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Notes -
Inspired by the discussion on science and scientists below, I want to bring up a series of books that I read as a teenager, and recently revisited this year: the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.
1. Red Mars
Out of all the books in my childhood, this looms the largest. This book is almost the entire reason for me wanting to go to MIT (become an astronaut so I could bring life to dead planet like Sax), and my interest in political philosophy (so I could figure out who was right between John, Arkady, and Frank). Just as KSR shows Mars here as a canvas that people use to paint their idealized image of society, society that will really truly be constructed by ideology, rather than history, I used this book as a template for my own life trajectory: a way of prescribing meaning to another-wise empty scientific materialism by coopting some elements of ecoism (which I should have always known I liked, but anyway). I also recently discovered that one of my favorite board games, Terraforming Mars is heavily inspired by this book, which was also cool.
It's funny coming back to this and seeing what worked and what didn't. The science fiction elements are very obviously unbelievable. We can barely launch people into space these days, much less send millions of times more mass than we've ever sent to space far out of Earth's gravity well to Mars (I know that most of the delta G is from the surface to LEO but still). Aging won't be cured by simply repairing damaged DNA, and terraforming is likely to be a much slower process than as depicted in the book, if it's even physically possible at all.
The geopolitics is a little bit better. The overpopulation crisis on Earth that drives much of the plot is solving itself right now, but the hegemony of transnational corporations (a big element of the board game too) is happening before our eyes. Knowing a bit more about the other cultures (Arabs and Swiss mainly) depicted in this book also allowed their adaptions to the planet to carry more weight for me.
And of course the personal is still fantastic. The love triangle between John, Frank, and Maya. The enigma of what Frank actually wants out of Mars (even though we get two POV sections from him). The solid dependency of Nadia, the fiery revolutionary fervor of Arkady, and the conflict between desire for death (Ann CLAYbourne) and life (Saxifrage Russel), all were much more interesting to me this time around. And how each of these characters reflects their own emotions on the landscape of Mars (which I know much better because of the game). And perhaps that this reflects my philosophical shift too: away from materialism and towards something more interested in life itself.
2. Green Mars
If Red Mars was the book that made me want to be an astronaut, Green Mars is what made me want to become a biologist. There is just something so magical about turning a dead planet alive (not only through the introduction of plants, but also culture). Maybe what really will follow in the death-throes of rationality is a kind of Viriditas, or worshipping of life, that we see come to life in the green movement in this book.
In terms of plot, this book follows our protagonists from Red Mars (the first hundred) after they have fled underground following the failed revolution of 2061, as well as some of their children: the first natives of Mars. The plot spans the course of 60 years, and is all over the place. One part focuses on Terraforming, another on a political conference to decide the fate of Mars, and still another on the quiet semi-retirement of one of the expedition leaders around the shore of the expanding Hellas Sea.
The characters were hit or miss for me. I really connected with Sax Russell, who is a scientist like myself. Sax is pretty autistically interested in science and the natural world, until a traumatic brain injury causes a radical shift in his personality and he grows interested in other humans. Nirgal, one of the native martians, and Art, a diplomat sent by one of the "good" transnational corporations I also liked reading about, but the female characters (Maya and Ann) were a huge miss for me. I found Maya to be a horrible, self-absorbed person, and found it hard to relate to Ann's obsession with maintaining Mars in a pristine, but dead state.
In terms of themes, a couple things stuck out to me. Firstly, science is political. This is very obvious in the novel, as the terraforming efforts are a scientific endeavor, but also a thorny political problem whose resolution very much depends on scientific feasibility. This is no less true in our world: the debates about global warming, pollution, veganism, etc. are all political as well as scientific questions. By refusing to engage on the level of the political, as if it is somehow
beneaththem (or worse, like we see below with Terrance Tao, considering social issues "solved") scientists are shooting themselves and their interests in the foot.Secondly, Robinson wants to highlight the effect that geography has on culture. We get extremely long (and often boring) descriptions of Martian geography to help us place the adaptions that various immigrant cultures are making as they come to Mars. No culture is unchanged, and this is at least partially because of the unique geographical (and other physical) quirks of the planet.
