Julian Jaynes would say that this is how human consciousness as we know it today has evolved.
Which makes me wonder, what would he say about the internet bubbles we have today. Did we perhaps already reach peak consciousness, and now the pendulum is swinging back? (Probably not, but it's an interesting thought.)
Good question! I didn't actually think about this consciously, but I guess my intuitive assumption is that the sufficiently advanced civilizations are strongly constrained by the laws of physics, which are the same for everyone, regardless of their intelligence.
A genius human inventor living in 21st century could possibly invent a car that is 10x faster than any other car invented so far, or maybe a rocket that is 100x faster than any other rocket. But if an alien civilization already has spaceships that fly at 0.9c, the best their super-minds can do is to increase it to 0.99c, or maybe 0.999c, but even if they get to 0.999999c, it won't make much of a difference if two civilizations on the opposite sides of the galaxy send their bombs at each other.
Similarly, human military in 21st century could invent more powerful bombs, and then maybe better bunkers, and then even more powerful bombs, etc. So the more intelligent side can keep an advantage. But if the alien civilizations invent bombs that can blow up stars, or create black holes and throw them at your solar system, there is probably not much you can do about it. Especially, if they won't only launch the bombs at you, but also at all solar systems around you. Suppose you survive the attack, but all stars within 1000 light years around you are destroyed. How will your civilization advance now? You need energy, and there is a limit on how much energy you can extract from a star; and if you have no more stars, you are out of energy.
Once you get the "theory of everything" and develop technology to exploit nature at that level, there is nowhere further to go. The speed of light is finite. The matter in your light solar system is finite; the amount of energy you can extract from it is finite. If you get e.g. to 1% of the fundamental limits, it means that no invention ever can make you 100x more efficient than you are now. Which means that a civilization that starts with 100x more resources (because they started expanding through the universe earlier, or sacrificed more to become faster) will crush you.
This is not a proof, one could possibly argue that the smarter civilization would e.g. try to escape instead of fighting, or that there must be a way to overcome what seems like the fundamental limitations of physics, like maybe even create your own parallel universe and escape there. But, this is my intuition about how things would work on the galactic scale. If someone throws a sufficient amount of black holes at you, or strips bare all the resources around you, it's game over even for the Space Einstein.
I imagine that nonsentient replicators could reproduce and travel through the universe faster than sentient ones, and speed is crucial for the Grabby Aliens argument.
You probably need sentience to figure out space travel, but once you get that done, maybe the universe is sufficiently regular that you can just follow the same relatively simple instructions over and over again. And even if occasionally you meet an irregularity, such as an intelligent technologically advanced civilization that changed something about their part of the universe, the flood will just go around them, consuming all the resources in their neighborhood, and probably hurting them in the process a lot even if they succeed to survive.
Okay, but why would someone essentially burn down the entire universe? First, we don't know what kind of utility function do the aliens have. Maybe they value something (paperclips? holy symbols?) way more than sentience. Or maybe they are paranoid about potential enemies, and burning down the rest of the universe seems like a reasonable defense to them. Second, it could happen as an accident; with billions of space probes across the universe, random mutations may happen, and the mutants that lost sentience but gained a little speed would outcompete the probes that follow the originally intended design.
Yes, sometimes it is necessary to tell your child, in whatever terms would be most effective right now, to shut the hell up.
I am not sure how many people in the linked thread actually meant what they wrote, and how many were just trolling. But it's fascinating to see people who believe that telling your child "shut up" when you have an important phone call is wrong (and according to one person, sociopathic).
I am a parent, of course.
The only specific advice offered to the parent in given situation was: "simply leave the room when you have a phone call". Multiple people wrote this. Those are probably not parents. Otherwise they might have noticed that kids sometimes have legs, and will use them to follow you to the other room.
In my personal experience, a frequent advice given by people horrified by my parenting style that contradicts their favorite psychological theories is that I should very patiently explain to the child why daddy needs to take the important phone call without being interrupted all the time. Slow and patient explanation is always the way. The practical problem with this advice is that (1) yes, I have already slowly and patiently explained several times in the past why parents should not be interrupted during phone calls; you see, I am not completely incapable of explaining things slowly and patiently; it's just that (2) the moment when I have an important phone call is not the right moment to give (yet another) slow and patient lecture on proper behavior, because, duh, I have an important phone call at the moment.
A thread about how to support new parents, which seems right based on my experiences.
> Don’t: offer to do something that makes more work for them
Specifically, don't do things that need "just a little work to finish".
For example, if you offer to cook someone a lunch, it will probably be appreciated... unless you only deliver a part of it, with detailed instructions on how to prepare the remaining part. "But I did the most difficult part, and only left out the easy part." Yeah, but ordering the entire thing from a restaurant would have been even easier.
I would add to the list:
When you meet a parent outside with a stroller, don't yell "Hello!" at them. The stroller may contain a sleeping baby. Many non-parents fail to realize this, and the urge to be polite is just too strong.
