We Are Not Saved

Last week I compared life to a video game. A video game where the number of players continues to increase, meaning that our collective knowledge of how best to play the game should also be increasing, except that at the same time the version of game we’re playing is also changing. As an aside I also mentioned that it’s becoming harder to know if we’re winning. This week I’d like to take that thought and expand upon it. What does it mean to be winning the video game? Or, to go a step further why are we even playing the game?

If humans gradually figure out how best to live, then we should give a lot of weight to what has already been figured out over the years. But what if we end up with more humans? Do the behaviors of a billion current people count more than a million historical people? At first glance the answer is an obvious yes, but what if we add in the complication that current conditions are rapidly changing? Is it possible that behavior can't keep up? In this episode we examine the question and compare years of experience vs. human experienced years.

It's the beginning of the year and time to do the annual revisiting of my predictions. Not much has changed in 2018, so I spend much of the episode examining some of the current trends. In particular I think the rise of populism in Europe and America is going to make things interesting for the foreseeable future.

For your holiday listening enjoyment I have assembled five stories, nay parables to bring enlightenment and edification during these otherwise dark and gloomy months. You may not always agree with the moral, but you will find some (generally me) doing something dumb in all of them. Enjoy!

Last month wildfires ravaged California, including the inappropriately named Camp Fire which killed 86. Many people want to blame the fires on global warming and the changing climate, while other's think it could be solved to more logging. More likely it's due to fire suppression efforts which have allowed deadwood to accumulate, meaning that when fires do come they are much more destructive. Suppressing fires is not the only place where we're trying to bend nature to our will, and the question I pose in this episode is whether there are other areas where we're accumulating metaphorical deadwood, and risk stockpiling fuel for a conflagration much greater than we expect.

In "The Coddling of the American Mind" Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt discuss the new culture of safety that has developed on campuses around the country, and argue that children and students need challenges and stress and even suffering in their life to develop properly. If we grant their premise, how do we decide how much suffering to introduce? And how do we convince people to accept more suffering into their life? How do we determine the right level of suffering?

Milan M. Ćirković's book The Great Silence is a fantastic exploration of the philosophy and importance of Fermi's Paradox. I spend the first half of this episode doing a review of the book and the second half discussing how my own explanation of the paradox fits in to Ćirković's framework.

Every time we develop a new technology, we take a risk. Some technologies are dangerous and it may be that sometime in the future we will develop a technology which will mean the end of humanity. In a recent paper Bostrom makes this point by using the analogy of drawing balls from an urn. Progress means drawing balls from the urn, and as a result means running this risk.  This is unfortunate because for many people also think growth and progress are the best ways for creating the world we want. Among them, Tyler Cowen who recently published the book Stubborn Attachments. In this episode I compare and contrast these two views. Perhaps we can have growth and avoid bad technology, but as far as we can tell, no one ever has...

I had a discussion with a friend recently who claimed that I other similarly dispassionate blogs (read rationalists) were providing intellectual cover for bad people, in particular men's rights activists and militant incels. I look into that claim, and ultimately find it to be... Listen to the podcast for the dramatic reveal! 

In the 90s there were two theories for the future. Fukuyama's "End of History" and Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations". Now that more than two decades has passed it seems obvious that Huntington was the more prescient. But even Huntington may have insufficiently accounted for the effects of technology on civilizations, particularly it's power to divide civilizations internally, something which is present on everyone's mind as we think about the results of the most recent election. Most people understate the importance of religion, Huntington does not, and this makes things even more complicated.