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Intelligence and rational thought is useful, but like any strategy it has its tradeoffs and limitations. No amount of intelligence can overcome the chaos of lo

Intelligence and rational thought is useful, but like any strategy it has its tradeoffs and limitations. No amount of intelligence can overcome the chaos of long time horizons, especially when we're talking about human civilization. IMHO it's reasonable to pick a long-term problem/risk and focus on solving it. But it's pure hubris to think rationality will give you anything approaching high confidence of what the biggest problems and risks actually are on a 20-50 year time horizon, let alone 200-500 years or longer. The whole reason we even have time to think this way is because we are at the peak of an industrial civilization that has created a level of abundance that allows a lot of people a lot of time to think. But the whole situation that we live in is not stable at all, "progress" could continue, or we could hit a peak and regress. As much as we can see a lot of long-term trajectories (eg. peak oil, global warming), we really have no idea what will be the triggers and inflection points that change the social fabric in ways that are unforeseeable and quickly invalidate whatever prior assumptions all that deep thinking was resting upon. I mean 50 years ago we thought overpopulation was the biggest risk, and that thinking has completely flipped even without a major trajectory change for industrial civilization in that time.

lisper 1y ago
I think one can levy a much more specific critique of rationalism: rationalism is in some sense self-defeating. If you are rational you will necessarily conclude that the fundamental dynamic that drives the (interesting parts of) the universe is Darwinian evolution, which is not rational. It blindly selects for reproductive fitness at the expense of all else. If you are a gene, you can probably produce more offspring in an already-industrialized environment by making brains that lean more towards misogyny and sexual promiscuity than gender equality and intellectual achievement. The real conflict here is between Darwinism and enlightenment ideals. But I have yet to see any self-styled Rationalists take this seriously.
- mettamage 1y ago
  I always liken this to that we’re all asteroids floating in space. There’s no free will and everything is determined. We just see the whole thing unfold from one conscious perspective. Emotionally I don’t subscribe to this view. Rationally I do. My critique for rational people is that they don’t seem to fully take experience into account. It’s assumptions + rationality + experience/data + whatever strong inclinations one has that seems to be the full picture for me.
  - Retric 1y ago
    > no free will That always seemed like a meaningless argument to me. To an outside observer free will is indistinguishable from a random process over some range of possibilities. You aren’t going to randomly go to sleep with your hand in a fire, there’s some hard coded biology preventing that choice but that only means human behavior isn’t completely random, hardly a groundbreaking discovery. At the other end we have no issues making an arbitrary decision where there’s no way to predict what the better choice is. So what exactly does free will bring to the table that we’re missing without it? Some sort of mystical soul, well what if that’s also deterministic? Unpredictability is useful in game theory, but computers can get that from a hardware RNG based on quantum processes like radioactive decay, so it doesn’t mean much. Finally, subjectively the answer isn’t clear so what difference does it make?
    - mettamage 1y ago
      > That always seemed like a meaningless argument to me. Same as that is not the lived experience. I notice that I care about free choice. The idea that there's no free will may be a pessimistic outlook to some but to me it's a strictly neutral one. It used to be a bit negative, until I looked more closely that there's a difference between looking at a situation objectively and having a lived experience. When it comes to my inclinations and how I want to live life, lived experience takes precedence. I don't have my thoughts sharp on it, but I don't think the concept even exists philosophically, but I think that's also what you're getting at. It's a conceptual remnant from the past.
      - adastra22 1y ago
        "Free choice" is the first step towards the solution to this paradox: free will is what a deterministic choice feels like from the inside. The popular notion of free will is that our decisions are undetermined, which must imply that there is a random element to them. But though that is the colloquial meaning, it doesn't line up with what people say they want: you want to make your choice according to your own reasons. You want free choice. But unless your own reasoning includes a literal throw of the dice, your justifications deterministically decide the outcome. "Free will" is the ability to make your own choices, and for most people most of the time, those choices are deterministic given the options and knowledge available. Free will and determinism are not only compatible, but necessarily so. If your choices weren't deterministic, it wouldn't be free will.
