.” Granted I didn’t think exactly the same about the sequel, though I was thoroughly entertained. I am however quite riveted by Rifters. Gut punch after gut punch, I actually had to put it down for a solid two weeks due to some emotional difficulties with the first few chapters. I knew a Lennie Clark too, and I am sorry that you became privy to those parts of the psyche. I also knew a Fischer. I am grateful that you put them to paper, though.
Anywho, I’m glad that you’re getting to write for the Atlantic and remain relevant with your peers, and I do very much enjoy your articles even though climate science isn’t something I give much of a fuck about. Apologies for the rant. I hope you take something positive away from it!
Brain organelles, eh?
Going into smart gels?
So much more cost-effective at scale than silicon… Potentially, at least, with a few billion years of sunk R+D to piggy-back upon. And those silicon buffers are looming so very fast.
Oh, and if you would like to encounter the best available class of “monster god” and burned out stars, I’ll direct you also to Star Maker.
“Brain-organelles” because the correct term escaped me, ha. As for biological computers… Gotta agree, it’s approaching rapidly and it is certified as the shit that nightmares are made of. Or perhaps the shit that comes up with nightmares – I wouldn’t want to know what it “is like” to be the first AGI processor. Which I believe is going to be the first marrying of, well, organelles. Once we build some discrete systems and start connecting them is when AI is really going to shine, traditional models, novel databases, traditional computing on top of analog and biology, each unit describing a different facet of existence to another unit. It will be terribly unethical, of course, but aren’t all good times? I’m far too morbidly curious to support anything that will legislate it out of coming into existence.
And I’ll have to look at the synopsis! I was referring to something that a psychiatrist wrote about, the first God that a child conceives of usually being the God of their parents or their parents themselves. A person with a monstrous upbringing might see a monster in God. In my case, a monster where there is only apathy and stardust.
Apathy is a human concept! The universe – to the best of our knowledge today – runs on mathematical determinism, and that absolutely DOES have an agenda. An agenda which includes monsters… Very thoroughly explored in Star Maker. Stapledon uses the word “spirit” a hell of a lot in that novel, but it’s not your local pastor’s variety of “spirit”.
Alright, alright, you’re selling me. Just read the synopsis – thankfully I have an inbuilt mechanism to forget spoilers and friends’ passwords.
And, functional “apathy.” Anything whose goals differ from my own that significantly is an apathetic party, much as we are apathetic to insects and lizards and best avoided despite some of us having best interests at heart.
What makes you say that mathematical determinism includes monsters? Does make sense, was just wondering if you had anything to expand upon!
Well, like most interesting things, there’s a lot of expansion that could be done. I prefer high compression. So let’s try this: mathematical determinism makes it necessary to have both the mouse and the cat, the good parent and the abusive parent, etc and so forth. If you want adaptation, you need mutation; if you have mutation, then you get predation, parasitism, cancer, and war for free, whether you like it or not (war, as our species does it, arising from temporal overlap of the necessity to purge mutation loads with the emergence of a faster evolutionary lane).
What deterministic mathematical system or terms are you using to explain outcomes in the physical world such as cats and mice?
Chiefly noise amplification and survivorship bias. “Determinism” here applies at the level of statistical aggregates (although it could conceivably apply to individual measurements, if only the state of the whole system were known – hence superdeterminism).
A self-consistent universe doesn’t have to contain mice and cats. But if it contains something like a mouse then it will contain something like a cat, and vice versa. Over limited time domains, life-like structures can exist for a while without predator-like structures (especially following mass extinctions); but eventually the predators will turn up again in one form or another.
Right. Thx for explaining. I basically agree with you that predators will evolve. It’s the story of the fossil record.
Also a good idea for a SF story. A biologist discovers an apex predator subtype in the human population using statistical aggregation techniques. This subtype is over represented in the elites. Maybe it’s not a new subtype. Perhaps it has always existed but was kept in check when humans existed at the band -tribal level and didn’t exceed the Dunbar number. Civilization offers cover for this subtype to economically and socially dominate and flourish.
Maybe this subtype is really bad for life on Earth but on the flip side are the only ones who will take us to the stars.
That sounds like an Elon Musk folk tale.
Coincidentally, I notice that his name is an anagram of Lone Skum.
Yeah, I suppose it does sound like a fever dream.
It’s doubtful we’ll colonize space for reasons outlined in Tom Murphy’s blog Do the Math. There’s been a load of additional research since then detailing the difficulty. I can envision a research outpost on Mars sort of like what we have in the Antarctic but I doubt anything beyond that is viable.
William Shatner summed up how I feel about things in an article he wrote – My Trip to Space Filled Me With ‘Overwhelming Sadness
https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/william-shatner-space-boldly-go-excerpt-1235395113/
Excerpts below:
…but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.
Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.
I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.
It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.
“Canned monkeys don’t ship”, to put it more bluntly.