Finally, as some of our characters enter their ~15th decade, Green Mars brings into question the continuity of our identity and its dependence on memory. Are we still the same person that we were 20, 30, 100 years ago? At what point do memories become indistinguishable from facts we could have read in a textbook?
3. Blue Mars
This was my favorite book growing up as a kid, but I found this entry on re-read in the series to be hopelessly fragmented and meandering in its focus. Much of the plot of the book is concerned with the formation of a new government for Mars (a vaguely socialist federation with strict limits on immigration from earth). There's some exploration of colonization of the outer solar system, but it is also hopelessly myopic and bohemian: there's no true political or cultural diversity in any of the colonies that are visited. On a personal level, very few of the first hundred have survived, and the ones that have have basically completed their character arcs. There's some interesting stuff with dealing with memory but other than that I found this book rather forgettable on a personal level.
Conclusions
So why is this culture war? We live in a society that is, for better or worse, driven in large part by scientific progress and research. Many of the big questions of our time: climate change, artificial intelligence, the obesity crisis, the fertility crisis, etc. are not only political, but also scientific questions. To ignore the input of scientists on these issues, like many on this forum want to do, seems incredibly myopic. At the same time, the training that we get as scientists (or at least the training that I have received) does not create people who are really able to participate in the political process. Gell-Mann amnesia is very real in academia: not just about the hot-button topics like race and gender, but also made-up shit like "learning styles", the efficiency of renewable energy, and a general understanding of politics and human psychology. Combine this with a massive ego because of success in one specific area, and you have the idiot savants that Nassim Taleb likes to harp on who cannot compromise or think outside the box. What Robinson is highlighting with his trilogy about colonizing Mars, perhaps the ultimate scientific endeavor, is that unless this changes, the science is not going to get done properly in the real world. As Miguel Unamuno once said, perhaps apocryphally, vencer no es convencer (to defeat is not to convince). The strain of liberal (and perhaps now woke) thought that currently dominates universities is not going to be able to beat the world into submission to its ideas, it has to learn how to participate in the political process and convince people (and perhaps be convinced in turn). Perhaps too this is a lesson that the rationalist community could learn as well, although I think most of you here at TheMotte have absorbed it plenty well.
For me on a personal level this series of books has helped to clarify what a future spiritual belief system might look like for me and the world. I’ve always struggled with the anthropocentrism of Christianity: perhaps something like Viriditas combined with Nietzchian vitalism could expand on the weak points I see in the Christian system.
I appreciate the Unamuno reference! If I remember correctly the quote is "venceréis pero no convenceréis" (you will win but you will not convince"). https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vencer%C3%A9is,_pero_no_convencer%C3%A9is
You will win, but you will not convince. You will win because you have brute force, but you will not convince because convincing involves persuading. And for persuading you need something that you are lacking in this fight, reason and law/rights. I consider it futile to ask you to think about Spain.
And indeed once the dictatorship ended, Spain did shift to the left within a generation.
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One of those guys..
I've heard good things about the books but every time I opened one in bookshop /online & an excerpt it looked illgical/ silly liberal/commie/green idiot stuff so I never read any of it. I like near future SF but pious liberals at least need to make some sense (e.g. C.Stross)
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Uh, ackshully, that's approximately where the state-of-the-art on anti-aging is heading.
Sirtuins are involved in DNA repair, which allows cells to keep replicating accurately, which is what keeps you alive and minimizes the effects of 'age' as we understand it.
There's currently a LOT of research into Sirtuin activators for this reason.
This might be a part of the book that gets borne out really well in the end.
My understanding is there is a large metabolic and structural component. Heart disease is still the #1 killer and this is almost entirely due to a break down in how the circulatory system functions. There is a genetic component but ti's not like fixing people's DNA will really help
Why does the heart/circulatory system break down, if not due to the failure of the cells to properly replicate over time, thanks to DNA damage?
Uhhh that is not the reason. You get build up of atherosclerotic plaque in the circulatory system for reasons we don't really understand fully yet, but has something to do with the activity of immune cells and levels of dietary fat. Over time the plaque blocks the vessel and you get a heart attack. No cell replication involved. I can point to a bunch of other diseases of aging (T2D for example) that have similar mechanisms of action that are metabolic, not replicator dependent. In the case of T2D for example, making the beta cells of the pancreas more robust won't fix the fact that your body doesn't respond to insulin any more. Of course there are things you can do to prevent these diseases (exercise and diet), but those only work up into a point.