I think what might help is engaging with different kinds of people. A group's pressure is weaker if you also meet people who openly believe that the group is a group of idiots. You can voice your concerns without fearing disapproval; but even if some things are difficult to explain to outsiders, at least you have a mental model of someone who would disagree.
But I also suspect that some people would just develop a different persona for each group, and let themselves be peer-pressured towards different extremes on different occasions.
Scratch is awesome for kids. My kids love it. My older daughter has afternoon lessons at school, and I help her debug her projects if there is a problem. I am not sure how I would teach her, if I had to start from zero.
I found a few videos on how to make games in Scratch, and I learned a lot about Scratch from them, but sometimes the author uses in the algorithm a mathematical expression that seems a bit too complicated for a small child. For example, how to make a moving object stop right before the wall. Like, if it moves 10 pixels each turn, and the wall is 5 pixels ahead, you want it to go 5 pixels at the last step; neither 10 nor 0. The author's solution is to go 10 pixels forward, and then "repeat 10 times: if there is a collision with the wall, go 1 pixel back". (Collisions of pictures are a primitive operation in Scratch.) That sounds trivial, but because the speed could be 10 pixels per turn or -10 pixels for turn, and it's not even guaranteed to be an integer, the algorithm becomes "repeat ceil(abs(V)) times: if there is a collision with the wall, go V/ceil(abs(V)) pixels back", and which point my daughter just says "I don't get it". (This is not a problem with Scratch per se; you could limit the speed to integer, and maybe avoid the absolute value by using an if-statement and doing the positive and negative values separately; and maybe ceil(abs(V)) could be a local variable. I am just saying that the videos are generally great... but you get one or two moments of this per video.)
In a bookstore I found a translation of Carol Vorderman's Computer Coding For Kids, which seems good (so it's going to be a Christmas present); the first 1/3 of the book is Scratch, the remaining 2/3 are Python.
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I like the definition of disorder as domination of public space for private purposes. As I see it, the problem with informal systems of preventing disorder is that some people are resistant to shame; specifically:
Once your neighborhood becomes a favorite place of these, you either need a strong community (the kind that can summon a group of adult men with baseball bats, who would ask the disorderly people to kindly leave and never set their foot in this neighborhood again), or you have to call the police. Or you give up your public space.
No idea whether this applies to your community, but a pattern I have noticed is that when the community is small and faces existential threats, people stick together, but when the community becomes successful, high status members start to fight against each other, which sometimes leads to a collapse of the community. It's because when the community is successful, infighting becomes more profitable.
In context of business, I don't know whether this is actually supported by statistics, but a friend who is an entrepreneur told me that he knows a few examples of companies where the founders cooperated as best friends and worked hard for a few years to make the company profitable... and when the company was ready to make its first million, suddenly each founder was like: "wait a moment, why should I split all that money with these guys? if I could somehow get rid of them and replace them by employees, I could pay the employees peanuts and keep the million for myself!" (But maybe that's a cultural thing in Slovakia, dunno.)
I have seen similar things in art. People working together to start an art journal, or an artistic competition, doing their best to gain some recognition (and grant money), and once the recognition and the grant money is there, three members conspire to kick out the fourth one, then two of them conspire to get rid of the third, etc. The project usually survives (the artistic grants are probably not very flexible; it is difficult to get them, but once you do, they probably stay for a long time), but becomes completely static, as the remaining person or a very small group of people are unable to make it grow, and probably have no motivation to do so; they just extract the rent (in money and prestige).
Another way for a community to fall apart is to be taken over by another. Could be a culture war, but could be simply another hobby. First you have a group that does X. Then new people join who like X but also Y. At first no one sees a problem, or the first people who do are called paranoid, but as more such people come, the group becomes about Y rather than about X, and the few old members who resist are kicked out of it. Then, sometimes it remains as a group about Y, and sometimes it falls apart after the Y people declare a victory and move to a fresh target.
On a longer timescale, communities can die out simply by their members getting old. Of course, everyone gets older all the time, but it's not a problem if the old people are likely to leave (e.g. because they no longer have the free time) and young people keep joining, so the majority of members is young. But sometimes the older members become a majority and the young people just gradually stop joining (because young people usually prefer the company of other young people), and then the problem keeps getting worse, until it literally becomes an old people's club... and then they die, and the club is over. (An effective treatment is to make a new group, consisting only of the young members of the original group; then the new group can be way more successful at recruiting new members.)
Words like "lazy" are fake explanations. They pretend to explain, but all they do is put a label on something. (Notice the urge to explain something without investigating it first.)
How specifically are you lazy? You mention an "urge to stop". How much of that is "push" and how much is "pull"? Would you be willing to do some other kind of boring work instead, for example do the dishes instead of the thing you are supposed to do? If yes, I think it casts some doubt on the "saving energy" explanation.