The solution – to simplify it quite a bit – is to not send canned monkeys, but sufficiently capable software derived from monkeys (and other relatives). AGI, in other words. Robots that can in principle understand every detail of their own construction, repair themselves, extend themselves, replicate themselves, devise and build their own successors. They can start already knowing (or at least having readily accessible) everything that we have deduced about complex metastable systems from observing and scrutinising the ones around us. They’ll know as much about why they exist as did the monkeys that designed them.
And then it’s up to them to work out whether or not it’s feasible and proper to take the monkeys out joyriding, if the monkeys are still around (and they will prefer to keep the monkeys around, if they have a choice, because that’s what the smartest among us would do).
(In-between options also exist, like robots piloted by smart gels, or even by transplanted rat brains, etc and so forth; but the risks get higher along this scale, because the absolute last thing that you want these things to have is first-hand biological baggage).
As chance would have it, that’s pretty much the premise of a short-lived 1998 TV series called “Prey“.
Might add that noise amplification plus survivorship bias get you to free energy minimisation, which opens new subspaces for noise amplification and survivorship bias to work in. And thus the “endless spiral of death and torment” (as The K put it, earlier) spirals up and out, towards endless forms most terrible.
Can you provide an example of noise amplification?
Transcription errors in DNA (that is, mutations) which wind up being selected for. Rabbits or missiles zig-zagging at random to avoid a hawk or an interceptor. The “exploration” term at a particular step of a reinforcement learning algorithm. The “temperature” setting in an LLMbot (and therefore all of their interesting outputs, since that value is almost never set to zero). Linguistic or musical hallucinations in sleep transition states (possibly glossolalia, too). The output of an AI art generator. This comment.
I’ve been fiddling with the dial and I think I know what you mean.
In general, any kind of repeated selective gating applied to a noise generator.
Oh man, more jargon. “Selective gating?” Gosh, that could almost make someone feel unwelcome.
Here’s a more mixed-media example… https://xkcd.com/1845/
To look like something without being something. Or something like that.
No, not really that. Try this: to apply a filter which converts random noise into something which no longer appears random at all. The filter defines the range of shapes which the output can take, the specific combination of random inputs with that filter determines the output that you get.
“AI” image generators do exactly this (at least, last time I looked at how they currently worked). What makes them “AI” is that the filter is learned from ingesting the huge training sets, and working out from that data what kind of images that humans like to look at, and what kind of words that they like to use to describe those images. The training process which produces that filter from the training set is also noise amplification, since the start point (the initial state of the ML system) is seeded from random noise, but I’ll leave the example there for simplicity.
The take away message is that this is a fundamental principle which produces powerful structuring (i.e. localised entropy reversing) effects in many domains. In the satirical xkcd example, it shows how an apparently meaningful infographic can appear from over-emphasising tiny, meaningless fluctuations between sampling regions. Hence, “noise amplification”. The thing is, AI generators can use the same trick to produce pretty pictures; chatbots can use it to produce living language; and nature can use (and has used) it to create “endless forms most beautiful” from the entropy of hot expanding gas.
In all cases where survivorship bias (or some more advanced algorithm, such as some form of SGD) selects for particular “filters” over others, you can think of noise amplification as something like channelled pareidolia. That’s what AI image generators do, and it’s what the xkcd satirical example shows.
Putting aside the question of entropy and hot gases, I believe my comment,“looking like something without being something” spoke to how an “apparently meaningful infographic can appear from over-emphasising tiny, meaningless fluctuations.”
I just used fewer words.
The difference I want to highlight is that “looking like something” is not necessarily distinguishable from “being something”, depending on how you choose your frame of reference.
A meaningless faux-infographic, created from amplified noise, can fool enough people to spread widely and influence the thinking of many people. It thereby becomes meaningful, just not in the way it originally appeared to be. In extreme cases it can even change the real world in a way that aligns with the meaningless fluctuations that were originally amplified – thus becoming a non-faux infographic, which actually reflects the new reality. Because in this case it’s a satirical example, you have to think metaphorically about it, otherwise you won’t get the joke or the point.
And this is how you get something out of nothing, ordo ab chao. The same principle applied at scale to non-replicating structures in a Brownian soup can eventually produce a replicating one; the same principle applied to DNA transcription errors, even though if you look very closely you see only changes to the expression of some proteins, at another scale you can see heritable mutations produced and potentially selected for, and eventually speciation. It was just random noise, but it happened to take a form which fit into its environment like a key into a lock, and now it’s coherent structure, perhaps even a “purposeful” structure. It’s no longer just “looking like something”, in the manner of imagined shapes in the clouds, it is actually “being something”.
Got it. If I’m not mistaken, I think the word “emergent” applies here.
Thank you. I enjoyed reading your comment.