- stuartjohnson12 1y ago
  To the contrary, here's a series of essays on the subject of evolutionary game theory, the incentives created by competition, and its consequences for human wellbeing: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS "Moloch hasn't won" is a lengthy critique of the argument you are making here.
  - lisper 1y ago
    That doesn't seem to be on point to me. I'm not talking about being "caught in bad equilibria". My assertion is that rationalism itself is not stable, that the (apparent) triumph of rationalism since the Enlightenment was a transient, not an equilibrium. And one of the reasons it was a transient is that self-styled rationalists believed (and apparently still believe) that rationalism will inevitably triumph because it is rational, because it is in more intimate contact with reality than religion and superstition. But this is wrong because it overlooks the fact that what triumphs in the long run is simply reproductive fitness. Being in contact with reality can be actively harmful to reproductive fitness if it leads you to, say, decide not to have kids because you are pessimistic about the future.
    - smallnamespace 1y ago
      > Being in contact with reality can be actively harmful to reproductive fitness if it leads you to, say, decide not to have kids because you are pessimistic about the future. The fact that you can write this sentence, consider it to be true, and yet still hold in your head the idea that the future might be bad but it's still important to have children suggests that "contact with reality" is not a curse.
    - fc417fc802 1y ago
      > it overlooks the fact that what triumphs in the long run is simply reproductive fitness. Why can't that observation be taken into account? Isn't the entire point of the approach accounting for all inputs to the extent possible? I think you are making invalid assumptions about the motivations or goals or internal state or etc of the actors which you are then conflating with the approach itself. That there are certain conditions under which the approach is not an optimal strategy does not imply that it is never competitive under any. The observation is then that rationalism requires certain prerequisites before it can reliably out compete other approaches. That seems reasonable enough when you consider that a fruit fly is unlikely to be able to successfully employ higher level reasoning as a survival strategy.
- munksbeer 1y ago
  I hesitate to nitpick, but Darwinism (as far as I know) is not really the term to use because Darwin's theory was limited to life on earth. Only later was the concept generalised into "natural selection" or "survival of the fittest". I'm not sure I entirely understand what you're arguing here, but I absolutely do agree that the most powerful force in the universe is natural selection.
  - lisper 1y ago
    The term "Darwinian evolution" applies to any process that comprises iterated replication with random mutation followed selection for some quality metric. Darwin himself would not have defined it that way, but he still deserves the credit for being the first to recognize and document the power of this simple process.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    The modern understanding of Darwin's theory (even the original theory, not necessarily neo-Darwinian extensions of it) apply to the origins of life and non-biological systems as well. Darwin himself was largely concerned with biology and restricted his published writings to that topic, but even he saw the application to the origin of life, and implications for religion. Even if he hadn't, we generally still use the discoverer's name to a theory even when applied to a domain outside their original area of concern. The term "survival of the fittest" predates Darwin's Origin of Species, and was adopted by Darwin within his lifetime, btw.
- imtringued 1y ago
  You got Darwinism exactly backwards. Darwinism and nature do not select like an algorithm. There is no cost function in reality and no population selection and reproduction algorithm. What you're seeing is the illusion of selection due to selection bias. If gender equality and intellectual achievement don't produce children, then that isn't "darwinism selecting rationality out". You can't expect the continued existence of finite lifespan organisms if there are no replacement organisms. Raising children is hard work. The people who believe in gender equality and intellectual achievement made the decision to not want more of themselves, particularly when their belief in gender equality entails not wanting male offspring. The alternative is essentially freeloading and expecting others, who do not share the beliefs, to produce children for you and also to teach them the "enlightened" belief of forcing "enlightened" beliefs onto others (note the circularity, the initial conditions are usually irrelevant and often just a fig leaf to perpetuate the status quo).
