We Are Not Saved

This week I had the flu, so I decided to take the low energy approach of covering three topics briefly, rather than one in depth. I start off talking about the new LDS First Presidency, than move to the recent excitement about Steven Pinker, and finally provide on update on the progress of the Pervnado. What all of these topics have in common is that we don't appear to be reaching any kind of equilibrium point. Both sides appear to just be getting angrier, and the question, as always is how is it going to end?

I spend this episode commenting on Scott Alexander's epic Meditations on Moloch post. In particular I look at the way his conception of Moloch interacts with religion and Fermi's paradox.

My annual prediction episode, of course since I have a set of permanent predictions, mostly I'm looking at whether 2017 brought any of them any closer to completion. There was some progress with AI, and with nuclear war getting more likely, but nothing earth-shattering. On top of the raw predictions I explain why the future is dominated by Black swans and being antifragile is the only way to deal with unexpected and impactful events because the future is not going to go the way we think it will.

I revisit Fermi's Paradox and my explanation for it, in light of the second edition of Stephen Webb's "If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens...Where Is Everybody? Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life". I find several places, where in my opinion Webb shows a lack of imagination. Then as a Christmas gift to myself I explain how too great of a focus on social justice may be keeping us from getting off of our own planet.

Another issue on the latest explosion of accusations of sexual harassment, which I've decided to gather under the term Pervnado (no, I did not coin it.) In this episode I lump together some things which didn't make it into the previous episode, including whether supervisors and co-workers of the perpetrators will also end up facing consequences. How far back things will extend (in particular whether the Pervnado will come for Bill Clinton). But the biggest thing I look at is the subjectivity of the accusations. And how, once unleashed, it's a weapon which may not be a discriminating as people hoped.

In this episode I examine the current spike in allegations of sexual harassment, with the attendant consequences. And while totally agreeing that it's a big problem I worry that people might be getting swept into a mania, where innocent people might be suffering. Of course this is not something unheard of. Back in 1841 Charles Mackay wrote a book about it, and from that day to this, even though the severity may have decreased we still suffer from the occasional witch hunt. Is the current spate of allegations in any danger of drifting into that territory?

Rationality: AI to Zombies is a book with an ideology, but how effective is it. While I don't especially agree that Bayesian Rationality is a better individual ideology than a religion like Christianity, even if it were, how applicable is it to the average individual, or even the below average individual. For an ideology to be successful, it can't just appeal to the elites. It has to be something that can be understood and applied at all levels. This episode dives into the way in which religion already fills that role.

I recently finished the book Rationality: AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky, and this episode is the first part of my review. In this episode I spend most of the time comparing rationality, as championed by Yudkowsky with Antifragility as championed by Taleb. In particular I take issue with Yudkowsky's focus on "winning" and also the lake of any methodology for dealing with the difference between rare outcomes with large impacts and rare outcomes with minimal impact.

Technology solves a lot of our problems, this is something everyone knows. But it also creates a lot of problems, though generally those problems are more subtle and take longer to manifest, though in the end there is no law which says that the benefits provided technology have to outweigh the problems created by it. In this episode I specifically look at the idea of accumulated negative mutations, and the promises and dangers of germline/genetic engineering.

Russian meddling in the election via the medium of Facebook ads has been much in the news lately. This episode examines whether social media advertising is disproportionately effective, after concluding that it is, it examines why that might be and what we should do about it.