There's also the theory of mitochondrial dysfunction causing aging. This one is a DNA-caused problem. Basically mitochondrial genomes accumulate mutations much more rapidly than cellular genomes. Since a large amount of the DNA for mitochondrial proteins is stored in the nucleus, not in the mitochondria, this eventually leads to some serious incompatibilities and dysfunctions in mitochondrial energy production. These eventually become so large that one by one the individual tissues in your body can no longer keep up and you die from multiple organ failure. This could theoretically be fixed by fixing mutated DNA in the mitochondria, but it's not clear to me yet how you could accomplish this, nor what template you would use for repair.
Is this considered an actual symptom of 'aging' wherein its inevitable as one gets older? I mean, do we see old people without much plaque as often as we see them with it (Yes yes, accounting for the survival of such persons to old age).
And likewise, if there was a mechanism for preventing the buildup of plaque in the body, wouldn't that also be impacted by failed cellular replication?
Since there are certainly other animals that have cardiovascular systems that nonetheless live an extremely long time.
We do see people without much plaque who have eaten diets relatively low in fat, especially saturated fat. But this usually means that one's diet is high in protein (which greatly increases cancer risk and kidney failure, although at least the former can be greatly mitigated through DNA-repair), or carbohydrates (which greatly increases the risk of insulin resistance). Now many traditional populations experience none of these three metabolic failure modes. Yet that is (as far as I understand it) usually a result of them being on the edge of starvation most of time, which increases risks for other things like malnutrition which would negatively impact cellular replication.
I certainly think it would help, but I'm not sure it would solve things completely. Kids can get T2D and athero, so merely having robust new cells wouldn't fix things completely.
Certainly, and I'm by no means arguing that enhanced DNA repair wouldn't help improve lifespans significantly. I just don't believe that this would be the magic bullet, as there are many other things going wrong as one ages. In addition to metabolism there's also the problem of the brain no longer producing new cells at all, which you point out in a comment thread below.
This does sound like a problem that can be solved via pharmacueticals, some chemical that breaks up the plaques (without hurting other cells), and removing the plaque from the blood would probably involve filtering (possibly via an external device?) and reintroducing it.
It sounds more like an oil change type problem, rather than an engine swap type problem.
Yea certainly! I've been very excited about nattokinase recently. This is a compound found in the Japanese fermented soybean dish Natto, that has been shown to reduce plaque by up to 36% in a single year. Been trying to get the parents on it with little success. I myself take it daily.
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It's maybe a depressing take, but I'd bet that aging and age-driven mortality is hugely multivariate as the result of at least a dozen factors that have all been locally optimized under a "needs to work at least one lifetime" metric. One could imagine a poorly[1] engineered car hitting it's warranty limit and immediately having all the wheels and seats fall out at once, without a simple "one weird trick" existing to maintain it indefinitely. I'm more hopeful for a bunch of weird tricks, though.
There's a famous legend about Henry Ford trying to engineer cars this way - if the car you buy has ten parts that might wear out, but in practice only nine of them ever fail, doesn't that mean you probably paid too much for an over-engineered design on the tenth?
If the lifetime of your car (or your body) was actually strictly determined by a L=min_i(L_i) formula, in fact, evolution would have a really tough time improving that - once you get L_i = L_j for some i,j, you can't improve L by improving either component, but only with a change that improves both at once. I think evolution is helped here by the addition of uncertainty - even when something like "heart failure kills people before cancer can" was true at some point in some average sense, there'd still be individuals getting lucky with their heart or unlucky with cancer and so cancer-fighting mutations would still give non-zero fitness improvements.
Perhaps a more subtle problem is that evolution doesn't care about the longevity of your body, only the fitness of your genes. By the time your biological mortality is really catching up to you, you're supposed to have a few kids and a bunch of grandkids running around, and from the point of view of an allele's frequency your life is only worth approximately as much as two of the former or four of the latter. So if age has made your body a significantly less efficient carrier of the genes you share, then evolution would be happy to put you out on an ice floe (as in a somewhat less mythical metaphor) rather than let you drag them down with you. Not only do alleles that reduce mortality become less useful in the face of different causes of death, but also in the face of other causes of weakness!
