Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[wirehead-wannabe]

> Although the method’s success rate was about 3.5%, experts in the field are calling the study a “stunning achievement” that could potentially “eradicate infertility” if it can be applied in humans. The ability to make artificial eggs from any cell in the body could allow women who lack viable eggs or male-male couples to have genetic children of their own. “Reproductive age” may become obsolete.

Oh great, let’s just take the breaks off of the Quiverfull problem completely.

[ozymandias271]

I am not sure why you think this is a big issue?

In the short run: the set “has ten kids” selects really hard for smart, highly religious, nonconformist people who take ideas seriously. With the exception of the second thing, I’m not sure why anyone in this community would object. It doesn’t seem like desire-to-be-Quiverfull is genetic: the religions in which people have ten kids don’t seem to have particularly high retention rates, particularly given that they’re willing to e.g. not educate their children to get them to stay.

If you’re like “eventually the world will be full of people who have evolved to want lots of kids because the others don’t reproduce, and then overpopulation”, yes, but an allele reaching fixation takes long enough that I’d be surprised if we were still meat by the time it happened, and if we’re not meat this is irrelevant. And I’m honestly uncertain which way the sign of this particular technology goes: sure, very enthusiastic people could use it to have a twentieth kid, but women who don’t want kids that strongly and thus didn’t have a kid until they were fifty could also use it. 

[jack-rustier]

Worst case scenario: what will probably end up happening, if anything happens, is that you get a world where a million mutually exclusive cults try to outbreed each other. Which is to say, the world isn’t going to look very much different from this current version of it. The only difference is that everyone is able to have more kids without their own age becoming a factor.

Today’s meme magic phenomena will continue apace regardless of this technology being freely available or not.

[wirehead-wannabe]

I was focusing more on the genetic aspect of this + overpopulation in general rather than the memetic part, though I can see why people didn’t interpret it that way. Basically, I don’t want to live in a world crammed full of as many humans as possible. I want everyone to be able to have their own huge tract of land and live densely only when they prefer to.

[sinesalvatorem]

Solution here, it seems to me, is to buy your track of land while it’s plentiful and not let new people move in. Then you only have to fear eminent domain, but I think that getting the government to stop stealing people’s land is probably actually less of a hard problem than getting people to stop undoing infertility.

I find it just as likely that we’ll manage to convince everyone to accept forced-infertility-by-default after forty as that we’ll get everyone to accept forced-death-by-default after 80 once anti-aging is a thing. Besides, in both case, the worlds in which people actually manage to be banned from editing themselves are dystopian hellscapes anyway.

[mitigatedchaos]

That’s not a real solution.  The political will under such conditions would shift, and democracy means you’ll be eminent domain’d for sure, even if it were realistic for most non-millionaires to attempt this in the first place.

Life extension would actually help here, however, since it keeps non-baby-obsessed people around and politically relevant longer.  Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

[sinesalvatorem]

Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

Seen here: The single most horrify thing I have ever seen a transhumanist unironically recommend, out of a vast number of horrifying futury things.

[thathopeyetlives]

[Catholic screaming]

[mitigatedchaos]

If $Deity prohibits the use of birth control under Catholicism, then surely altering one’s genome to live past the normal maximum age of 120 years would be an even greater violation of the divine will?

I would expect the Catholic church to come out against human genetic augmentation, and thus life extension, even though I don’t expect them to come out against, for example, curing blindness.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[wirehead-wannabe]

> Although the method’s success rate was about 3.5%, experts in the field are calling the study a “stunning achievement” that could potentially “eradicate infertility” if it can be applied in humans. The ability to make artificial eggs from any cell in the body could allow women who lack viable eggs or male-male couples to have genetic children of their own. “Reproductive age” may become obsolete.

Oh great, let’s just take the breaks off of the Quiverfull problem completely.

[ozymandias271]

I am not sure why you think this is a big issue?

In the short run: the set “has ten kids” selects really hard for smart, highly religious, nonconformist people who take ideas seriously. With the exception of the second thing, I’m not sure why anyone in this community would object. It doesn’t seem like desire-to-be-Quiverfull is genetic: the religions in which people have ten kids don’t seem to have particularly high retention rates, particularly given that they’re willing to e.g. not educate their children to get them to stay.

