We Are Not Saved

Technology allows us to optimize around very narrow criteria. If we turn that optimization ability towards changing society. We can end up emphasizing one potential future, based around a narrow set of values over other potential futures with other values. Conceivably abandoning many long standing values regardless of how useful they are. This is analogous to the transit systems of many large cities, in particular the Bay Area, where all the lines stay together for awhile and it doesn't matter what value you emphasize, but introduce technology and suddenly optimizing one value over another results in radically different results.

Last week I compared life to a video game. A video game where the number of players continues to increase, meaning that our collective knowledge of how best to play the game should also be increasing, except that at the same time the version of game we’re playing is also changing. As an aside I also mentioned that it’s becoming harder to know if we’re winning. This week I’d like to take that thought and expand upon it. What does it mean to be winning the video game? Or, to go a step further why are we even playing the game?

If humans gradually figure out how best to live, then we should give a lot of weight to what has already been figured out over the years. But what if we end up with more humans? Do the behaviors of a billion current people count more than a million historical people? At first glance the answer is an obvious yes, but what if we add in the complication that current conditions are rapidly changing? Is it possible that behavior can't keep up? In this episode we examine the question and compare years of experience vs. human experienced years.

It's the beginning of the year and time to do the annual revisiting of my predictions. Not much has changed in 2018, so I spend much of the episode examining some of the current trends. In particular I think the rise of populism in Europe and America is going to make things interesting for the foreseeable future.

For your holiday listening enjoyment I have assembled five stories, nay parables to bring enlightenment and edification during these otherwise dark and gloomy months. You may not always agree with the moral, but you will find some (generally me) doing something dumb in all of them. Enjoy!

Last month wildfires ravaged California, including the inappropriately named Camp Fire which killed 86. Many people want to blame the fires on global warming and the changing climate, while other's think it could be solved to more logging. More likely it's due to fire suppression efforts which have allowed deadwood to accumulate, meaning that when fires do come they are much more destructive. Suppressing fires is not the only place where we're trying to bend nature to our will, and the question I pose in this episode is whether there are other areas where we're accumulating metaphorical deadwood, and risk stockpiling fuel for a conflagration much greater than we expect.

In "The Coddling of the American Mind" Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt discuss the new culture of safety that has developed on campuses around the country, and argue that children and students need challenges and stress and even suffering in their life to develop properly. If we grant their premise, how do we decide how much suffering to introduce? And how do we convince people to accept more suffering into their life? How do we determine the right level of suffering?

Milan M. Ćirković's book The Great Silence is a fantastic exploration of the philosophy and importance of Fermi's Paradox. I spend the first half of this episode doing a review of the book and the second half discussing how my own explanation of the paradox fits in to Ćirković's framework.

Every time we develop a new technology, we take a risk. Some technologies are dangerous and it may be that sometime in the future we will develop a technology which will mean the end of humanity. In a recent paper Bostrom makes this point by using the analogy of drawing balls from an urn. Progress means drawing balls from the urn, and as a result means running this risk.  This is unfortunate because for many people also think growth and progress are the best ways for creating the world we want. Among them, Tyler Cowen who recently published the book Stubborn Attachments. In this episode I compare and contrast these two views. Perhaps we can have growth and avoid bad technology, but as far as we can tell, no one ever has...

I had a discussion with a friend recently who claimed that I other similarly dispassionate blogs (read rationalists) were providing intellectual cover for bad people, in particular men's rights activists and militant incels. I look into that claim, and ultimately find it to be... Listen to the podcast for the dramatic reveal! 

In the 90s there were two theories for the future. Fukuyama's "End of History" and Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations". Now that more than two decades has passed it seems obvious that Huntington was the more prescient. But even Huntington may have insufficiently accounted for the effects of technology on civilizations, particularly it's power to divide civilizations internally, something which is present on everyone's mind as we think about the results of the most recent election. Most people understate the importance of religion, Huntington does not, and this makes things even more complicated.

A recent book asks, "What's Wrong with China?" Well perhaps a lot, but for the purposes of this podcast I'm just looking at how very different China is from the US or the West, far different than most people think. Particularly those people who expect China to smoothly transition to something indistinguishable from a modern western democracy. 

On June 1, 2009 Air France Flight 447 crashed into the mid-atlantic killing all 228 people aboard. In this episode I look at how it happened and whether it provides any larger lessons on the limits of privacy and technology and for the political crisis we're currently facing.

There are a lot of ways to spend our time, money and attention, and all three are limited. How do we decide what to spend them on, how do we decide what to worry about? This is the topic I examine on this episode, using global warming/climate change as one of the big examples. I approach this question with several frameworks in mind including the framework of effective altruism.

Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth is a book about a future where brain emulation becomes commonplace, by Robin Hanson. The future Hanson describes is a mixed bag, and I look at what that says about other transhumanist visions of the future, along with, of course, the very real possibility that none of those visions will come to pass. A position which Hanson’s book also supports though with much less detail. But this position, both because of it’s immediacy and it’s long term downside, is where, I feel, we should be spending the bulk of our attention.

I have long positioned myself as something of a deficit hawk. A few weeks ago I heard a podcast about Modern Monetary Theory, an economics ideology which declares that debts and deficits don't matter. This is not the first time I have heard someone claim that, and my response was always, "But what about inflation?!?" Well it turns out I was wrong. Advocates of MMT aren't ignoring inflation they're arguing that inflation is the only thing you should worry about. This does answer my primary objection, but I think there are still reasons why MMT is a bad idea.

I decide to add myself to the long list of people talking about the Kavanuagh nomination. But I look at it from the standpoint of what standards a Senator might use to make a decision when it really isn't clear who's telling the truth. Spoiler alert: most of them are self-serving and biased.

Recently I attended the Moral and Ethical Leadership Conference put on by the BYU Management Society, the unofficial theme of which appeared to be civility. I take three speeches from the conference: Senator Jeff Flake, artist Eric Dowdle and columnist McKay Coppins and use them as a jumping off point for a discussion of the current state of civility and why it needs to be defended.

On a recent episode of the Art of Manliness Professor Benjamin Ginsberg discusses his book The Value of War and makes the claim that war has several positive values which have been recently overlooked? Is this the case? If so what might those positives be? 

How will people a thousand years from now view this era? Will they see us as visionaries creating utopia or will they see us as hopelessly naive, ignoring obvious risks in favor of selfish short-term cultural gains? As you might imagine, I'm arguing for the latter. Particularly given that we are doing very little to avoid being selfish, or short-term or to identify the risks of changes to the culture. Also it should be noted that I am mostly reframing what Robin Hanson says in this post, so a definite thanks to him.