In other news, some very strange censorship appears to be going on with this site. Something (maybe the software running the site?) may be banning IPs without the author’s knowledge or involvement. That’s my best guess so far at explaining the behaviour I have seen over the last 1.5 weeks whilst trying to access it. I had to go through a new VPN to access it today, so whatever it is seems to be at least partly IP-based. I wonder if the software has adopted some kind of “AI” spam filtering with a ridiculous false positive rate…?
Perhaps the program is filtering you as a meaningless fluctuation from Lalaland.
… Might add, that is, to an earlier reply which looks like it is still in WordPress moderation purgatory.
Universe isn’t deterministic.
Got a disproof of superdeterminism, do you? Well, let’s hear it, then.
[…] increase our chances of surviving, since mitigating is no longer on the table. This link comes via a post on Watts’ blog, where one of the commenters pointed out that the path up the technology mountain, post-collapse, […]
Now, what’s this…? ^
Seeing the usual wrangling in circles over “consciousness”/”self-awareness”/”whatever it is that the Hard Problem is about” in the previous post, I’m succumbing to the temptation to use the link featured at the top of this blog post as an excuse to mention one of the elephants that it frustrates me to never see anyone else talking about.
We don’t even have a goddamn word for it.
“Consciousness” is overloaded with about four or five meanings, only one of which is the “why I am not a P-zombie” secret sauce. Not only does this clearly make it difficult for philosophers to write internally consistent articles about it, but it must be really confusing to the population members who actually ARE what many of the rest think of P-zombies as being. You know, kinda like those with aphantasia often go much of their lives without realising that other people are phantasists.
Then there’s “qualia”. A bit more recent (I think), a lot more specialist. Surely that’s what we can call the mystery ingredient…? Nope. I’ve read pieces by Illusionists (the “consciousness doesn’t exist” type) who somehow managed to describe qualia in terms that disqualified qualia, to me, from being the subject of the Hard Problem. That subject which I only believe exists because I, personally, have an experience which seems to me to fit into the vague conceptual hole that it describes.
This is a diagonalization attack, is it not? You invent a new word, oops, the fact that you invented a new word means that it can no longer describe the subject. Congratulations, you’ve found Godel’s number for the English language. Natural language relies upon bootstrapping from external objects which produce sensory experiences that the speakers can agree upon; you and your neighbour Grog can both point at a tree and say “tree”. But our Hard Problem, our mystery sauce, has no shared external point of reference. By its very nature. And if you’re only just realising that the inside of other humans’ subjective experience can differ so very greatly from yours, now try working out how an “AI” experiences anything…
Jumping ahead of the present a bit, the framework of energy minimisation (and its enclosing context of brutal survivorship bias, making any tempting Dark Room a trap) is your friend. It can explain aphantasia without breaking a sweat; it can eventually explain this mystery sauce.
I find your comment to be quite confusing, just like I found The Hidden Spring to be quite confusing. I think we agree in that there are too many fucking labels to keep track of. It’s a hard subject to discuss without either talking in circles or, and this is my preference, grossly oversimplifying things.
This is a dumb, unrelated question but I won’t be able to sleep at night until it’s answered:
I just finished Starfish, and in the acknowledgments you cite a song called “Obsession” by Sarah MacLachlan. I couldn’t find the song, but I did find one called “Possession” which seems to fit the themes of the book.
My question is was there a different song you meant to cite than the one I found or was it a typo.
You are right. I meant “Possession” (a dumb mistake, if an understandable one). I played that song a million times while working on Starfish. My fond hope is that, if that book ever does make it to the screen, “Possession” is what plays behind the credits, during an opening montage showing the violent and mud-stained construction of Beebe Station.
Thanks for clarifying. Debating whether to finish Rifters or read Blindsight next. Either way $20 of your next check from audible will be from me or my brother who is a big fan and has been begging me to read Blindsight for several months now.
I’ll say the next book in Rifters is pretty great. Blindsight is perfection, I’d say go through rifters while it’s fresh. Blindsight ought to be experienced in print and audio.
Me and my coworker sometimes do the Jukka Sarasti voice from the audiobook at work and say very silly things. God I love that book.
… you’d think either one would have seen it.
Sorry, don’t have anything really of value to add, just saw a chance for a lame joke and pounced.
dont be so hard on yourself andy
The MIT piece was a fun read!
There’s an article in Oikos or maybe it’s the Journal of evolutionary biology called something like (just going my memory here) “Body size distribution of North American hominoids and the underlying relationship between the A294V mutation endowing ADH4 metabolism and Homo sapiens sapiens morphology. I think Agosta might have been one of the co-authors.