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This fits what I have read and seen of the research as well. There was a poster at a meeting I went to this year in San Diego where they selected flies for long lifespans by only taking offspring after a certain date (usually around 40 days I think). The genes that they found to be modified were all over the genome and didn't point to a single nice answer about aging other than it's something that affects the whole organism through many different pathways.
Nick Lane (one of my favorite biologists these days) has a theory that aging is caused by accumulations of mitochondrial mutations that prevent optimal ATP production. Eventually you get to the point where tissues can't produce enough energy to sustain themselves and then you get multiple organ failure and die. I'm attracted to this model because it means that in order to combat aging you should do a lot of aerobic (easy) exercise and have kids with people who are physically fit. Over time the average human lifespan should increase.
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The thing is, the body has many built-in repair mechanisms, unlike your average engine, and in theory (i.e. we do observe this in nature) is able to keep repairing things 'indefinitely' if it is able to function at full capacity.
One of the major drivers of 'aging' appears to be the breakdown of the repair mechanisms. Including the repair mechanisms for DNA in the cells. But that, too, is downstream of damage to DNA. And eventually damage to the DNA accumulates and outpaces the ability of the repair mechanisms to repair.
Bolstering the natural repair mechanisms is likely to get us a lot of improvement on the longevity front.
There will almost certainly need to be other interventions for certain ailments, though. Big one would be accumulated damage to the brain, due to blunt force trauma or similar damage that is additive over time with no natural means of repair.
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That just means the currently foreseeable research is that way. There are a whole lot of factors in aging that by definition can't be cured by DNA repair because things in body that intentionally have no major maintenance mechanism after reaching adulthood keep deteriorating from plain physical stress and wear.
"intentionally" is a weird word to use there, what do you mean with that?
Likewise "after reaching adulthood." This implies that these maintenance mechanisms existed prior to adulthood. Which implies they could be re-activated.
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I remember reading the first two books too, it was strange. Who gets misty-eyed about a red desolate wasteland? Bring forth the water!
Also I think that terraforming Mars is a red herring. Are we really short of lebensraum on Earth? Easier to build cities and extract resources in Canada, Antarctica, the deep oceans, Russia, the Sahara.
O'Neill cylinders are also a good option. You can put them anywhere.
Expansion into space should be with a definite, clear objective. What about Mercury, is there not a tonne of solar power there? Should we not put heavy industry there, or perhaps in Lagrange points closer to the sun? There are resources in the asteroids, let's get them. Let's get offworld certainly, advance as a civilization, secure Mars... but only with good reason. The costs must be outweighed by the benefits.
And why assume that we need Mars to be compatible to organic life to be there? It's probably easier to get robotic or otherwise hardened bodies than it is to make Mars a credible place for settlement.
There's a good Nick Land essay about this where he argues that space exploration is really about planetary disassembly by posthuman intelligences rather than domestead frontier LARPing. But the true vision can't be sold to the voters and politicians since it's too Nietzschean. Alas I cannot find it.
Lure of the Void?
You have succeeded where AI and myself have failed.
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Iirc he starts from the premise that spheres are an extremely inefficient shape to extract mineral resources from, compared to disassembling a planet into asteroids and having space drones mine them.
If resources are what you're after, "at the bottom of a decent gravity well" seems like one of the worst places to be. Maybe there are other reasons to like planets, but shipping lots of mass between them seems expensive.
IMO asteroids are a far more interesting near-term target.
The other advantage of disassembling a planet is that doing so also disassembles the gravity well.
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All near-future space stories have this "problem". There's no good reason for humans to go live in space (besides escaping the "single planet trap" which hedges against catastrophes that are extremely unlikely, many of which would still leave the surviving humans on earth better of than the humans surviving in our potential colonies). The technology required to teraform Mars or building O'Neill cylinders would also fix most problems on earth, just orders of magnitude cheaper.
What benefits?
Around twice the delta-V of a Mars mission, if you start from Earth orbit. And for what, 7x the solar irradiance of Earth? Just built 7x the amount of panels here. That's going to be cheaper than shipping the panels (or the panel factories) to Mercury for a very, very long time. Also, once you have heavy industry on Mercury, you need to ship the... heavy goods back out, quickly depleting what little water there is on Mercury.