If you’re like “eventually the world will be full of people who have evolved to want lots of kids because the others don’t reproduce, and then overpopulation”, yes, but an allele reaching fixation takes long enough that I’d be surprised if we were still meat by the time it happened, and if we’re not meat this is irrelevant. And I’m honestly uncertain which way the sign of this particular technology goes: sure, very enthusiastic people could use it to have a twentieth kid, but women who don’t want kids that strongly and thus didn’t have a kid until they were fifty could also use it. 

[jack-rustier]

Worst case scenario: what will probably end up happening, if anything happens, is that you get a world where a million mutually exclusive cults try to outbreed each other. Which is to say, the world isn’t going to look very much different from this current version of it. The only difference is that everyone is able to have more kids without their own age becoming a factor.

Today’s meme magic phenomena will continue apace regardless of this technology being freely available or not.

[wirehead-wannabe]

I was focusing more on the genetic aspect of this + overpopulation in general rather than the memetic part, though I can see why people didn’t interpret it that way. Basically, I don’t want to live in a world crammed full of as many humans as possible. I want everyone to be able to have their own huge tract of land and live densely only when they prefer to.

[sinesalvatorem]

Solution here, it seems to me, is to buy your track of land while it’s plentiful and not let new people move in. Then you only have to fear eminent domain, but I think that getting the government to stop stealing people’s land is probably actually less of a hard problem than getting people to stop undoing infertility.

I find it just as likely that we’ll manage to convince everyone to accept forced-infertility-by-default after forty as that we’ll get everyone to accept forced-death-by-default after 80 once anti-aging is a thing. Besides, in both case, the worlds in which people actually manage to be banned from editing themselves are dystopian hellscapes anyway.

[mitigatedchaos]

That’s not a real solution.  The political will under such conditions would shift, and democracy means you’ll be eminent domain’d for sure, even if it were realistic for most non-millionaires to attempt this in the first place.

Life extension would actually help here, however, since it keeps non-baby-obsessed people around and politically relevant longer.  Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

[sinesalvatorem]

Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

Seen here: The single most horrify thing I have ever seen a transhumanist unironically recommend, out of a vast number of horrifying futury things.

[mitigatedchaos]

Note: Continued discussion of this topic.

The entire point was to avoid shooting, starving, or forcibly sterilizing people. And, if it turns out to be unnecessary, it decays to “everyone who asks gets more baby tickets than they can even use.”

It seemed a better choice than allocating a set pool of resources which is based on one’s ancestors from the time that life extension hits. (ie, each person gets X resources which are split by their descendants, recursively) Maybe you would prefer that instead, but I felt it punished the descendants unfairly.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Lightsabers are stupid period. Even if they make you unbeatable against normal blasters, I can just make blasters with three muzzles in an equilateral triangle (that fire at the same time). Impossible to block all three shots. Or for shorter distances, anything with spray. Swords just aren't a good weapon and an even worse defense, even magic space swords.

argumate answered:

What if I told you that they don’t use lightsabers because they’re good.

[mitigatedchaos]

That assumes they must block all three shots simultaneously, which isn’t required.  The proper response is to use explosives.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[testblogdontupvote]

The argument “if you like taxes then simply go donate money to the government. You don’t? Then stop being a hypocrite and talking about how taxes are good” seems a bit silly to me. Sure, if you believe that any centralized taxation and spending is bad, then there’s no reason to support taxation. But if you do think that centralized spending can in certain situations outperform a free market, then you see taxes as a prisoner’s dilemma. If everyone cooperates, and voluntarily donates to the government, then everyone would be better off, but this is not a stable equilibrium, and every individual agent can benefit from defecting, and then everyone is much worse off, but trying to unilaterally start cooperating and donating money would make you even worse off. So you employ a very common way to resolve prisoner’s dilemmas: elect a guy with a gun who shoots at defectors. In this situation you end up being better off than without this guy, but your incentive structure changes only by the amount of shooting, and it’s still rational to not cooperate by any amount higher than what is being enforced. It is rational to want to resolve prisoner’s dilemmas this way, and it’s also rational to not be a cooperate-bot in dilemmas that aren’t being resolved.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[wirehead-wannabe]

> Although the method’s success rate was about 3.5%, experts in the field are calling the study a “stunning achievement” that could potentially “eradicate infertility” if it can be applied in humans. The ability to make artificial eggs from any cell in the body could allow women who lack viable eggs or male-male couples to have genetic children of their own. “Reproductive age” may become obsolete.