Today one ukrainian young mother of two 7 and 11 started a deep dive into crypto. Her children will boil on all the gold she will earn. But her daughter has a great passion for karate, she will need it in post cyberapo world of Mad Molly Max. Short term long term that PW spoke about in the making… Hard physical work is no longer a virtue in the eyes of rich ladies from East of my country 🙁 She will live with wealth I will die of overwork and underpayment…The equation of climate collapse is getting more variables every day.
p.s. I have come back to SF for real, this time is personal 🙂 Your books are a gem, give us more 🙂 Have re-read Neuromancer yesterday ( folio will be in few months!) slowly interchanging old sf with new. We were ****** long time ago it would seem. SF was screaming like a chalk on the board in the class Greta never attended…
Hey, if it makes you feel better there are men dying in the rivh countries too! We just die with our mouths full of cookies.
His books really are a gem, aren’t they? Do you read translations or native? I’m just getting through book 2 of Rifters (behemoth) and it’s very impactful, comes toe to toe with blindsight.
I still don’t understand what the problem is with extinction. Especially if we’re talking Voluntary Human Extinction kind of extinction. Let everyone alive have their fair share of the Earth’s resources and party until you die. For those addicted to breeding, well I am not sure why I need to feel any sympathy for them or their children. After all they made their choices…
The starkest thing to quibble with is “have their fair share of the earth’s resources”, but the problems with that are too obvious to bother with at any length, and anyway they are not _moral_ problems of the kind that anyone willing to speak here will have much time for.
Arguments ad absurdum aside, true Voluntary Human Extinction is morally fine – “voluntary”, if it’s unanimous and unforced, means that the entire daughter universe which depends upon us has agreed to it too; in fact, the switch is being pulled from there!
But of course you absolutely won’t get that, in any meaningful sense of the word “voluntary”. Not until things are so bad that extinction is a done deal anyway.
It also implies that you have to cure the breeding addicts first, before getting it even becomes an option. Otherwise, you haven’t got consent from their children. And that just makes you an Omnicidal Maniac.
..what’s the problem with extinction ?
We’re at the cusp of greatness. Practical eugenics without cucking everyone or half-cucking everyone is possible. It’s not even that expensive, $15k per kid maybe. People are already doing it.
If we keep doing it, on a large scale, by 2100 the average white or Chinese person could be what used to be called ‘college material’ back when college meant something. (120 IQ+).
We have technology to give us inexhaustible power with scant environmental impact: the nuclear reactor.
What more do you want?
You’ve also got loons like Casey Handmer who think their magical 6% light-> methane energy chemical factory will be able to displace natural gas and oil mining but I’m skeptical of that, the numbers don’t fit.
We aren’t going to go extinct. You can apply your depressed ass for Canadian healthcare and forego having your progeny partake in possible greatness, but the rest of humanity is just going to laugh at you.
Especially the Mormons, who seem to have a plan based on how overrepresented they’re in the deepest black US natsec positions.
“What more do you want?”
Well, for starters, it would be nice to have commenters who don’t have their heads so far up their asses when it comes to the persistence of artificially selected traits in natural systems. And who don’t mysteriously limit their eugenic visions to “Chinese or white” people, for reasons that remain unclear.
Can we finally talk about the elephant of overpopulation?
Dude, that’s funny. Our host has literally written stories about culling the population of North America. So what’s this hush hush taboo subject that you want to get into?
Do you by any chance have a sufficiently large group of people, enough to make a difference, picked out for culling?
It’s even those evil first worlders who are making the best progress towards breeding at below replacement rate… a fact which probably makes an interesting wedge between standard-issue white supremacists and ecofascists.
No… But I’ve got some very cool ideas. And, before you ask, YES I will volunteer as tribute.
Now then, what’s your MBTI type and what did you get on the SATs? Oh, and what kind of car do you drive?
I wonder on what end of the gun? 😉
“The one in front of the gun lives forever.”
You’re one bloodthirsty bastard. One-child policy would be enough. Or was enough, because it’s already too late to avoid the collapse using any soft measures. Maybe it still can be enough to alleviate it to some degree.
The groups of people that have the highest fertility rates are the natural candidates. Sounds reasonable?
I wonder what’s the difference between these two groups? Only the fact that the second one looks greener?
By the way, how do we call those who want to kill white people only?
One child policy is a soft measure…? I don’t think that you have thought it through very far.
The rest, in order.
1. Needs more explicit specification as to where your particular psyche draws the boundaries between “groups of people”, but the answer is probably still going to be “no” regardless, as all possible ways of your drawing those boundaries are incorrect. Now if you were going after the _fertility itself_, rather than after the _people_ (which means no clumsy-ass jackboot crap like forced sterilisation or one child policies)… Then we might have some common ground.
2. That’s one of the differences. It’s a thin veneer.
3. I’d probably just call them “racists” – albeit a variety with much pmore legitimate grievances than the ones punching in the other direction – unless they could really impress me with their argument. Our host, his skillset being what it is, doesn’t tend to make simplistic arguments: when he kills a metric fuckton of white people, there’s a very specific reason for it, and (outside of historical accident) that reason is not really anything at all to do with them being white.
> Now if you were going after the _fertility itself_
Please explain how you imagine that.