  - lisper 1y ago
    > no population selection and reproduction algorithm I never said there was. Darwin said it because he didn't know anything about genes, but that mistake was corrected by Dawkins. > If gender equality and intellectual achievement don't produce children, then that isn't "darwinism selecting rationality out". Why not? > The people who believe in gender equality and intellectual achievement made the decision to not want more of themselves That's the wrong way to look at it. Individuals are not the unit of reproduction. Genes are. Genes that build brains that want to have (and raise) children are more likely to propagate than genes that build brains that don't, all else being equial. So it is not rationality per se that is the problem -- rationality can provide a reproductive advantage because it lets you, for example, build technology. The problem is that non-rational brains can parasitically benefit from the phenotype of rational brains, at least for a while. But in the long run this is not a stable equilibrium.
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago
  Darwinism isn't a weakness of rationality, teleology has fine tuning problem, while darwinism is minimally fine tuned to work from scratch, which can be said to be optimal. Also darwinism doesn't select for reproductive fitness, it's only a proxy goal; true goal is survival, so you can produce more offspring only in a way compatible with true goal.
  - lisper 1y ago
    > Darwinism isn't a weakness of rationality I didn't say it was. I said that the Rationalist community is not taking the implications of Darwinism into account when they choose where to focus their attention. This is what leads them to fixate on hostile AI and the MWI when what they should be worried about is the rise of MAGA. But not only is that not what they are worried about, many self-styled Rationalists are Trump supporters.
- naasking 1y ago
  > If you are a gene, you can probably produce more offspring in an already-industrialized environment by making brains that lean more towards misogyny and sexual promiscuity than gender equality and intellectual achievement. The fact that humans are intelligent at all and Enlightenment peoples currently dominate the world suggests otherwise.
  - lisper 1y ago
    > Enlightenment peoples currently dominate the world Huh??? How do you figure? AFAICT the world is dominated by Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin (if you reckon by power) or Christians and Muslims (if you reckon by population). None of these individuals or groups can be properly categorized as "Enlightenment peoples", certainly not with a capital E. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
    - naasking 1y ago
      Western nations have dominated the world for centuries, in science, technology and cultural dominance. Russia is a bit player and has been for some time. Even if China were to ascend to equal prominence as the US, it would be an outlier in an otherwise clear trend.
      - lisper 1y ago
        > Western nations have dominated the world for centuries I guess that depends on what you consider "the world". It makes no sense to even talk about the West dominating "the world" before 1492. The first truly global Western empire was Britain, but it was also the last. It was replaced by the U.S. but it was never really global. Even at the height of its power after WW2 the USSR was a credible rival. After the fall of the USSR in 1991 the U.S. was the sole undisputed superpower for a little while, but that came to an abrupt end on September 11, 2001 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I think you are over-extrapolating the past into the future. The mindset and culture that produced U.S. hegemony in the 20th century seems to me to be mostly extinct. The U.S. was indeed ruled by rationalism (more or less) from the time of its founding through the mid-to-late 20th century, but there is precious little of that left today. Certainly the power structure in the U.S. today is actively hostile to rationalism, and I don't see a whole lot of rationalism in play in the opposition either.
- Rastonbury 1y ago
  Couple of point to that, mainly why should one have to follow darwinian evolution just because we are a product of that. It's similar to the natural law argument against homosexuality, that unnatural sex is wrong. The argument against that is natural biology does not inform what is good or what we should do. I'm sure you would be able to predict what a rationalise will say when you ask them what future they prefer: one where we maximises for the number of humans or one with fewer humans but better lives
  - lisper 1y ago
    > why should one have to follow darwinian evolution That depends on what you mean by "follow". You have to "follow" Darwinian evolution for the same reason you have to "follow", say, the law of gravity. That doesn't mean you can't build airplanes and spacecraft, but you still have to acknowledge and "follow" the law of gravity. You can't just glue feathers to your arms, jump off a cliff, and hope for the best. (Actually, rationalists aren't even gluing feathers to their arms. They are doing the equivalent of jumping off a cliff because they just don't believe gravity applies to them.) [UPDATE] > unnatural sex is wrong The problem with that argument is that homosexuality is not unnatural. Many, many species have homosexual relations. Accounting for this is a little bit challenging, but the fact is undeniable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals
    - mensetmanusman 1y ago
      Pointing to other species can be futile since they also eat their young and are horrible partners :)
      - lisper 1y ago
        Well, yeah, the whole "against nature" argument is bogus to begin with. But I think a counter-argument is stronger if it can be made even while accepting the other side's premises.
