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I agree with your point about scientific breakthroughs coming via pure curiosity. I’m just saying that we can’t forget the human agency at play here. We didn’t

I agree with your point about scientific breakthroughs coming via pure curiosity. I’m just saying that we can’t forget the human agency at play here. We didn’t have to build the atom bomb, and it wasn’t exactly simple to turn insights from physics into the atom bomb (it took a team of the best scientists and technologists many years). Also, we can influence the direction of how technology is used. Even setting up the atom bomb to be used involves a ton of decisions and implementation that can be questioned and molded by individual people. Essentially I believe that fear of powerful technology comes from an irrational distrust in people as incompetent or malicious. Same with desire for powerful technology to control or replace people (e.g. algocracy). It seems to reflect a lot of the rhetoric and motivations of the eugenics movement. But the problem is, it can perhaps be a self-fulfilling prophecy. People are capable of being incredibly competent if encouraged to do so. So I think we should go in that direction, of empowerment and freedom rather than control or replacement. And if our governing structures or institutions or culture are making it difficult to go in that direction, we should fight those.

trashtester 4y ago
The Manhatten project was started after Einstein (a pacifist) urged Roosevelt that Hitler could build it first. https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1939-1942/einstein_letter.htm#:~:text=Einstein%20had%20written%20to%20inform,extremely%20powerful%20bombs%22%20was%20conceivable https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Event.... At the time Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, about 50000 Chinese people died every week due to Japanese occupation. If the alternative were an invasion, those two bombs probably saved millions of lives. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/world-war-two-casualties-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/world-war... Von Neumann lobbied to make sure that USA/USSR would end up with a situation of Mutually Assured Destruction. He believed that would be the best way to avoid large wars between the Soviets and NATO. In all these cases the development/use/threat of nukes were done with, arguably, the best of intentions. In their minds, they were employing agency to help protect the world. I would argue that the eugenic movement was the same. There may have been some malice, but there was definitely many eugenicists that truely believed that eugenics was the only way to prevent dysgengics, followed by a malthusian collapse. One could even argue that Hitler saw himself as the hero of Germany, the one that would save Germany from enemy "tribes", foreign and domestic (jews). If so, he may have seen the Holocaust as a heoric and brave act, and it was certainly executed with extreme competency. Mao's cultural revolution, Pol Pot Cambodian genocide, and the Hutu's genocide vs the Tutsies were all very similar to the Holocaust, even if less known. In all cases, a group of Others were seen as a threat, and eliminated. In most of these cases, I think the perpetrators saw themselves as the heroes, almost like the heroes of Minas Tirith fighting the hordes of Mordor. It is extremely hard to come up with a way to live in the world that minimizes harm. And, I think, it is those who has the strongest conviction that they are the Good (TM) struggeling against Evil, that has the greatest tendency to cause harm, as they are convinced that the end justifies the means.
- iroh2727 4y ago
  Yeah I agree that no one acts in a knowingly malicious way. But considering for example racists or eugenicists, it's important to note that no one is born a racist or eugenicist. Those mentalities are always either (1) something other people convince them is the right mentality or (2) a kind of coping mechanism, a way to maintain our belief that we are good or we are competent in the face of some negative signals that may say otherwise. Thus, given the fact that people do change (otherwise they wouldn't have changed to such an unnatural state to begin with), we should rely on the agency of people calling other people out and people being able to increase their self-awareness and learn from their mistakes. I mean, if you disagree with someone, you don't have to convince them, you just have to convince others to join your side. People with different beliefs standing up for them is what creates balance in the world. Of your above examples, I also agree with your point about it always being some group vs the 'others'. But again, none of those people were born with those desires to harm others. It was something developed and something unnatural, likely the response to some negative events. But I don't think we shouldn't distrust human agency altogether just because some people use theirs to cause harm. And we don't have to calculate precisely the total benefit or harm of our future actions in order to have permission to express our agency. I guess it's really about reaching a state of self-awareness to identify if we're acting in an authentic way. Coming back to technology, I'd say with people that want to automate away or control people, they should reflect on why they've come to distrust other people in general. I mean they certainly trust themselves to try to automate away or control other people. Why not trust others similarly? What events or people in their life led them to that mindset?
  - trashtester 4y ago
    > it's important to note that no one is born a racist or eugenicist. I would agree about eugenicist, that one requires some understanding about heritability. But for racism (or similar prejudices based on gender, sexuality, etc), my personal experience, with my own children, indicate that the tendency to group and judge people by their appearance is something that kids to automatically around age 2-3, and that they have to learn to stop. (Kind of like they automatically learn to lie and fight, and have to learn to stop doing that) And since my children are girls with brown skin in an environment where more than half the kids are white, they focus(ed) a lot on their own skin color, and how that makes people different, just as they do about gender and gender expression. Simply by living in the world, they pick up gender and gender expression. If they see violations of gender-typical behaviour or expression, their first reaction is negative, and they have to be told that it is ok for a boy to hit a boy. As for the racism part, luckily I have only seen mild expressions of that beyond the basic tendency to use skin color to categorize people. There was maybe one occurance a few years back with my oldest daughter, which made me sit down with her and explain what racism is and why it is not ok. (When she understood that racism could be used against her mother and herself, this was pretty easy) I think if you travel a bit around the world, especially outside of Europe and the Americas. If you go small towns and villages in Africa, India, South-East Asia, China, Korea and Japan. If you get to know the locals there, not as a tourist, but on a more personal level, you will find that in most places, some kind of racist thinking exists almost everywhere. If you travel with a person of a different race from yours, it will become extra obvious. Lets say that one of you is white, one is black, asians are likely to treat you quite differently. In some places, there is strong prejudice against Indian people, in some place prejudice agasint Chinese people, etc. Now if one of you is openly gay or transsexual, the experience would be even mor extreme, an might turn dangerous in some places. In other places (like Thailand) a transsexual person might receive even less attention than in the most progressive places in the US, though. (In Thailand, it is so normal to be a trans-woman, that coming out of the closet is not seen as an achievement. So even the positive feedback that a trans person might get around progressives in the West would be gone. The thais would just instantly accept that the trans woman is socially a woman.) Oh, and if you think that all those slightly racist or sexist african or asian people are evil people just because of the racism or sexism, maybe you need to look in the mirror. They simply live in a place that has never had the kind of inclusivity movement that western countries have had after WW2. They are not evil, they simply live in a culture* where some kinds of prejudice is still the norm. Get to know them, and you will find that many of them are still good people with good intentions and kind hearts. * Not saying that all asians are the same, I mean if you do end up in some village somewhere where the local culture tolerates or even encourages racism or sexism, that village's culture is what I refer to.