Almost all asteroids are worse sources of metals than a decent mine on earth. So you get into a chicken-or-egg problem with asteroid mining: the only reason why you'd want to do it is because those resources are already in space. But if the only thing to built in space is infrastructure for getting resources, you can just skip the entire space-headache and do your project on Earth for a fraction of the cost!
In the end, it's an awesome scenario for stories, and we like telling stories. Either for entertainment, or for inspiration. But realistically/economically, I don't see a case for human space flight at all. And if you want to build cool/inspirational stuff, you can do a whole lot just with our moon and the space around it.
This isn't true, though. These catastrophes that would literally leave no humans (or any life as we know it) alive on Earth aren't extremely unlikely, they are basically guaranteed according to our best understanding of physics and astronomy. Now, Mars is close enough to Earth that it's not an effective hedge against these catastrophes, but one must step into one's entrance way before one steps out one's front door.
Fortunately, we likely have millions, if not billions, of years, to get human civilization sustainable on another planet that's safe from these guaranteed catastrophes on Earth, which is a lot of time to research and develop innovations to enable us getting off Earth. But it's still a very finite amount of time, and these innovations aren't going to just happen over time without humans trying to come up with solutions to problems that get in the way of a goal. Dunno if terraforming is the right idea, but certainly some form of self-sustaining human colony on Mars seems like a reasonable intermediate goal for motivating the necessary innovations.
What are you worried about? Volcanism or impactor would certainly spare Mars. We'd need to be extremely unlucky for a gamma ray burst to take out either Earth or Mars, but for both getting hit, we'd need to be absurdly unlucky. What else? Close-by supernova? I think we ruled out most candidates, there are no geriatric stars in our direct neighborhood.
The first two candidates certainly could end human civilization on Earth, but they usually only happen every few tens of millions of years. On such extreme timelines, it's unlikely humans would still be around, just from an evolutionary view. Also, humans being the cockroaches of the mammalian class, we'd probably have a pretty good chance to survive a minor event, at least as a species (if not as a civilization). After all, we eat everything and live everywhere.
It's a few hundred millions, max. After that, the sun will slowly increase its irradiance by a relatively small percentage, resulting in a runaway greenhouse effect from atmospheric water vapor, which will end the carbon cycle on Earth.
So, those timelines are so extremely long (and as such, the probabilities of an extinction event in the next couple of hundred years), we can worry about them when we get really, really bored. The problems we have to solve before that need to be solved here, because solving them here is cheaper than living in space or on Mars.
Ah, I had thought we had at least a billion, but I hadn't done that much research. I'll take your correction at face value. You also answer here the question you asked earlier in this comment about what catastrophes I'm worried about. I'm worried about the big one.
I disagree. We won't ever get really, really bored, at least that's my prediction based on our evident ability to find extremely banal and inconsequential problems extremely interesting when there's a dearth of consequential problems that are nipping at our heels. And escaping boredom is a really bad motivator for accomplishing something as difficult as sustainable life off Earth. If we take the attitude that the timeline is just so long that we can worry about it in the future, that's a formula for just never doing it at all and letting humanity get snuffed out. One might hope that the human spirit would overcome and survive when push comes to shove, and I'd guess that it would, but I think things would be more pleasant if push didn't come to shove. Plenty of people survived the Titanic and made it to America, but I think it would have been more pleasant for everyone involved if that had been accomplished by the ship just reaching its destination safely instead of having to rely on lifeboats and another ship coming around to pick those up. If we can clearly see an iceberg in our path, it's best to plan for it now instead of relying on future us to solve it when there's less time to work out the kinks.
And there's no need to solve cheaper problems before expensive problems. Our problem-solving abilities aren't fungible like money, and we can devote resources both to expensive and cheap problems at the same time in a way that's more beneficial overall for humanity. Obviously no one can actually work out a credible measure of "benefit to humanity" or whatever, there are arguments to be made about the details, including the notion that, in 2025, all resources devoted to researching and accomplishing space travel would be better spent on something else on Earth, which I disagree with but which I think isn't unreasonable. But that's a different notion than the one that there's no point to humans living in space. Even before a planet/solar system-destroying catastrophe, there's a point, because living in space will force individuals living there to innovate and learn the things we don't even know that we don't know about how to live in space, so that we can actually get it right when shit hits the fan for all of Earth (some of them
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Yeah but some of them are much better source of minerals than any mine on earth. Iridium is hard to acquire here for one thing.