- dtj1123 1y ago
  An issue with this line of reasoning is that Darwinian evolution fails to accurately describe real evolutionary processes. A counterexample is meiotic drive, where alleles disrupt the meiotic process in order to favour their own transmission, even if the alleles in question ultimately produce a less fit organism. Whilst this is not an inherently positive observation, I think it does illustrate that the fatalistic picture you're painting here is incorrect. There's room for tentative optimism.
  - lisper 1y ago
    > Darwinian evolution fails to accurately describe real evolutionary processes. That is not correct. Darwin did make a mistake, but it was not the fundamental dynamics of the process, but that he chose the wrong unit of selection. Darwin thought that selection selected for individuals or species when in fact it selects for genes. Richard Dawkins is the person who figured this out, but Darwin knew nothing about genes (OoS was published only three years after Gregor Mendel's work) so he still gets the credit nothwithsanding this mistake.
    - dtj1123 1y ago
      I don't think you've understood my point. I'm not suggesting that selection doesn't occur, but rather that selection is only part of the story. Have a look at gene flow or genetic drift if you want to know more, they're both examples of non-selective processes that influence the genetic makeup of a population.
      - lisper 1y ago
        > selection is only part of the story Of course. Variation is the other part. > gene flow or genetic drift Those are two mechanisms by which variation occurs. This is not something Darwin got wrong, he just didn't have all the data. Genes were unknown in Darwin's time.
        dtj1123 1y ago
        Which of selection or variation does meiotic drive fall under? Clearly it isn't Darwinian selection, because it can favour transmission of genes which are not conducive to survival. Clearly it isn't variation, because it tends to reduce the degree of genetic polymorphism within a population.
- TheAncientGeek 1y ago
  But rationalism , if the modern sort, isn't supposed to be descriptive, it's supposed to be normative -- rationality lets you win.
  - lisper 1y ago
    The problem is not with rationalism, it's with Rationalism (with a capital R), the cult-like phenomenon that has grown up around rationalism that fetishizes things like Bayes's theorem, hostile AI, Roko's basilisk, and the MWI.
throwaway2037 1y ago
I used to think that massive, very long term droughts might cause serious instability, but I have since changed my mind. In highly developed nations, the amount of irrigation infrastructure built in the last 100 years is simple stunning. Plus, national agriculture research programmes are always researching how to use less water and grow the same amount of product. About drinking water: Rich places just build desalination plants. Sure, it is much more expensive than natural water sources (rivers, lakes, aquifers), but not expensive enough to cause political instability or serious economic harm. To be clear: Everything I wrote is from the perspective of highly developed nations. In middle income nations and below, droughts are incredibly challenging to overcome. The political and economic impacts can be enormous.
- eesmith 1y ago
  'America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow' (https://waterwatch.org/america-is-using-up-its-groundwater-like-theres-no-tomorrow/ https://waterwatch.org/america-is-using-up-its-groundwater-l...) to support that stunning irrigation infrastructure. You should not interpret that historical success to imply future success as it depended on non-sustainable groundwater extraction. Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer > Many farmers in the Texas High Plains, which rely particularly on groundwater, are now turning away from irrigated agriculture as pumping costs have risen and as they have become aware of the hazards of overpumping. > Sixty years of intensive farming using huge center-pivot irrigators has emptied parts of the High Plains Aquifer. > as the water consumption efficiency of the center-pivot irrigator improved over the years, farmers chose to plant more intensively, irrigate more land, and grow thirstier crops rather than reduce water consumption--an example of the Jevons Paradox in practice How will the Great Plains farmers get water once the remaining groundwater is too expensive to extract? Salt Lake City cannot simply build desalination plants to fix its water problem. I expect the bad experiences of Okies during the internal migration of the Dust Bowl will be replicated once the temporary (albeit century-long) relief of using fossil water is exhausted.