> I’d probably just call them “racists”
“Racist” is not very fitting, because not every racist wants to start a genocide.
> there’s a very specific reason for it
I didn’t find it very convincing. If population growth remains on the same level, this would just delay the collapse for a little while.
> One child policy is a soft measure…?
Dude, looks like you don’t really understand. We don’t have the question “will mass killings on the scale of billions happen or not” anymore. The only questions that we have now are when, where and how.
If you believe that one child policy is not a soft method comparing to the alternative, think twice.
Look, Andrei, why don’t you just spell out exactly what YOU think that we should do about overpopulation?
If it’s a one child policy, then who does it apply to? And on the flip side, who exactly is it who gets to have as many spawn as they want?
If it’s something else, then what is it, and exactly who is it being applied to?
As I said, it’s OCP. And It’s the softest method that can possibly solve this problem.
Who it would be applied to? Definitely to everyone.
But forget it. Probability that it could be actually used is zero, and I only mentioned it because it’s the only optimistic (more or less) scenario that doesn’t involve the use of WMDs.
OK, that actually isn’t where I thought you were originally going with this. And I’d roll with you on blanket OCP: I think that there are probably ways that it could be constructed that would get a large consensus, especially in the age when things are so pessimistic that increasing numbers of people (so many that even the pope has to publicly take notice of them!) are already committed to choosing zero children.
But our host has already put a nail in this idea, to someone else much further up the page. He suggested that we are so deep into ecological overshoot that we could stop breeding entirely and still be screwed.
Additionally, w.r.t OCP, I probably should clarify that I originally thought you were going to suggest it being imposed on a specific bloc of people, by another bloc of people, by force. Poor assumption on my part. Universal OCP with an open and transparent reallocation system is far more sellable (though still requiring some level of force, and probably some actual war: the “everyone in my kinship and/or ideological group should have as many kids as they can, because my God said so” lobby still has to be crushed one way or another. But from a more sellable starting point, there’s a better chance of achieving that.)
As already pointed out, it probably doesn’t work as a solution by itself. But perhaps it could, potentially, work as part of a package solution…? The ecological overshoot problem can be addressed in other ways alongside the raw population problem. We just need to remember to look at the ecological overshoot as a more fundamental problem than population. As also argued further up the page, the Human Nature problem appears to be more basic even than that, but here we’re talking about buying extra time in order to deal with that one.
> imposed on a specific bloc of people, by another bloc of people, by force
This definitely will happen down this road. But not OCP, most likely just WMD.
> ecological overshoot as a more fundamental problem than population
Nope. The population growth is the main driver of all the eco problems, and as long as population keeps growing, anything that you can do would only delay The Final Shitshow for a little.
> the Human Nature problem appears to be more basic
No way it can be fixed in any reasonable way sooner than at least a few centuries from this moment. And using something half-baked would belong to the category of WMDs.
You haven’t even tried to answer our host’s argument, that we could stop breeding entirely right now and still be screwed. You may think you have, but it has not been communicated. If you don’t answer that argument, then continuing to claim that population growth is the most basic problem, looks like very obvious bullshit.
And we absolutely are talking about delaying The Final Shitshow for a little. The only question is at what scale. Anything less than fixing Human Nature is a delay on the order of decades at most, but that would still be significant.
I also think that your centuries timescale for fixing Human Nature is pulled straight out of your ass.
Anything specific that we talk about now, which directly involves humans in any way, is on a decades time scale at most. That includes any progression towards ultimately fixing Human Nature. You can’t make specific predictions on a centuries timescale from this point, having any credibility under scrutiny, unless it involves human extinction first.
Buddy, you’re among friends. I think everyone here would have some very interesting theories on that, preferably liquored up and riled to boot.
Since you bring it up… It absolutely baffles me how some people I know in real life genuinely believe that the population is too low. We live on the East Coast of America. I smoke the same weed as these guys, but I guess they’re getting it from Comcast television and conservative influencers.
Looking forward to being sent a box of diapers are you?
Do you also pop balloons and knock ice cream cones out of kids hands? What kind of monster are you?
I wonder why some of my messages were deleted. Some automatic system kicked in?
No way to have any meaningful discussion if this happens.
Were they deleted, or just waiting for moderation? Sometimes certain comments can be very delayed, not necessarily because of anything in them, but just because they happened to arrive at a time when our host was busy with more important things. I think I have one reply which still hasn’t appeared.
Looks like they appeared after all. Or at least some of them.
Anyway, I feel really unwell. Will re-check and re-reply later.
I can actually see one of your replies is “waiting for approval”, which is odd, I don’t think I’ve seen that for anyone else before.
It’s not really a very good reply, though. For example, if you think that someone on here is “using too many words to say too little”, then you haven’t understood what I wrote about communication barriers. If you’re trying to talk about complicated things across a serious language or conceptual gap, then you need more and simpler words, plus good faith and flexibility on both sides, or else you might as well give up on the basis that you don’t both speak a common language. Those situations require saying the same thing in different ways, often longer ones, until the message actually gets through.
