11 ms·

From the excellent UR essay [1]: Okay, let's apply a gross reality check. You're an alien. You're observing Earth with an infinitely powerful telescope fr

by enko 13y ago

From the excellent UR essay [1]: Okay, let's apply a gross reality check. You're an alien. You're observing Earth with an infinitely powerful telescope from Alpha Centauri. You have a simple question. Since 1950, has human civilization - or American civilization, which amounts to pretty much the same these days - advanced or declined? Apparently the easiest way for Sam Altman to answer the question is to trade it for a different one. He is not alone in this. He asks: since 1950, has human technology advanced or declined? Clearly, the alien, you, I, and Sam Altman all have the same answer to this question. Any question with an obvious answer is a stupid question. "Is an iPad more advanced than a Smith-Corona?" is a stupid question. Who asks stupid questions? Obviously, blithering idiots. But we can compose an interesting question by factoring out the stupid question. Which world would Sam Altman rather live in? 2013, with iPads and teh Internet? Or 1950 - with iPads and teh Internet? In a sense, this 1950 is just as real as the "real" 1950. Neither exists. Sam Altman cannot pack his bags and move to either the real 1950 or my imaginary super-1950. Both exist only as thought experiments. It is not hard to construct or define the super-1950, though - one run of a time machine, with a printout of Wikipedia, would be pretty much all the real 1950 needed. Send the technology back to 1945, and you'll have iPads by '55 at the latest. Those guys got things done. The interesting (and scary) question this thought-experiment asks is whether, aside from technical progress, human civilization has advanced or declined since 1950. In actual reality, this too is a stupid question. The answer is no less obvious - I assert. [1] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/sam-altman-is-not-blithering-idiot.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/sam-...