Oh great, let’s just take the breaks off of the Quiverfull problem completely.

[ozymandias271]

I am not sure why you think this is a big issue?

In the short run: the set “has ten kids” selects really hard for smart, highly religious, nonconformist people who take ideas seriously. With the exception of the second thing, I’m not sure why anyone in this community would object. It doesn’t seem like desire-to-be-Quiverfull is genetic: the religions in which people have ten kids don’t seem to have particularly high retention rates, particularly given that they’re willing to e.g. not educate their children to get them to stay.

If you’re like “eventually the world will be full of people who have evolved to want lots of kids because the others don’t reproduce, and then overpopulation”, yes, but an allele reaching fixation takes long enough that I’d be surprised if we were still meat by the time it happened, and if we’re not meat this is irrelevant. And I’m honestly uncertain which way the sign of this particular technology goes: sure, very enthusiastic people could use it to have a twentieth kid, but women who don’t want kids that strongly and thus didn’t have a kid until they were fifty could also use it. 

[jack-rustier]

Worst case scenario: what will probably end up happening, if anything happens, is that you get a world where a million mutually exclusive cults try to outbreed each other. Which is to say, the world isn’t going to look very much different from this current version of it. The only difference is that everyone is able to have more kids without their own age becoming a factor.

Today’s meme magic phenomena will continue apace regardless of this technology being freely available or not.

[wirehead-wannabe]

I was focusing more on the genetic aspect of this + overpopulation in general rather than the memetic part, though I can see why people didn’t interpret it that way. Basically, I don’t want to live in a world crammed full of as many humans as possible. I want everyone to be able to have their own huge tract of land and live densely only when they prefer to.

[sinesalvatorem]

Solution here, it seems to me, is to buy your track of land while it’s plentiful and not let new people move in. Then you only have to fear eminent domain, but I think that getting the government to stop stealing people’s land is probably actually less of a hard problem than getting people to stop undoing infertility.

I find it just as likely that we’ll manage to convince everyone to accept forced-infertility-by-default after forty as that we’ll get everyone to accept forced-death-by-default after 80 once anti-aging is a thing. Besides, in both case, the worlds in which people actually manage to be banned from editing themselves are dystopian hellscapes anyway.

[mitigatedchaos]

That’s not a real solution.  The political will under such conditions would shift, and democracy means you’ll be eminent domain’d for sure, even if it were realistic for most non-millionaires to attempt this in the first place.

Life extension would actually help here, however, since it keeps non-baby-obsessed people around and politically relevant longer.  Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

So I’m stuck wondering about the superintelligent paperclip factory doomsday scenario

[startup-punk]

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it’s basically a theoritical end of the world, in which self aware AI happens in a paperclip factory. The machine, without hard coded ethics, hits on a runaway recursive-self improvement loop, transforms the planet into the most efficient paperclip factory in history, exterminating humanity in the process - to use the iron in our blood for more paperclips.

And I can’t help but think that we’ve already created a self-aware machine without hard coded ethics that’s optimizing for a fundamentally anti-human goal: and it’s capitalism.

Capitalism is the software running on industrial hardware, and it is maintained by wetware (humans). The only goal of it is maximizing profit, for which it needs constant growth. Everything else is a marginal benefit of it - say, innovation. And the problems are increasingly acknowledged as not bugs but features of the system: that it can produce well enough, but it doesn’t care about distributing well enough, because loss is acceptably within the margins (or it’s calculated as not-yet-realized profit).

And it’s fascinating how the AI skepticism / doomsday scenarios come so close to self-awareness, but by some perverted twist of thought we’re not collectively realizing that we’re already there. Time has stopped, we’re in an endless loop of self-destruction, and the wetware is screaming in horror, unable to articulate properly its unfreedom, as the machine has stomped out the thoughts and language and power necessary to do so.

Until now.

[argumate]

people rediscover the capitalism was the paperclip maximizer all along! idea every couple of months, then life goes on

[mitigatedchaos]

I mean, wasn’t that essentially what the Communists were thinking, before they went and got millions of people killed trying to replace it?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

@bambamramfan

I believe a fair chunk of the alienation that concerns you isn’t just a result of competitive economic systems, but also urban planning.