trashtester 4y ago

The Manhatten project was started after Einstein (a pacifist) urged Roosevelt that Hitler could build it first. https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1939-1942/einstein_letter.htm#:~:text=Einstein%20had%20written%20to%20inform,extremely%20powerful%20bombs%22%20was%20conceivable https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Event.... At the time Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, about 50000 Chinese people died every week due to Japanese occupation. If the alternative were an invasion, those two bombs probably saved millions of lives. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/world-war-two-casualties-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/world-war... Von Neumann lobbied to make sure that USA/USSR would end up with a situation of Mutually Assured Destruction. He believed that would be the best way to avoid large wars between the Soviets and NATO. In all these cases the development/use/threat of nukes were done with, arguably, the best of intentions. In their minds, they were employing agency to help protect the world. I would argue that the eugenic movement was the same. There may have been some malice, but there was definitely many eugenicists that truely believed that eugenics was the only way to prevent dysgengics, followed by a malthusian collapse. One could even argue that Hitler saw himself as the hero of Germany, the one that would save Germany from enemy "tribes", foreign and domestic (jews). If so, he may have seen the Holocaust as a heoric and brave act, and it was certainly executed with extreme competency. Mao's cultural revolution, Pol Pot Cambodian genocide, and the Hutu's genocide vs the Tutsies were all very similar to the Holocaust, even if less known. In all cases, a group of Others were seen as a threat, and eliminated. In most of these cases, I think the perpetrators saw themselves as the heroes, almost like the heroes of Minas Tirith fighting the hordes of Mordor. It is extremely hard to come up with a way to live in the world that minimizes harm. And, I think, it is those who has the strongest conviction that they are the Good (TM) struggeling against Evil, that has the greatest tendency to cause harm, as they are convinced that the end justifies the means.

