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Any individual would agree with you and herein lies the crux: who is "we"? If "we" is not "the entire earth population" those that optimize for "happiness, hea

Any individual would agree with you and herein lies the crux: who is "we"? If "we" is not "the entire earth population" those that optimize for "happiness, health, learning, or anything else like that" lose to those, for whatever reasons or circumstances, optimize on price alone (arguably to the detriment of their happiness, health, etc). Case in point: outsourcing: 10 devs in the west cost more than 10 devs elsewhere in the world, meaning a global market for dev skills will move elsewhere, where those devs are cheaper for a reason (quality of life, living standards, infrastructure, are not spent on, so labour is cheaper). Of course globalists will argue that this ultimately will "level", look at incomes going up where we outsource-to for example, but I think this misses the point. We will just keep optimizing, pointing the needle so to speak to the next cheapest place, which might in the future be a country that used to be "more expensive" but now, forced to compete, lowers its standards to accomodate the market. We're stuck in a Malthusian Trap. Thinking we can simply escape it by not playing the game is missing the point: the question we need to solve is: "how do we stop competing for resources as individuals or arbitrary groups (neighbourhoord/cities/countries/continents), and start having a real shared understanding of our habits, genetic behaviour and use of resources".

api 6y ago
> Any individual would agree with you and herein lies the crux: who is "we"? "We" is a complex system. It is nobody and everyone. I really don't think humans are actually intelligent. I think we are extremely clever, but a truly intelligent species would learn to countermand the emergent properties of the systems in which it embeds itself and take charge of its own history. We are not intelligent enough to do that. Clever means we can understand one-cause-one-effect or few-causes-one-effect, and you can see that this is how all our engineered systems are built. They are very sophisticated versions of "hit thing with rock." Our machines are full of single parts with single functions. Living systems on the other hand are all-causes-cause-all-effects fully concurrent feedback loops. Every part has every function with varying weights, like the weights in a neural network. That's totally beyond our intelligence to understand. We can barely do parallel programming with a few threads... this is like parallel programming where every instruction executes at once. So far what look like attempts to control our destiny, like communism and fascism, are nothing but resentment driven tribal purges thinly veiled in complex language. They've done more harm than good. Right now just leaving things alone is possibly the best we can do. BTW I think this is also why the promised dividends from sequencing the human genome and understanding genetics have not materialized. Genomes and the living phenotypes they help form are complex all-causes-all emergent systems much like our societies and economies. We are not cognitively capable of understanding them. Studying biology is like studying alien technology from a civilization a billion years beyond ours.

api 6y ago

> Any individual would agree with you and herein lies the crux: who is "we"? "We" is a complex system. It is nobody and everyone. I really don't think humans are actually intelligent. I think we are extremely clever, but a truly intelligent species would learn to countermand the emergent properties of the systems in which it embeds itself and take charge of its own history. We are not intelligent enough to do that. Clever means we can understand one-cause-one-effect or few-causes-one-effect, and you can see that this is how all our engineered systems are built. They are very sophisticated versions of "hit thing with rock." Our machines are full of single parts with single functions. Living systems on the other hand are all-causes-cause-all-effects fully concurrent feedback loops. Every part has every function with varying weights, like the weights in a neural network. That's totally beyond our intelligence to understand. We can barely do parallel programming with a few threads... this is like parallel programming where every instruction executes at once. So far what look like attempts to control our destiny, like communism and fascism, are nothing but resentment driven tribal purges thinly veiled in complex language. They've done more harm than good. Right now just leaving things alone is possibly the best we can do. BTW I think this is also why the promised dividends from sequencing the human genome and understanding genetics have not materialized. Genomes and the living phenotypes they help form are complex all-causes-all emergent systems much like our societies and economies. We are not cognitively capable of understanding them. Studying biology is like studying alien technology from a civilization a billion years beyond ours.