twoodfin 13y ago
This is just a more clever way to project the same nostalgia as adventured's comments. What evidence do we have that 1950's America was a font of innovation and civilization that 2013 cannot match? "Civilization" is an odd term for a place with millions living under legalized segregation, and an entire half of the population largely consigned to domestic labor. Not to mention, much of the prosperity of the '50's was a "fringe benefit" of most of the rest of the industrialized world blowing itself up for the second time in 30 years. And of course there's survivorship bias: No one remembers all the terrible inventions of the '50's. (Had they come up with Smell-O-Vision yet?) All we remember is the transistor radio and the hydrogen bomb. Look back on the 2010's in 60 years and you'll see all sorts of amazing stuff that made its mark on the future, I'm sure.
- adventured 13y ago
  It's not about nostalgia. It's: what do you get for your labor, what can it buy and for how much, what kind of savings do you have, how hard do both parents have to work to make ends meet, what does an education cost and what income can you get for it, how many jobs are available? Simple questions that can be easily answered with real data that was available in 1970 and today.
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    I started to make a list of all the things you can get in 2013 that you couldn't get at any price in 1970 (notable ones included Gleevac and a Blu-ray set of the Godfather trilogy) but I am just going to give up. If you think you'd be happier living as the median American in 1970 than as the median American in 2013, especially in the Socratic satisfaction sense of knowing the experiences of both, I just can't imagine how to convince you otherwise.
    - enko 13y ago
      With respect, I think you're coming at this from the wrong angle. In my opinion, availability of blurays, or whatever, has no correlation whatsoever with the general health and happiness of a society. In fact, the essay I linked specifically seeks to factor that out, on the presumption - that I share - that it is basically irrelevant. Are you a miserable, miserable man today because you can't get 2025's GreenRay UHD or super-ultra-holo-3d or the iPad 20 or whatever? Would any of those things make you a long-term happier person? Of course not. Technological knick-knacks do not bring long-term life satisfaction. Convenience does not equal happiness. You will not die with a smile on your lips because you own a retina display. I'd advise you to read the essay I linked. It might change your thinking on a few things.
      - twoodfin 13y ago
        If I get a certain variety of leukemia, and I'm in a society which hasn't discovered Gleevac yet, I will probably die. That's a pretty awful consequence. Not getting to see the Godfather movies in glorious 1080p is perhaps a lesser tragedy, but all these little things add up. Sure, there are all sorts of "holistic" measurements of society's overall happiness, but I'll come back to the Socratic question: Would you really be happier in 1970, knowing what you're missing from 2013? And again, we're assuming straight up that you're not in some woefully underprivileged demographic that would be seriously screwed by having to live under 1970's mores.
mturmon 13y ago
"Send the technology back to 1945, and you'll have iPads by '55 at the latest." Complete horseshit.
- gaius 13y ago
  In your phone you have a million times the computing power these guys used to launch rockets into space. You use it to launch birds at pigs.
  - mturmon 13y ago
    Not a downvoter, but your observation is (a) false, and (b) irrelevant, if it were true. To fill in the gap in what I wrote: Even if the physics and the roadmap were known, the infrastructure and background engineering expertise needed to go from vacuum tubes to fabs making cheap ICs at nanoscale in volume would take longer than a decade to build. Moore's law has been in operation since about 1958. That's 36 density doublings, at one per 18 months. You don't get 36 doublings in 10 years, because that would be one doubling every 3 months. The only reason I bothered to comment is that I tire of the outlandish claims and "everything you know is wrong" posturing of UR. It was really only worth the original two-word rebuttal.
    - gaius 13y ago
      You're talking about people who went from a standing start (almost) to nuclear weapons and satellites in orbit in a similar timescale.
      - btilly 13y ago
        Do you really think that people have become that much stupider? Moore's Law has been going for decades. Multiple Nobel prizes have been awarded for discoveries that made its continued existence possible. The fact that you don't understand the accomplishment does not make it less significant. I am typing on a small device whose internal electronics exceed in complexity all electronic devices that existed in 1940. Combined. Yet this is a commodity item. Stop and think about that. And then you might recognize the absurdity of claiming that a few tips and a can do attitude would have created the results of decades of modern technological progress in 10 years.
blahedo 13y ago
There are at least two massive fallacies embedded in this quote (and afaict in the larger essay, though I did not read the whole thing): - Due to better modern reporting (and the 24h news cycle), despite generally lower rates of crimes and various other bad stuff, we feel like their rates are higher now, so we get all nostalgic for the 1950s. - More importantly, 1950 was a good time for certain kinds of people and not so much for others. Within the US, internet or no, 1950 is not a great time to travel to if you are LGBT, disabled, female, non-Christian, or ill with any of a variety of chronic conditions, and it's especially shitty if you are black (or, to a lesser extent, of another minority). Outside the US, Europe and Japan were still basically starving from post-war deprivation, the Soviet bloc was hitting the worst parts of Stalinism, China was approaching something like a thousand-year low in terms of civilisation, and most of the rest of the world were moribund colonies of the dying European empires. If you're a middle-class able-bodied white straight Christian (preferably Protestant) man in the US, though, sure, 1950 sounds super.
- scarmig 13y ago
  So what you're saying is that most people who valorize the 1950's are assuming they'll be Don Draper and not some nameless black daughter with no economic or educational prospects whose dad was just lynched?
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    I think the people who valorize the 60's should actually listen to Don Draper. From some 5'th season episode, roughly paraphrased (working from memory): Roger Sterling: "Buying a Jaguar is how you know you've arrived." Don Draper: "I grew up on a farm. Indoor plumbing is how I know I've arrived."
- pdonis 13y ago
  despite generally lower rates of crimes and various other bad stuff You have to be careful with statistics. One of the thought experiments posed later in that same Moldbug post is this: how much of the Earth's inhabited area is safe for a person to wander about at night, alone? And how much was in 1950? His conclusion is that much more of the Earth's inhabited area (in particular, large parts of many cities--Detroit is his example) is unsafe now vs. in 1950. Crime rate statistics don't usually get broken down to that level of detail, so you might not see the pattern there. (Although in other posts Moldbug also quotes the statistic that the crime rate in Britain today is something like 50 times higher than it was in the Victorian era.)

by enko 13y ago

twoodfin 13y ago

This is just a more clever way to project the same nostalgia as adventured's comments. What evidence do we have that 1950's America was a font of innovation and civilization that 2013 cannot match? "Civilization" is an odd term for a place with millions living under legalized segregation, and an entire half of the population largely consigned to domestic labor. Not to mention, much of the prosperity of the '50's was a "fringe benefit" of most of the rest of the industrialized world blowing itself up for the second time in 30 years. And of course there's survivorship bias: No one remembers all the terrible inventions of the '50's. (Had they come up with Smell-O-Vision yet?) All we remember is the transistor radio and the hydrogen bomb. Look back on the 2010's in 60 years and you'll see all sorts of amazing stuff that made its mark on the future, I'm sure.