  - throwaway2037 1y ago
    You raise an interesting point about inland population centers. My guess: Household daily water usage is a tiny fraction compared to Ag. As a result, at some point, I assume that states will slowly raise the cost of Ag water, until the most wasteful practices disappear. Example: They could move to drip irrigation that Israel uses, but it must at least 10x more expensive.

lisper 1y ago

I think one can levy a much more specific critique of rationalism: rationalism is in some sense self-defeating. If you are rational you will necessarily conclude that the fundamental dynamic that drives the (interesting parts of) the universe is Darwinian evolution, which is not rational. It blindly selects for reproductive fitness at the expense of all else. If you are a gene, you can probably produce more offspring in an already-industrialized environment by making brains that lean more towards misogyny and sexual promiscuity than gender equality and intellectual achievement. The real conflict here is between Darwinism and enlightenment ideals. But I have yet to see any self-styled Rationalists take this seriously.

mettamage 1y ago
I always liken this to that we’re all asteroids floating in space. There’s no free will and everything is determined. We just see the whole thing unfold from one conscious perspective. Emotionally I don’t subscribe to this view. Rationally I do. My critique for rational people is that they don’t seem to fully take experience into account. It’s assumptions + rationality + experience/data + whatever strong inclinations one has that seems to be the full picture for me.
- Retric 1y ago
  > no free will That always seemed like a meaningless argument to me. To an outside observer free will is indistinguishable from a random process over some range of possibilities. You aren’t going to randomly go to sleep with your hand in a fire, there’s some hard coded biology preventing that choice but that only means human behavior isn’t completely random, hardly a groundbreaking discovery. At the other end we have no issues making an arbitrary decision where there’s no way to predict what the better choice is. So what exactly does free will bring to the table that we’re missing without it? Some sort of mystical soul, well what if that’s also deterministic? Unpredictability is useful in game theory, but computers can get that from a hardware RNG based on quantum processes like radioactive decay, so it doesn’t mean much. Finally, subjectively the answer isn’t clear so what difference does it make?
  - mettamage 1y ago
    > That always seemed like a meaningless argument to me. Same as that is not the lived experience. I notice that I care about free choice. The idea that there's no free will may be a pessimistic outlook to some but to me it's a strictly neutral one. It used to be a bit negative, until I looked more closely that there's a difference between looking at a situation objectively and having a lived experience. When it comes to my inclinations and how I want to live life, lived experience takes precedence. I don't have my thoughts sharp on it, but I don't think the concept even exists philosophically, but I think that's also what you're getting at. It's a conceptual remnant from the past.
    - adastra22 1y ago
      "Free choice" is the first step towards the solution to this paradox: free will is what a deterministic choice feels like from the inside. The popular notion of free will is that our decisions are undetermined, which must imply that there is a random element to them. But though that is the colloquial meaning, it doesn't line up with what people say they want: you want to make your choice according to your own reasons. You want free choice. But unless your own reasoning includes a literal throw of the dice, your justifications deterministically decide the outcome. "Free will" is the ability to make your own choices, and for most people most of the time, those choices are deterministic given the options and knowledge available. Free will and determinism are not only compatible, but necessarily so. If your choices weren't deterministic, it wouldn't be free will.
stuartjohnson12 1y ago
To the contrary, here's a series of essays on the subject of evolutionary game theory, the incentives created by competition, and its consequences for human wellbeing: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS "Moloch hasn't won" is a lengthy critique of the argument you are making here.
