What Do You Think of the Transhumana?

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

i enjoyed this, like, i don't have a lot of experience reading slate sarkodeks. Scott alexander agrees with it's just for him like a small subset of the problems that just face rational agents trying to coordinate in a land where there are limited resources. And what this essay does is run through all the ways in which these roles co ordination problems manifest themselves and also some different ways that people have tried to address the problem. I would think like im prised that i've read more of hisstai, it's just lazy. But he thinks that like capitalism is the problem, when it's just like life that's the problem, like human ife that

David and Tamler wind their way through the long-requested “Meditations on Moloch” by Scott Alexander, a comprehensive account of the coordination problems (personified by Allan Ginsberg’s demon-entity Moloch) that lead to human misery and values tossed out the window. Does Alexander’s rationalist conception of human nature ignore the work of VBW favorites like Joe Henrich and Robert Frank? Is he a little too friendly to the neo-social Darwinism view of some guy named Nick Land? And oh no, why does he have to go transhumanist at the end?! Plus, we talk about the unique comic vision of Norm Macdonald and why we loved him.