gxon's comments

If not direct human extinction, it could certainly mean complete collapse of advanced civilization.

Even if humans manage to survive for millions of years into the future, we've already burned all the easily accessible fossil fuels. What we're burning now takes a lot of technology to extract. It's not immediately obvious that we'll ever be able to become a space faring civilization without cheap fossil fuels to bootstrap us there. Eventually, we'll go extinct by some asteroid impact or supervolcano.

We should probably assume it's now or never for intelligence to spread off this rock.

Nothing we can do. Brace for impact and setup a flexible lifestyle so you can rapidly move and adapt depending on what hits first/hardest.

Obviously still support any possible measures to mitigate the damage. Maybe we can still work together to avoid complete catastrophe.

Meh. The continuation of the species is more important than some silly desire to mix my own DNA into a new human. A kind of corollary to the Gay Uncle theory.

I also consider the memes > genes in terms of leaving a legacy. Shaping a kid's mindset doesn't require them to share half of your genes.

To add to that, even if we can technically support a lot more people with the sustainable resources we have, which I personally doubt, getting close to our max capacity means we will have zero wiggle room when things go wrong. With climate change accelerating and guaranteed to cause drastic changes to our environment, a lot of things will go wrong at the same time.

The analogy I like is your income/spending ratio. Yes, you can technically spend 100% of your income, or even >100% with debt. But if you choose to live like that, then when you get laid off, or get sick/disabled, or divorced, or forced to start caring for a relative, or have your house burn down, then all of a sudden what's already a major emergency is exacerbated by financial issues.

Decreasing our population now is like increasing our savings rate. We know difficult times are coming. Fewer people will only help us navigate the transition more humanely and equitably. Not only is this true from a macro/global scale, but also a micro/family scale where it's obvious that having more kids than you can afford or have time to raise is its own kind of cruelty.

Anyway, if you're choosing to have kids, one is enough. The real winners adopt.

To the first point, I'm not making that argument. It's my interpretation of Freud's argument described in this article. Do you think I misinterpreted it?

To the second, I understand this to be fairly well established, at least in modern times. For example, Nobel laureates are massively over represented by people of Jewish descent [1]. Freud's argument here just seems to be yet another theory for why this might be.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates

It's a fascinating idea that belief in an unseen god set up the Jewish people to be more capable of thinking in abstraction and this is part of the reason why Jews are so over-represented in contributions to science.

If that's actually true, I wonder if it still holds value today. Are secular education systems sufficient for producing the same or better mindset? Are their other myths we can teach children that don't have the same cruft and dead weight of traditional religion?

As per our current science, we're forever limited to our galactic local group. Exponential growth tends to consume even very big things surprisingly quickly.

I also question whether a mass die off event on this planet won't lock us out from ever rebuilding a spacefaring civilization. We've already used up all the readily accessible fossil fuel that was necessary for us to get this far.

Like I suggested, it's highly problematic.

But what are the alternatives if people stop dying of old age? If the birth rate is even marginally higher than the very small death rate, we eventually over populate. The only way to resolve that is some kind of culling mechanism. War, starvation, and disease are what usually happens to humanity when resources get too constrained.

But now we have nukes.

Interesting. I've recently been thinking of something similar as a form of population control in a post-aging world. Rather than individual resource consumption, every time you reproduce, you jump forward in the euthanasia line. I suspect this would not work very well.

There's got to be some more formal line of research or thought about population management in a post-aging world.

This is a problem for both the people who are and are not interested in participating in extreme behavior.

Those who are will more likely have a false sense of lower risk than their actions would subject them to. Those who aren't might be scared away by a larger value than they would actually be subject to.

This could even become a self fulfilling prophecy where activities with high average micromorts will only attract people more willing to engage in risky behavior, thus inflating the tail of extreme behavior that causes most of the mortality, increasing the activity's average micromorts over time.

No? A big player might decide to preemptively squash ANY startup that could possibly become a threat while it's cheap and nobody else cares enough to notice.

This is why I think we need to be careful when considering a ban on facial recognition. Pandora's box is open.

Even if we do decide on some kind of ban, we need to assume facial recognition will always be used by someone, somewhere, and design our social systems to account for that fact.

Killing old.reddit.com would probably be their final Digg moment for me. Maybe they'll manage to keep the bulk of their users and keep some husk of it's former self going for a long time, but I'm gone. I suspect many others will join. The quality of content has been plummeting for years anyway.

Too bad there's no clear successor this time.

Never had any problems with RIF on mobile.

It's interesting how many successful, creative people seem to be incapable at imagining themselves not being so successful one day.

What you perform well at today won't necessarily be valuable in the future.

And yet, we desperately want to find a better model so we can stop feeding the ad demon.

To expand on this, it's tempting to dismiss those warning of doom and gloom when you start to notice a pattern of the doom never materializing.

But we should also be aware of the possibility that those warning of doom and gloom activate people's minds to severity and risk of the problem. Because more people are aware and paying attention, we collectively take action to mitigate the risk and the worst case never happens.

A great example is our response to a pandemic. The response that creates the least amount of damage might look like a major over-reaction and people will start to question those who raised alarm with such intensity.

How do we deal with this meta problem?

If the boy cries wolf, but nobody else sees it, how do you decide if the boy was mistaken/lied or if the act of the entire town waking up scared the wolf away?

And make them self replicating and you only have to add it once! Grey goo here we come!

Absolutely. But the game we use to choose a president does not seem to be at all related to the actual job of president.