When in a city, you have significantly less personal connection to, and knowledge of, the people around you.  This makes it harder not only to judge their intentions, but also to punish them.  Thus, you are at increased risk when interacting with them (as I think slavojzyzzek mentioned).

Part of the way to combat this may be to turn cities into collections of ten thousand villages.  Build each block of the city as a mixed-use unit, with internal green space and, critically, controlled access beyond the shops at the perimeter.  That could be as simple as just making people check in when they enter and refusing anyone not approved by a specific resident.  Have the block owned or managed by a sort of cooperative responsible for creating cultural festivals and whatnot to encourage social interaction and a sense of community.  Specific police officers could be assigned to each block (as the population is high enough) and get to know the residents.

With increased trust and more limited populations, the residents can get to know their neighbors more on the scale of a small town than a big city, reducing the social distance by one or two orders of magnitude.  If you’re Communitarian enough, you can also have police/healthcare/etc units focus on specific high-risk people within the block to prevent situations from spiraling out of control.

[nuclearspaceheater]

This seems like treating a symptom of the real problem, which is needing to know and get along with the people you happen to live near, and is the opposite of “high-trust.”

Low-trust vs high-trust is about how you have to deal with strangers. If tight-knit communities are required to form connections or even so much as not expected to get attacked or ripped off, then that is a failure of civil society and a damage-control motivated return to the tribalism and provincialism that modernity is an effort to solve/depends on already being solved.

And we certainly have at out disposal far greater tools for creating shared context and trust between unrelated strangers than has perhaps ever existed, if there existed the will to use them. (And certainly, if you’re entertaining a scenario where the pursuit of your goals can affect the direction of urban planning, then you’re already imagining the use of a lot of political will!)

I consider that much of what gets called “alienation” is a feature. It would be worth fighting for as a goal rather than fought as a problem, even absent its economic benefits.

[mitigatedchaos]

I would consider that in high-crime areas, civil society has in fact failed to some degree and that a return to a more structured form of community as a method of preventing it from getting even further off the rails can be considered justified.  Preventing and policing crime and misbehavior are both quite challenging tasks on their own.

What I have proposed does not undermine modernity any more than the existence of suburban towns does.  (Though, perhaps you wish to abolish suburban towns as well for some reason.)  Specifically, it’s also primarily for residential areas.  It isn’t as though you can’t just walk right off the block and be back in the rest of the city.

As for political willpower, something not so different from what I have proposed already appears to exist in Singapore.  I once thought that cop cameras, while a good idea, weren’t politically tractable, but that situation changed and they began to emerge in various cities.  I wouldn’t expect this idea to take off for another 20 years, anyway.

I probably have different values from you, since I believe that human beings are social creatures and function best if they have at least some social context and support network, people that they know they can depend on (which, absent some pretty powerful culture, is not something that can be counted on from strangers).

What are these methods that people lack the political will to use, that are only as difficult as urban planning?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@bambamramfan

I believe a fair chunk of the alienation that concerns you isn’t just a result of competitive economic systems, but also urban planning.

When in a city, you have significantly less personal connection to, and knowledge of, the people around you.  This makes it harder not only to judge their intentions, but also to punish them.  Thus, you are at increased risk when interacting with them (as I think slavojzyzzek mentioned).

Part of the way to combat this may be to turn cities into collections of ten thousand villages.  Build each block of the city as a mixed-use unit, with internal green space and, critically, controlled access beyond the shops at the perimeter.  That could be as simple as just making people check in when they enter and refusing anyone not approved by a specific resident.  Have the block owned or managed by a sort of cooperative responsible for creating cultural festivals and whatnot to encourage social interaction and a sense of community.  Specific police officers could be assigned to each block (as the population is high enough) and get to know the residents.

With increased trust and more limited populations, the residents can get to know their neighbors more on the scale of a small town than a big city, reducing the social distance by one or two orders of magnitude.  If you’re Communitarian enough, you can also have police/healthcare/etc units focus on specific high-risk people within the block to prevent situations from spiraling out of control.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

src k6bd

(Original text removed.)

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

MAXIMUM OVERDOG

Or, what happens when your faction finally wins the revolution.