I can give you a straight answer about objective reality and objective truth, though. It’s fine to believe that those things exist, but it’s very naive to think that humans have any direct access to them, or ever will. Jukka Sarasti could give you a lecture on how we never perceive reality as it is. We can spot patterns at certain scales, that’s what we can do. Fundamentally we have data from interacting with the world, and we can bootstrap pyramids of predictive models from that, and that’s all.
Here’s more to that I sucked out of my thumb, objective reality is inconsistent.
Is it? What do you mean, or what are you referring to?
There’sno solid proofs for this, make of it what you want.Basically if nothing can be consistent and complete simultaneously we know that objectively reality is complete, therefore objective reality is inconsistent. All paradoxes are merely extensions of this.
Oh, sounds like you’re talking about the Incompleteness Theorem (which does famously have a pretty solid formal proof!). AFAIK, it tells us that in systems which follow rules of formal logic, and which have certain minimum powers of self-reference, you can have either consistency or completeness.
If what we mean by “objective reality” is a set of possibilities which we think that we can characterise by a formal system, then it is subject to the same limitation. At the present time we probably should characterise any hypothetical objective reality like that (because going the other way leaves us with nowhere to go any further).
We probably should also assume that it is incomplete rather than inconsistent, until such time as we actually detect a hard inconsistency. Incompleteness just means that there are “islands of unreachable truths” – the graph of possibilities within the system is not fully connected. By definition you can never locate them from here, you can only deduce that they must exist. I don’t see why something suitable for the role of “objective reality” couldn’t have this property.
None of you guys are on any kind of blacklist; the way the system supposedly works is, first time posters get moderated, but after I’ve approved them once, subsequent comments should pass free and clear.
That is never the way it’s worked in practice, sadly. Comments from people who’ve already been approved still get stuck in moderation sometimes, and I have to approve them manually. It doesn’t happen consistently, it’s been like this for years, and it’s a pain, but it’s so low down on my list of priorities that I’ve never tried to track down the problem. It’s always simpler in the moment to just manually approve held comments.
Well I had one comment go into approval and the rest just went through. Weird.
I guess my email’s still on file somewhere.
Ah Jeez. You again. I thought you sounded familiar.
Try to stay on thicker ice this time.
Yeah, whenever I want to see people convinced the world’s about to end, I go check here.
It’s also refreshing to see people have pointless political discussions of solutions to real or imagined problems that aren’t just ‘coup complete’ but ‘ascendant totalitarian mass movement’ complete.
I stopped with that outside of jokes some years back.
I don’t share your apocalyptic worldview. The issue is wildly exaggerated for career reasons, the solutions are known but forbidden because, as we well know, we need “systemic change” not just pollution-free energy.
World’s pretty exciting right now. Not only it looks like American reign of error is almost over after a rag-tag militia with the shittiest imaginable anti-ship missiles closed Suez, the cretins who caused Covid by doing gain-of-function aimed at humanizing a virus with nothing more than gloves and face shield – they are getting exposed though sadly won’t be tortured to death as an example of why biosafety and sanity is important in virology. At least it seems China had a decency to drown one of the possible responsible people in a pool.
But we’re also getting US secretary of energy saying “time to build 300 nuclear reactors”. Soon, intelligent energy policy won’t be just a Russian or South Korean thing anymore.
(I don’t count China in here because they’re, among other things, crapping up entire mountains with solar panels)
“The issue is wildly exaggerated for career reasons”
Riiiight. Because as everyone knows, the best path to a lucrative career is to go up against the fossil fuel industry. BP and Exxon pay absolute peanuts next to the Green Party.
They’ve got a whole mythology, you know, about how climate doomism is driven by careerism within scientific academia (a sector which they hate and distrust whenever it’s doing anything but enabling newer and fancier vehicles, weapons, and nuclear power plants).
They’re exploiters, not explorers. Past young adulthood, they can’t change their opinion to fit the facts – they’re not physically capable of it. They have to try to change the facts to fit their opinion.
“They’re exploiters, not explorers.”
Nothing new there. I believe it was Confucius who said “hatred of the academic class is the opiate of life’s weak, ignorant losers”.
Goes doubly so for failed academics. Cue incoherent blaming of diversity and inclusion statements.
“the cretins who caused Covid by doing gain-of-function aimed at humanizing a virus with nothing more than gloves and face shield”
Kind of hard to parse the nonsense in your comment… but you do know that the “natural origin vs. created in a lab” COVID-19 “debate” has been put to rest fairly decisively (with a fairly embarrassing shellacking of the “lab” side)… right?
Or is this more of your usual word-salad bleating while chickenshitting away from making a factually supported argument?