Apparently this one is pretty rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(6178)_1986_DA
Even Australian production of iron ore is barely a billion tonnes per year, that's a lot of iron. Iron is at least digestible by the world economy whereas there'd be a glut of gold and platinum.
I have no problem with waiting. Personally I think that leaving Earth's orbit pre-fusion propulsion is silly. But with fusion propulsion lots of opportunities are opened up, one scarcely needs to worry about delta-v within the solar system.
I mean this is just ridiculous:
6 years! And by the time you get there nothing can be done, chemical rockets are the astronomical cuck chair. You just get to watch the asteroid tumble on.
What is currently keeping us from fusion torches? What’s the sticking point?
For power generation, I understand that we haven’t been able to get enough power out to pay for the containment fields. I’d naively expect that to be much easier if you don’t actually want to hold on to the reaction. Unless that just gives you an Orion drive instead of a torch…
Edit: atomic rockets has me covered, as always
I keep rooting for a nuclear salt water rocket. In space no one can hear your environmental impact statement.
What an awesome concept, though.
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It feels like we are trying to push a square peg through a round hole, so long as scientists are people and not robots.
Having gone through a long journey of internet atheism, towards 'Skepticism' as a sort of general outlook to fill in the void that a lack of coherent belief system creates, I was left, like many, very unimpressed by my fellow atheists, skeptics and scientists in general insofar as they were represented by science popularizers. I did not find anything similar to Less Wrong during this time, but was left to trudge through the mud of Skeptic drama, power tripping feminist moderators and such. Atheism+ came along with a bang and every foot soldier of internet atheism and skepticism turned from making mountains out of molehills, where the actions of some pastor in the middle of nowhere did or said something silly, towards tearing each other apart over small ideological differences. These were the same people who scoffed at the silly religious people who start wars over inconsequential differences in scripture...
Now, that's just the rabble beneath the 'Science'. It included a lot of professors and scientists, sure, but it also included a lot of nobodies. But this was the population group that had, for at least a decade, labored under the delusion that they were in some way different from the rest. With science, reason and rationality as their shield. Turns out they very much weren't any of that to any extent that mattered.
But, again, this is the rabble. The scientists themselves, surely, are better. Right? Well, as you say yourself, they kind of aren't. And better men than me or you have long made that observation. Turns out they are very much human like everyone else.
To that end I'd argue the kind of 'scientist' you seem to pine for would probably make for a terrible person in any other aspect of life. Good people don't constantly have to evaluate base truths. Wallowing in self doubt over whatever facet of their life they happen to re-evaluate today, to not fall prey to bias or whatever, whilst potentially destroying key aspects of their life in the process.
Further than that, I'd say that if you ever want to colonize Mars, the last thing you need is science. As you can't hope to achieve such a lofty goal without true believers who hold not doubt in their heart towards their task but unshakeable faith and enthusiasm. Lest you end up with another 'Whitey on the Moon' paradigm.
As far as my mind can see, if we were to form any sort of realistic framework that could facilitate this goal of veneration and exploration for science, physics and space, we are working towards a chauvinistic European and/or East Asian supremacism. Any other population groups and any other concerns that don't functionally establish such authority are doomed to fall prey to everything we've seen trip up science so far. Though I welcome any thoughts to the contrary.
In conclusion, it seems that if one loves science, one should learn to love politics first.
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I've never gotten around to reading the Mars trilogy. Maybe I should, but the one novel I did finish, Aurora, made me want to puke. Now I feel like writing a full review which will be, no points for guessing, highly negative. The following is a Cliff notes version, not spoilered because I literally don't respect it enough to care:
The characters are retarded. The tech is woeful. The novel has no redeeming qualities I can think of. It's a morality tale dressed up in a hard-sf frock.
I quite liked KSR as a kid but Aurora completely ruined him for me, it's fractally bad.
