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I agree. The main problem is that it’s impossible to reliably project out even decades let alone centuries or millennia. So longtermism gives you this blank sla
by api 3y ago
I agree. The main problem is that it’s impossible to reliably project out even decades let alone centuries or millennia. So longtermism gives you this blank slate to tell any “just so story” you want.
Speculating is fine but you can’t use pure speculation to justify things in the real world. That’s the problem.
Truth is that we have no idea about anything much past our own slice of time. In 2000 years we may be extinct, reverted to hunter gatherers, settled across the solar system like in The Expanse, or extinct or kept in zoos by superintelligent posthuman AIs that have expanded out into the cosmos. Or none of the above. Who knows.
- jacquesm 3y agoWe're already outside of the envelope that I envisioned as a kid for the era we are living in and the departure gets more extreme with every year that passes. But we seem to have been unable to outrun wars, greed and outright evil. Those you can definitely count on for the longer term unless we start to actively work against them.
- api 3y agoI don’t think we will be rid of those things until we start understanding how incentives work. Game theory should be taught in high school.
- hef19898 3y agoMaybe we should stop believeing humans could be modeled at all. We are not computers running some software...
- jacquesm 3y agoI think a big part of the problem is that we keep on creating structures where malicious individuals have a disproportionally high chance to end up with their grubby little tentacles on the levers of power. You'd think WWII would teach us that lesson forever but for some strange reason we are immune to absorbing this and we have made that same mistake at least another few 100 times since then. And one of these days one of those idiots is going to kill us all. And for some reason it is always men.
- hef19898 3y agoYeah, sometime someone will do somethind stupid enough to send everything to hell. So far so, simce WW2 that is, we as humanity managed to prevent this. Let's hope we stay that happy!
- jacquesm 3y ago> we as humanity managed to prevent this No we actually did not manage to prevent it. We almost caused it but sheer luck in several cases derailed Armageddon. It could have just as easily happened, and probably more than just as easily (figure about 60:40 with us living in the '40' branch of the multiverse). Pretty good odds though. But over the longer term: not such good odds.
- kortilla 3y agoPower and greed don’t account for much of the violence though. Look at Hamas.
- jacquesm 3y agoReligion will take care of the remainder. And I don't doubt that plenty of Hamas' motivation can ultimately be boiled down to power and greed.
- 3seashells 3y agoYou can build trees of likely scenarios, branching from the now and calculate what capability traversal does to the likelihood of all scenarios if you have a full human behavior model and thus a society model. And it gives you quite surprising answers: Root hardening is op. If a capability increases the risk of societal decline (nukes e.g.) you can increase societies abilities to recover from that by creating a video archive of your civilization techniques aka YouTube. And by increasing the ability to approach scenarios again and again, the likelihood of stable traversal to a scenario with more capabilities increases enormously. The root aka now is hardened against a negative outcome that is likely. Longtermism with good models and no biases is a plus.