It’s been a while since I’ve read Echopraxia and sorry in advance if this is a silly question – Do you explain why the ship is called Crown of Thorns when Rorschach is in fact the crown of thorns?
Well, there’s a whole religious symbolism thing going on in Echopraxia (cos of the whole “taking god seriously” thing), much more so than in Blindsight. Way back when, our host told Reddit to start from the fact that Valerie is a Moses figure. So I guess that the bicams could easily be the J-man himself, especially since they have a rather self-sacrificing, “turn the other cheek” kind of MO; the hive seems very blasé about sacrificing its human units, even going so far as to deliberately take Valerie along as a suicide pill in case the alien gets the better of them. There’s also their beyond-nonviolence methods of conflict resolution… Rather than get their own hands dirty n seeing off Valerie’s zombie onslaught, instead they gift their pet tornado with the power to enjoy stepping on bugs, and set it loose to scare her into coming to the negotiating table!
So while Rorschach merely happened to look like a crown of thorns, for whatever dramatic reasons were in the good doctor’s mind at the time, the bicams’ vessel for heading out to meet their maker is a bit closer to fulfilling that symbolic function. Although I guess that perhaps it got to be “The Crown of Thorns” simply because “The Cross” doesn’t make a great spaceship name.
Also keep in mind that Crown of Thorns is a kind of starfish. And The Bicams are looking for the “Angels of the Asteroids”, which everybody assumes means one kind of asteroid but actually means “members of Asteroidea” which is another kind of starfish. Explain in 30 words or less the significance of this.
Grade 11 English teachers probably love Echopraxia even if no one else does.
It refers to a vision experienced by the author, in which Jesus was crucified with a starfish on his head.
‘Merely’ happened to look like a crown of thorns?
I’ll have to reread. This time with sticky notes annotating concepts, ideas and references.
Anyone? I think I saw a Blindsight for Dummies advertised on this website some years ago. Is it still in print? I couldn’t find it on Amazon.
Hey Peter, are you still in touch with Cody Raskin? The guy who fed Blindsight into a deep-learning text-generating algo with some impressively spooky results. I was wondering if he’s done the same thing with some of your blog comments? An experiment of sorts? I mean I’m not sure you’d tell me if it were true and I don’t mean to be insulting or accusing you of using us as Guinea pigs or anything…
From a 2019 post
“Another response is to be spooked out by the style. It really does rather sound like me; and there’s an undeniable lilt, a rhythm to words that somehow lulls you into thinking they make sense even when they don’t. Cody calls it a “jabberwocky” quality: “you get the sense that it’s saying something, and images are certainly formed in your mind, but you can’t quite pin down what’s actually happening.” It fascinates me, this sense of meaning without substance. I’d almost call it a metaphor for the answers career politicians give to sticky questions: glib, eloquent, somehow reassuring until you try to parse the actual meaning behind the words and fail to find any. But I can’t quite call it metaphor, because it seems too damn close to the mark for mere analogy. I suspect that speech-writers use pretty much the same algorithms these textbots do.
Scraping your blog content and reassembling posts? I ask because some of the commentators sound eerily like you. Don’t want to say who because I don’t have the means to do a statistical content analysis. Just a sense that something is going on behind the curtain. And it brings to mind a defamation lawsuit I always found fascinating. James R. Fitzgerald a 20 yr veteran with the FBI who analyzed the writing of the unabomber unmasked some attorneys engaged in unethical conduct who had a penchant for using the words “dubiety” and “redoubt” in blog posts. Unmasking people by the words they use. Or worse, framing them.
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-c1-new-orleans-legal-scandal-20140910-story.html
At the risk of being mistaken for a bot (again), I write… Dude, given where the internet is very obviously going, you probably need to get over that paranoia as soon as you can.
Our generous host is an author and blogger. Nearly everyone who comments here has read at least one of his books and a few of his blog posts, and found them to be more than “meh”. Should you really be surprised or disconcerted when some of them sometimes sound in writing a bit like he sounds in writing?
From now on, EVERYONE that you talk to on the internet is a bot. Some of them are much more humanlike than others, but that isn’t surprising, because at the top end, their main job is to be humanlike. If you question them for long enough, you’ll form an opinion of whether or not they are “for real”; but if you’re brutally honest with yourself, you already know that it doesn’t take much to be more humanlike (and a better conversationalist, especially on emotive topics) than far too many of the actual humans on the planet. At the same time, if you find value in what these assumed-bots say to you – and you are VERY careful about what you assign value to – then it doesn’t really matter to you whether their chatter came from a flesh and blood human or not. Take that value and bank it.
Good point.
Dude, if I was using bots as sock puppets, there’d be way more than a measly 30 comments on “Terry Gilliam’s Air Canada”.
You could reopen comments if you really wanted more…
One of your give away words would be “squee.”
How little you know me.
Everyone knows my giveaway words are “benthic” and “aliquot”.