- lisper 1y ago
  That doesn't seem to be on point to me. I'm not talking about being "caught in bad equilibria". My assertion is that rationalism itself is not stable, that the (apparent) triumph of rationalism since the Enlightenment was a transient, not an equilibrium. And one of the reasons it was a transient is that self-styled rationalists believed (and apparently still believe) that rationalism will inevitably triumph because it is rational, because it is in more intimate contact with reality than religion and superstition. But this is wrong because it overlooks the fact that what triumphs in the long run is simply reproductive fitness. Being in contact with reality can be actively harmful to reproductive fitness if it leads you to, say, decide not to have kids because you are pessimistic about the future.
  - smallnamespace 1y ago
    > Being in contact with reality can be actively harmful to reproductive fitness if it leads you to, say, decide not to have kids because you are pessimistic about the future. The fact that you can write this sentence, consider it to be true, and yet still hold in your head the idea that the future might be bad but it's still important to have children suggests that "contact with reality" is not a curse.
  - fc417fc802 1y ago
    > it overlooks the fact that what triumphs in the long run is simply reproductive fitness. Why can't that observation be taken into account? Isn't the entire point of the approach accounting for all inputs to the extent possible? I think you are making invalid assumptions about the motivations or goals or internal state or etc of the actors which you are then conflating with the approach itself. That there are certain conditions under which the approach is not an optimal strategy does not imply that it is never competitive under any. The observation is then that rationalism requires certain prerequisites before it can reliably out compete other approaches. That seems reasonable enough when you consider that a fruit fly is unlikely to be able to successfully employ higher level reasoning as a survival strategy.
munksbeer 1y ago
I hesitate to nitpick, but Darwinism (as far as I know) is not really the term to use because Darwin's theory was limited to life on earth. Only later was the concept generalised into "natural selection" or "survival of the fittest". I'm not sure I entirely understand what you're arguing here, but I absolutely do agree that the most powerful force in the universe is natural selection.
- lisper 1y ago
  The term "Darwinian evolution" applies to any process that comprises iterated replication with random mutation followed selection for some quality metric. Darwin himself would not have defined it that way, but he still deserves the credit for being the first to recognize and document the power of this simple process.
- adastra22 1y ago
  The modern understanding of Darwin's theory (even the original theory, not necessarily neo-Darwinian extensions of it) apply to the origins of life and non-biological systems as well. Darwin himself was largely concerned with biology and restricted his published writings to that topic, but even he saw the application to the origin of life, and implications for religion. Even if he hadn't, we generally still use the discoverer's name to a theory even when applied to a domain outside their original area of concern. The term "survival of the fittest" predates Darwin's Origin of Species, and was adopted by Darwin within his lifetime, btw.
imtringued 1y ago
You got Darwinism exactly backwards. Darwinism and nature do not select like an algorithm. There is no cost function in reality and no population selection and reproduction algorithm. What you're seeing is the illusion of selection due to selection bias. If gender equality and intellectual achievement don't produce children, then that isn't "darwinism selecting rationality out". You can't expect the continued existence of finite lifespan organisms if there are no replacement organisms. Raising children is hard work. The people who believe in gender equality and intellectual achievement made the decision to not want more of themselves, particularly when their belief in gender equality entails not wanting male offspring. The alternative is essentially freeloading and expecting others, who do not share the beliefs, to produce children for you and also to teach them the "enlightened" belief of forcing "enlightened" beliefs onto others (note the circularity, the initial conditions are usually irrelevant and often just a fig leaf to perpetuate the status quo).
- lisper 1y ago
  > no population selection and reproduction algorithm I never said there was. Darwin said it because he didn't know anything about genes, but that mistake was corrected by Dawkins. > If gender equality and intellectual achievement don't produce children, then that isn't "darwinism selecting rationality out". Why not? > The people who believe in gender equality and intellectual achievement made the decision to not want more of themselves That's the wrong way to look at it. Individuals are not the unit of reproduction. Genes are. Genes that build brains that want to have (and raise) children are more likely to propagate than genes that build brains that don't, all else being equial. So it is not rationality per se that is the problem -- rationality can provide a reproductive advantage because it lets you, for example, build technology. The problem is that non-rational brains can parasitically benefit from the phenotype of rational brains, at least for a while. But in the long run this is not a stable equilibrium.