In particular the nonsense about insular dwarfism which crops up very early and makes it obvious that he does not understand the first thing about biology. He repeatedly states that the ship's genetic screening/controlled breeding system is working fine and there is no inbreeding or loss of genetic diversity, then insists that this is pointless and they are doomed because they didn't take the zoo/island effect into account. There's no attempt to find a mechanism by which that might operate despite the genetic diversity being fine, and I don't think KSR realised he needed one.
The morality is even more confused: it builds its anti-space argument around the deep immorality of generation ships, with endless discussion of the inhuman cruelty of condemning future generations to live and die in a ship for your ambition, climaxing with the protagonist attacking would-be space explorers on earth, denouncing them for a crime which none of them have or plan to commit and which she already has. Literally Freya is the only character in the entire book who we see launch a generation ship, and she uses the immorality of her own actions to condemn space exploration as a whole. KSR brushes off this hypocricy, yet he's obviously aware of it because he uses the cryosleep deux ex machina to let Freya give the speech directly instead of dictating it to the grandchildren she condemned to die in space.
Also it's a much pettier issue but I couldn't get over the fact that the ship's closed-loop ecosystem is not only divided into a bunch of different ecoregions with non-overlapping fauna but that most of them have predators including miniature bears and wolves. I half-wish the Snakes on a Plane people would option it for a sequel.
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Mars trilogy is much better than that. Not as moralistic for sure: there are many competing ideologies and it isn’t clear to me which KSR thinks are the right ones.
It does seem his work has degraded a bit over time because I also hated Ministry for the Future (dude if global warming was that easy to solve we would have done it).
To me it seemed that he design the gift economy some of the Martians end up with to be pretty utopian. But yes, he does't dwell on it, or even elaborate very much.
KSR is very much a utopian socialist, and thinks that humans could - if we all sat down together in open conversation - Figure It All Out. I don't mind it, it's nice to have not everything you read be endlessly cynical. But this streak of his obviously runs through all his work.
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(Bolding mine) I don't think anyone ever in any side of politics is particularly good at the part I bolded, but certainly the last 10 or so years have been transformative for me in learning of how unimportant this was to self-described liberals. Of course, liberalism doesn't necessarily imply free exchange of ideas and discourse, but it's certainly something I used to associate with them, and too many times I'd hear from a friend about how he went into or wanted to go into an argument with someone with [wrongthink] ideas, with or looking for some tactic to cut through that person's defenses in order to convince them without also looking for tactics by which to allow that person to convince him that [wrongthink] is actually correct.
Going into a conversation or argument looking to convince someone else without allowing for the possibility of oneself being convinced in reverse is just not a winning strategy unless your goal isn't the truth and you have overwhelming force on your side to enforce what you believe is right anyway. Because people can tell when they're being lectured to instead of being engaged with, especially in the long run.
Which reminds me of 2 separate but related phenomena that I keep seeing over and over among the woke left. One is that of "wokeness didn't fail, it was failed by the bigoted populace that was just too bigoted to accept it." This is just a continuation of the "feminism didn't fail, it was failed by the misogynistic populace that was just too misogynistic to accept it," a common sentiment among feminists before "woke" as we understand it today was a common term. I see this commonly enough among both the left and the right and in non-political contexts as well. People love avoiding accountability and blaming others, everywhere and in all contexts.
However, it is entirely and only the responsibility of the ideologues who support an ideology that requires mass buy-in from large swathes of society due to the severe societal changes it pushes to make a convincing case for their ideology, and any failure of the ideology to take hold is entirely the ideologues' fault, and you'd think that these ideologues would be motivated to realize this, in order to more effectively push their ideological changes in society (that they don't seem to realize this indicates either they care more about feeling righteous than about accomplishing meaningful political change or they genuinely believe that they have overwhelming force, or both). It's like how it's always and only the movie studio/marketer/etc.'s fault when a movie bombs, even presuming that it bombed due to society being so filled with bigots who were bigoted against the movie's message/actors/directors/marketers/etc., since no one has an obligation to give money to movie studios.
The other phenomenon is that of ideologues gutting out credible organizations and wearing them as a skin suit in order to launder their ideas through the inertial credibility of the organization while the rest of the world catches up to notice. Academia is the obvious one that people are talking about right now here, but also mainstream journalism and also even fictional media, with stuff like the Hugo awards for science fiction or the Star Wars film franchise or game companies like Bioware or Bungie, where these organizations huff and puff as if people still respect them like before the more recent ideological takeovers without seeming to recognize that you can only wear the skin suit for so long before people notice that the underlying thing isn't delivering on the promise of the label and adjusts their credibility rating accordingly.