I suspect it might be more useful to think about the emotions associated with the work you are avoiding, and to observe how those emotions appear. Maybe you could do something about it?
Another thing that is different in modern society compared to the jungle is that the rewards are no longer immediate. You find a berry, you can eat it. You kill a mammoth, you... can't start eating it right now, you need to cook the meat first... but at least you see the meat right there in front of you. Modern work often lacks these rewards. (And various online activities provide them: you get the replies, karma points, etc.)
So maybe you could motivate yourself by contemplating the greater context of the work you are supposed to do. Or to find some detail that makes you happy, and focus on that. Or try to make your working environment more pleasant somehow.
After sleeping on it, it seems to me that the topic were are talking about is "staring into the abyss": whether, when, and how to do it properly, and for what outcome.
The easiest way is to not do it at all. Just pretend that everything is flowers and rainbows, and refuse to talk about the darker aspects of reality.
This is what we typically do with little children. A part of that is parental laziness: by avoiding difficult topics we avoid difficult conversations. But another part is that children are not cognitively ready to process nontrivial topics, so we try to postpone the debates about darker things until later, when they get the capability. Some lazy parents overdo it; some kids grow up living in a fairy tale world. Occasional glimpses of darkness can be dismissed as temporary exceptions to the general okay-ness of the world. "Grandma died, but now she is happy in Heaven." At this level, people who try to disrupt the peace are dismissed relatively gently, accused of spoiling the mood and frightening the kids.
When this becomes impossible because the darkness pushes its way beyond our filters, the next lazy strategy is to downplay the darkness. Either it is not so bad, or there is some silver lining to everything. "Death gives meaning to life." "The animals don't mind dying so that we can have meat to eat; they understand it is their role in the system." "Slavery actually benefits the blacks; they do not have the mental capacity to survive without a master." "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger." At this point the pushback against those trying to disrupt the peace is stronger; people are aware that their rationalizations are fragile. Luckily, we can reframe the rationalizations as a sign of maturity, and dismiss those who disagree with us as immature. "When you grow up, you will realize that..."
Another possible reaction is trying to join the abyss. Yes, bad things happen, but since they are inevitable, there is no point worrying about that. Heck, if there is a cosmic rule saying that things will always be as bad as possible, there is no point feeling guilty about contributing to the badness; if you won't do it, someone else will! Resigning on your values is the true wisdom, and cynicism is how you signal being wise; trying to follow your values is immature. The reaction to people trying to follow their values is hostile, because (a) they make us seem bad in contrast, showing that following your values is actually possible... but if we succeed at destroying them, it proves that they were wrong, and (b) hey, there is nothing intrinsically bad at hurting people; life is suffering, sooner or later someone is going to teach you the lesson, it might as well be me, at least I will take some enjoyment from it.
Another reaction is throwing a tantrum. Yes, the abyss is there, and no, I am not going to make peace with it. I have no idea what should I do about that, but I know that I need to do something. So I am going to do some random thing; the more extreme the better, because it clearly signals that I am opposed to things being bad. Fight! Fight! And if all that happens as a result of my random fighting is that some innocent people get hurt and no problem actually gets solved... hey, my intentions were pure, and at least I did something! Don't you dare accusing me of being a part of the problem.
And... the last option that comes to my mind is accepting the situation for what it is. Looking at the abyss, unflinching. Realizing that there is not much you can do about it. Trying to figure out the best way anyway, and following it, quite aware that it is too little compared to the size of the problems. Perhaps if more people joined you... but they won't, because that's how thing are, and that's how we got here in the first place. At the end, you may successfully contribute to some small improvement that probably doesn't change the overall situation much. But it made some things better for some people. It was probably all you could do, given your options and capabilities. It was not enough. It was something.
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From this perspective, I see Vassar in the "throwing a tantrum" category. Yes, he is doing something, but he is optimizing for signal rather than the true thing. Becoming a drug addict, developing schizophrenia, killing yourself -- those are all costly signals of engaging with the abyss. But sending the strongest signal was not the point. It doesn't make you stronger. It doesn't make humanity stronger. It doesn't really address the problem that you so strongly signal caring about.
I assumed we can do better than this. This is some teenage-level shit, and maybe it's downstream of living in the Bay Area, where saying "don't do drugs" makes you uncool, and saying "it's better to be sane" makes you ableist. I still think you should stop taking drugs (or never start taking them) and protect your sanity. Look for the ways to become stronger, and don't let people like Vassar hurt your friends. I didn't think that this needs to be said explicitly, but apparently it is, so here I said it.
Everyone, please, don't be stupid. You probably came here because you wanted to do better. Remember that.
Sounds interesting.
When I think about making YouTube videos, it seems to me that doing it at high technical level (nice environment, proper lights and sounds, good editing, animations, etc.) is a lot of work, so it would be good to split the work at least between 2 people: 1 who understands the ideas and creates the script, and 1 who does the editing.