GoblinSlayer 1y ago
Darwinism isn't a weakness of rationality, teleology has fine tuning problem, while darwinism is minimally fine tuned to work from scratch, which can be said to be optimal. Also darwinism doesn't select for reproductive fitness, it's only a proxy goal; true goal is survival, so you can produce more offspring only in a way compatible with true goal.
- lisper 1y ago
  > Darwinism isn't a weakness of rationality I didn't say it was. I said that the Rationalist community is not taking the implications of Darwinism into account when they choose where to focus their attention. This is what leads them to fixate on hostile AI and the MWI when what they should be worried about is the rise of MAGA. But not only is that not what they are worried about, many self-styled Rationalists are Trump supporters.
naasking 1y ago
> If you are a gene, you can probably produce more offspring in an already-industrialized environment by making brains that lean more towards misogyny and sexual promiscuity than gender equality and intellectual achievement. The fact that humans are intelligent at all and Enlightenment peoples currently dominate the world suggests otherwise.
- lisper 1y ago
  > Enlightenment peoples currently dominate the world Huh??? How do you figure? AFAICT the world is dominated by Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin (if you reckon by power) or Christians and Muslims (if you reckon by population). None of these individuals or groups can be properly categorized as "Enlightenment peoples", certainly not with a capital E. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
  - naasking 1y ago
    Western nations have dominated the world for centuries, in science, technology and cultural dominance. Russia is a bit player and has been for some time. Even if China were to ascend to equal prominence as the US, it would be an outlier in an otherwise clear trend.
    - lisper 1y ago
      > Western nations have dominated the world for centuries I guess that depends on what you consider "the world". It makes no sense to even talk about the West dominating "the world" before 1492. The first truly global Western empire was Britain, but it was also the last. It was replaced by the U.S. but it was never really global. Even at the height of its power after WW2 the USSR was a credible rival. After the fall of the USSR in 1991 the U.S. was the sole undisputed superpower for a little while, but that came to an abrupt end on September 11, 2001 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I think you are over-extrapolating the past into the future. The mindset and culture that produced U.S. hegemony in the 20th century seems to me to be mostly extinct. The U.S. was indeed ruled by rationalism (more or less) from the time of its founding through the mid-to-late 20th century, but there is precious little of that left today. Certainly the power structure in the U.S. today is actively hostile to rationalism, and I don't see a whole lot of rationalism in play in the opposition either.
Rastonbury 1y ago
Couple of point to that, mainly why should one have to follow darwinian evolution just because we are a product of that. It's similar to the natural law argument against homosexuality, that unnatural sex is wrong. The argument against that is natural biology does not inform what is good or what we should do. I'm sure you would be able to predict what a rationalise will say when you ask them what future they prefer: one where we maximises for the number of humans or one with fewer humans but better lives
- lisper 1y ago
  > why should one have to follow darwinian evolution That depends on what you mean by "follow". You have to "follow" Darwinian evolution for the same reason you have to "follow", say, the law of gravity. That doesn't mean you can't build airplanes and spacecraft, but you still have to acknowledge and "follow" the law of gravity. You can't just glue feathers to your arms, jump off a cliff, and hope for the best. (Actually, rationalists aren't even gluing feathers to their arms. They are doing the equivalent of jumping off a cliff because they just don't believe gravity applies to them.) [UPDATE] > unnatural sex is wrong The problem with that argument is that homosexuality is not unnatural. Many, many species have homosexual relations. Accounting for this is a little bit challenging, but the fact is undeniable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals
  - mensetmanusman 1y ago
    Pointing to other species can be futile since they also eat their young and are horrible partners :)
    - lisper 1y ago
      Well, yeah, the whole "against nature" argument is bogus to begin with. But I think a counter-argument is stronger if it can be made even while accepting the other side's premises.
dtj1123 1y ago
An issue with this line of reasoning is that Darwinian evolution fails to accurately describe real evolutionary processes. A counterexample is meiotic drive, where alleles disrupt the meiotic process in order to favour their own transmission, even if the alleles in question ultimately produce a less fit organism. Whilst this is not an inherently positive observation, I think it does illustrate that the fatalistic picture you're painting here is incorrect. There's room for tentative optimism.