adventured 13y ago
It's not about nostalgia. It's: what do you get for your labor, what can it buy and for how much, what kind of savings do you have, how hard do both parents have to work to make ends meet, what does an education cost and what income can you get for it, how many jobs are available? Simple questions that can be easily answered with real data that was available in 1970 and today.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  I started to make a list of all the things you can get in 2013 that you couldn't get at any price in 1970 (notable ones included Gleevac and a Blu-ray set of the Godfather trilogy) but I am just going to give up. If you think you'd be happier living as the median American in 1970 than as the median American in 2013, especially in the Socratic satisfaction sense of knowing the experiences of both, I just can't imagine how to convince you otherwise.
  - enko 13y ago
    With respect, I think you're coming at this from the wrong angle. In my opinion, availability of blurays, or whatever, has no correlation whatsoever with the general health and happiness of a society. In fact, the essay I linked specifically seeks to factor that out, on the presumption - that I share - that it is basically irrelevant. Are you a miserable, miserable man today because you can't get 2025's GreenRay UHD or super-ultra-holo-3d or the iPad 20 or whatever? Would any of those things make you a long-term happier person? Of course not. Technological knick-knacks do not bring long-term life satisfaction. Convenience does not equal happiness. You will not die with a smile on your lips because you own a retina display. I'd advise you to read the essay I linked. It might change your thinking on a few things.
    - twoodfin 13y ago
      If I get a certain variety of leukemia, and I'm in a society which hasn't discovered Gleevac yet, I will probably die. That's a pretty awful consequence. Not getting to see the Godfather movies in glorious 1080p is perhaps a lesser tragedy, but all these little things add up. Sure, there are all sorts of "holistic" measurements of society's overall happiness, but I'll come back to the Socratic question: Would you really be happier in 1970, knowing what you're missing from 2013? And again, we're assuming straight up that you're not in some woefully underprivileged demographic that would be seriously screwed by having to live under 1970's mores.

mturmon 13y ago

"Send the technology back to 1945, and you'll have iPads by '55 at the latest." Complete horseshit.

gaius 13y ago
In your phone you have a million times the computing power these guys used to launch rockets into space. You use it to launch birds at pigs.
- mturmon 13y ago
  Not a downvoter, but your observation is (a) false, and (b) irrelevant, if it were true. To fill in the gap in what I wrote: Even if the physics and the roadmap were known, the infrastructure and background engineering expertise needed to go from vacuum tubes to fabs making cheap ICs at nanoscale in volume would take longer than a decade to build. Moore's law has been in operation since about 1958. That's 36 density doublings, at one per 18 months. You don't get 36 doublings in 10 years, because that would be one doubling every 3 months. The only reason I bothered to comment is that I tire of the outlandish claims and "everything you know is wrong" posturing of UR. It was really only worth the original two-word rebuttal.
  - gaius 13y ago
    You're talking about people who went from a standing start (almost) to nuclear weapons and satellites in orbit in a similar timescale.
    - btilly 13y ago
      Do you really think that people have become that much stupider? Moore's Law has been going for decades. Multiple Nobel prizes have been awarded for discoveries that made its continued existence possible. The fact that you don't understand the accomplishment does not make it less significant. I am typing on a small device whose internal electronics exceed in complexity all electronic devices that existed in 1940. Combined. Yet this is a commodity item. Stop and think about that. And then you might recognize the absurdity of claiming that a few tips and a can do attitude would have created the results of decades of modern technological progress in 10 years.

blahedo 13y ago

There are at least two massive fallacies embedded in this quote (and afaict in the larger essay, though I did not read the whole thing): - Due to better modern reporting (and the 24h news cycle), despite generally lower rates of crimes and various other bad stuff, we feel like their rates are higher now, so we get all nostalgic for the 1950s. - More importantly, 1950 was a good time for certain kinds of people and not so much for others. Within the US, internet or no, 1950 is not a great time to travel to if you are LGBT, disabled, female, non-Christian, or ill with any of a variety of chronic conditions, and it's especially shitty if you are black (or, to a lesser extent, of another minority). Outside the US, Europe and Japan were still basically starving from post-war deprivation, the Soviet bloc was hitting the worst parts of Stalinism, China was approaching something like a thousand-year low in terms of civilisation, and most of the rest of the world were moribund colonies of the dying European empires. If you're a middle-class able-bodied white straight Christian (preferably Protestant) man in the US, though, sure, 1950 sounds super.

scarmig 13y ago
So what you're saying is that most people who valorize the 1950's are assuming they'll be Don Draper and not some nameless black daughter with no economic or educational prospects whose dad was just lynched?
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  I think the people who valorize the 60's should actually listen to Don Draper. From some 5'th season episode, roughly paraphrased (working from memory): Roger Sterling: "Buying a Jaguar is how you know you've arrived." Don Draper: "I grew up on a farm. Indoor plumbing is how I know I've arrived."
pdonis 13y ago
despite generally lower rates of crimes and various other bad stuff You have to be careful with statistics. One of the thought experiments posed later in that same Moldbug post is this: how much of the Earth's inhabited area is safe for a person to wander about at night, alone? And how much was in 1950? His conclusion is that much more of the Earth's inhabited area (in particular, large parts of many cities--Detroit is his example) is unsafe now vs. in 1950. Crime rate statistics don't usually get broken down to that level of detail, so you might not see the pattern there. (Although in other posts Moldbug also quotes the statistic that the crime rate in Britain today is something like 50 times higher than it was in the Victorian era.)