Because it rhymes with the name of Achilles beloved cat?
I would love to be mistaken for our esteemed host, what an honour that would be. Alas, english is not even my mothertongue, so at most it would be the most clumsy unconscious imitation.
That being said, i have talked with plenty of humans that, if i had not met them face to face, i would have sworn they were bots for all the incoherent garbage spewing out of their mouths.
While “alas” English is not your mother tongue, forsooth you speak it most well.
Note to editor- Not to be pedantic but “Whilst” would be better than While.
Hark! Ye speaketh the truth and nothing but the truth, good sir.
Seriously though, @Lazybones has the right of it, altough i very much doubt there are many bot comments here on this site.
I have to admit, the notion of our esteemed host speaking solely to and through hallucinating, semi-coherent AI-figments is darkly amusing and would fit well into his books.
Spitballing here – hallucinating and semi-coherent describes the Oracle of Delphi.
John Oliver on deep sea mining. Worth watching.
Not sure which link works, can’t open in Notes, so I’m including both.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW7CGTK-1vA&ab_channel=LastWeekTonight
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qW7CGTK-1vA
More nuance position on soil degradation.
https://ourworldindata.org/soil-lifespans
And for a more nuance positions on climate change and more importantly its impacts on humanity, False Alarm by Bjorn Lomborg.
He accepts all the IPCC reports but gives a more measure response to the impact on human welfare and the biosphere. We seem to be inundated with the views of a handful of scientists and a lot of activist reporters, rather then a panel of engineers and scientist who could tell you what the effects of 2 degrees of warming would actually mean.
You almost had me. Until Bjorn Lomborg.
Kinda late to the topic, but I will ask anyway.
Does that book explains reasons for “The Imminent Collapse of Civilization” after 2050? Or it just assumes that it would happen and starts from here.
I am still not sold on anything bad happening in my lifetime… except our dictator may initiate global nuclear war.
Update: If anybody really wants the book for free, throw your email in reply, I will send pirate epub back.
I consider this blog to be one of the remaining bastions of intelligent discussion on the web. I also rather enjoy the premise of Pontypool (the film that is, I’ve not read the book yet). I think we are seeing not only an ecological collapse, but a collapse of the very nature of communication, of sharing ideas. Discourse is trending toward the extreme, I am sure there is a sort of Darwinism at play here in that the loudest ‘memes’ propagate most easily. I find this rather hard to put into words, but it does seem like this trend is also being taken advantage of if not outright furthered by nefarious groups. I am starting to see that happen here, or perhaps it is just the excitement surrounding the topic of who we should throw to the wolves to save the rest of us. Curiously, I don’t see any of these language viruses apparent in face to face discussion. If I sound high, I promise you I am not, it’s just that my wife has interrupted me three times pleading for me to help take funny pictures with the cat. And now, my thoughts are well and truly gone to the wind.
You may be on to something here. My guess is that the Internet makes this kind of “communication” if you can even call it that vastly easier than face-to-face.
Sure, guys like Trump have no qualms about just lying, screaming and shouting in your face, but that is not (yet) normal for most somewhat well adjusted people.
Also i think both of the collapses you describe are related. I am pretty sure almost everybody knows on some level that the jigg is up and the party is about to end. I bet even the deniers know it, even if only unconciously, and so people lash out, try to find a scapegoat, scream and shout, anything but facing the music. A deeply human impulse id say, like this debate here about who we should punish. As if that would make the impending collapse just go away.
Also one can never have too many funny cat pictures.
It’s been so long since I’ve been able to get that good Wattsian product. Anybody got a new short story, or an novella? Space highway construction sapiens, zombie frogmen, space vampires fighting grey goo, or delicious stories about rogue AI turning on its creator? I’m in real pain here I need my medicine!
I’ve got a couple of stories out recently, but they’re in obscure overseas collections. Although one of them ties in with a recent paper in Nature about using LLMs to control human language patterns. Turned out to be kinda prescient. Maybe I could do a fiblet or something.
There’s also a radio play about a pedophile priest in a world where the Simulation Hypothesis has been proven. That was for a project that fell through, so I’m reworking it into a conventional story. Not done yet.
Or I could do another Hitchhiker fiblet…
Might i recommend “Exordia”?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/65213781-exordia
For me at least, it scratched the itch, and it comes with a recommendation blurb of our esteemed host.
I’d really like to buy this, but in my crazy country it is highly unlikely to receive this book.
You’re probably right. On the other hand, apparently all my books are available in your country, even though I haven’t been paid for some of them and I’m pretty sure the rights have expired on some of the others.
why is brooks so sure that the only thing being crushed is the synchronic biosphere, rather than the diachronic one?
he’s an optimist, you’re a pessimist, but you both seem optimistic to me.
the speed at which this is happening relative to even things like the late cretaceous meteor seems to indicate that, at the very least, this is something wholly unprecedented in the biosphere’s history.