- lisper 1y ago
  > Darwinian evolution fails to accurately describe real evolutionary processes. That is not correct. Darwin did make a mistake, but it was not the fundamental dynamics of the process, but that he chose the wrong unit of selection. Darwin thought that selection selected for individuals or species when in fact it selects for genes. Richard Dawkins is the person who figured this out, but Darwin knew nothing about genes (OoS was published only three years after Gregor Mendel's work) so he still gets the credit nothwithsanding this mistake.
  - dtj1123 1y ago
    I don't think you've understood my point. I'm not suggesting that selection doesn't occur, but rather that selection is only part of the story. Have a look at gene flow or genetic drift if you want to know more, they're both examples of non-selective processes that influence the genetic makeup of a population.
    - lisper 1y ago
      > selection is only part of the story Of course. Variation is the other part. > gene flow or genetic drift Those are two mechanisms by which variation occurs. This is not something Darwin got wrong, he just didn't have all the data. Genes were unknown in Darwin's time.
      - dtj1123 1y ago
        Which of selection or variation does meiotic drive fall under? Clearly it isn't Darwinian selection, because it can favour transmission of genes which are not conducive to survival. Clearly it isn't variation, because it tends to reduce the degree of genetic polymorphism within a population.
TheAncientGeek 1y ago
But rationalism , if the modern sort, isn't supposed to be descriptive, it's supposed to be normative -- rationality lets you win.
- lisper 1y ago
  The problem is not with rationalism, it's with Rationalism (with a capital R), the cult-like phenomenon that has grown up around rationalism that fetishizes things like Bayes's theorem, hostile AI, Roko's basilisk, and the MWI.

throwaway2037 1y ago

I used to think that massive, very long term droughts might cause serious instability, but I have since changed my mind. In highly developed nations, the amount of irrigation infrastructure built in the last 100 years is simple stunning. Plus, national agriculture research programmes are always researching how to use less water and grow the same amount of product. About drinking water: Rich places just build desalination plants. Sure, it is much more expensive than natural water sources (rivers, lakes, aquifers), but not expensive enough to cause political instability or serious economic harm. To be clear: Everything I wrote is from the perspective of highly developed nations. In middle income nations and below, droughts are incredibly challenging to overcome. The political and economic impacts can be enormous.

eesmith 1y ago
'America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow' (https://waterwatch.org/america-is-using-up-its-groundwater-like-theres-no-tomorrow/ https://waterwatch.org/america-is-using-up-its-groundwater-l...) to support that stunning irrigation infrastructure. You should not interpret that historical success to imply future success as it depended on non-sustainable groundwater extraction. Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer > Many farmers in the Texas High Plains, which rely particularly on groundwater, are now turning away from irrigated agriculture as pumping costs have risen and as they have become aware of the hazards of overpumping. > Sixty years of intensive farming using huge center-pivot irrigators has emptied parts of the High Plains Aquifer. > as the water consumption efficiency of the center-pivot irrigator improved over the years, farmers chose to plant more intensively, irrigate more land, and grow thirstier crops rather than reduce water consumption--an example of the Jevons Paradox in practice How will the Great Plains farmers get water once the remaining groundwater is too expensive to extract? Salt Lake City cannot simply build desalination plants to fix its water problem. I expect the bad experiences of Okies during the internal migration of the Dust Bowl will be replicated once the temporary (albeit century-long) relief of using fossil water is exhausted.
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  You raise an interesting point about inland population centers. My guess: Household daily water usage is a tiny fraction compared to Ag. As a result, at some point, I assume that states will slowly raise the cost of Ag water, until the most wasteful practices disappear. Example: They could move to drip irrigation that Israel uses, but it must at least 10x more expensive.