iroh2727 4y ago
Yeah I agree that no one acts in a knowingly malicious way. But considering for example racists or eugenicists, it's important to note that no one is born a racist or eugenicist. Those mentalities are always either (1) something other people convince them is the right mentality or (2) a kind of coping mechanism, a way to maintain our belief that we are good or we are competent in the face of some negative signals that may say otherwise. Thus, given the fact that people do change (otherwise they wouldn't have changed to such an unnatural state to begin with), we should rely on the agency of people calling other people out and people being able to increase their self-awareness and learn from their mistakes. I mean, if you disagree with someone, you don't have to convince them, you just have to convince others to join your side. People with different beliefs standing up for them is what creates balance in the world. Of your above examples, I also agree with your point about it always being some group vs the 'others'. But again, none of those people were born with those desires to harm others. It was something developed and something unnatural, likely the response to some negative events. But I don't think we shouldn't distrust human agency altogether just because some people use theirs to cause harm. And we don't have to calculate precisely the total benefit or harm of our future actions in order to have permission to express our agency. I guess it's really about reaching a state of self-awareness to identify if we're acting in an authentic way. Coming back to technology, I'd say with people that want to automate away or control people, they should reflect on why they've come to distrust other people in general. I mean they certainly trust themselves to try to automate away or control other people. Why not trust others similarly? What events or people in their life led them to that mindset?
- trashtester 4y ago
  > it's important to note that no one is born a racist or eugenicist. I would agree about eugenicist, that one requires some understanding about heritability. But for racism (or similar prejudices based on gender, sexuality, etc), my personal experience, with my own children, indicate that the tendency to group and judge people by their appearance is something that kids to automatically around age 2-3, and that they have to learn to stop. (Kind of like they automatically learn to lie and fight, and have to learn to stop doing that) And since my children are girls with brown skin in an environment where more than half the kids are white, they focus(ed) a lot on their own skin color, and how that makes people different, just as they do about gender and gender expression. Simply by living in the world, they pick up gender and gender expression. If they see violations of gender-typical behaviour or expression, their first reaction is negative, and they have to be told that it is ok for a boy to hit a boy. As for the racism part, luckily I have only seen mild expressions of that beyond the basic tendency to use skin color to categorize people. There was maybe one occurance a few years back with my oldest daughter, which made me sit down with her and explain what racism is and why it is not ok. (When she understood that racism could be used against her mother and herself, this was pretty easy) I think if you travel a bit around the world, especially outside of Europe and the Americas. If you go small towns and villages in Africa, India, South-East Asia, China, Korea and Japan. If you get to know the locals there, not as a tourist, but on a more personal level, you will find that in most places, some kind of racist thinking exists almost everywhere. If you travel with a person of a different race from yours, it will become extra obvious. Lets say that one of you is white, one is black, asians are likely to treat you quite differently. In some places, there is strong prejudice against Indian people, in some place prejudice agasint Chinese people, etc. Now if one of you is openly gay or transsexual, the experience would be even mor extreme, an might turn dangerous in some places. In other places (like Thailand) a transsexual person might receive even less attention than in the most progressive places in the US, though. (In Thailand, it is so normal to be a trans-woman, that coming out of the closet is not seen as an achievement. So even the positive feedback that a trans person might get around progressives in the West would be gone. The thais would just instantly accept that the trans woman is socially a woman.) Oh, and if you think that all those slightly racist or sexist african or asian people are evil people just because of the racism or sexism, maybe you need to look in the mirror. They simply live in a place that has never had the kind of inclusivity movement that western countries have had after WW2. They are not evil, they simply live in a culture* where some kinds of prejudice is still the norm. Get to know them, and you will find that many of them are still good people with good intentions and kind hearts. * Not saying that all asians are the same, I mean if you do end up in some village somewhere where the local culture tolerates or even encourages racism or sexism, that village's culture is what I refer to.