In both of these, there's this implicit idea of getting to do whatever one wants and then being apparently confused by the obvious consequence imposed on one by uncontrollable external forces. You can choose your message, but you have no vote on how other people respond to it. If you want other people to respond to your message in a certain way, it is only and entirely your responsibility to sculpt your message to get the results you want.
As much as I hate this analogy, it reminds me of the "nice guy" phenomenon that was all the rage on feminist think pieces about a decade ago, referring to men who appear to believe they're entitled to sex for following all the instructions they were given for attracting a woman, and then lashing out at women when the sex isn't delivered. Instead of taking responsibility for his own failures (i.e. believing the instructions he was given, instead of understanding that part of the test is correctly interpreting these instructions) and fixing it, he just blames women for not filling their role. The opposite gender counterpart would be a woman in her 30s or 40s who had her sexual fun with a large set of male partners while also building her career blaming high value men in their age range for not fulfilling their role of finding them attractive and instead going for younger, less successful, less sexually experienced women. In neither case, does blaming others actually help the person in question, not without overwhelming force to enforce it (which has arguably been the case over the last few decades for the latter case), and in both cases, taking accountability for one's own failure and learning from it seems to be - to me, anyway - the most likely method to bear fruit. But people hate taking accountability more than they love their ideology winning.
This was a really great comment and I think highlights to me why it is so frustrating that science has backed itself into this particular failure mode. Science is supposed to be this system that helps you actually discover truth, and although it doesn't always do so in the most direct fashion (see Kuhn) the truth usually wins out. Scientists with the proper training should be able to apply this epistemic openness to their lives outside of the laboratory, but it seems like the opposite actually occurs. But instead I find many scientists to be incredibly dogmatic and close-minded. Which is what I suppose the system rewards.
Planck's Principle -- that "Science progresses one funeral at a time" -- has reigned for a long time.
I fear that in certain fields, the opposite might even be the case - that the science regresses one funeral at a time. It's not that the older scientists have no biases whatsoever, but it really isn't rare that younger academics (can't really call them scientists in good conscience, tbf) are much more strictly dogmatic and don't even pretend to be interested in the pursuit of truth if it goes against their beliefs.
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I about wrote some of my reflections on the trilogy here last year.
The gender question is interesting, especially since the trilogy does seem to be very concerned with sex (the various relationships between the first 100, Hiroko's weird sex cult, the loose sexual relationships between the children in the hidden colony). 2312, a later work with many similarities to the Mars Trilogy, also extensively deals with the trans question, although kind of in a background way (everyone is just implied to be trans because why not). This does make me think a lot less of KSR as a thinker: there's a lot more kowtowing to current thing going on than I would like to think.
2312 came out in 2012, and presumably was written in 2011 sometime, at the latest. That’s at least 5 years before trans stuff really filtered out into normie world, I think.
I think KSR is a bit of an overrated author in the world of SF, but he tends to be well ahead of the current thing.
To his intellectual credit, he strikes me as more of a harbinger of doom than a follower.
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Various other fictional examples to mind: "We have finally invented the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel, Don't Invent The Torment Nexus;" "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." A non-fictional example could be underrated details of the Scopes "monkey" trial.
And of the examples you've chosen- climate change, artificial intelligence, the obesity crisis, the fertility crisis- they are also the product of scientists! Are they the only solution to problems they created? Bit of a racket, don't you think? (I'm being a bit facetious, as I think deep green ecology is even worse)
I think you're gesturing towards something interesting but I'm not quite grokking what "this" is, exactly. The tendency of scientists towards arrogance and Gell-Mann amnesia? Their tendency to consider the world perfectable and to be shaped in their image?
The this I refer to is thus: science's inability to think in terms of political solutions and general narrow specialization that leaves them pretty useless at anything the real world. I think this used to be less true in the past, and is probably a result of pedagogical choices that have been made by the university system. Learning another language for example, which used to be the standard for science because not everything was published in English, forces you to realize that there isn't one way of doing things (because different languages make different choices).
I can't really argue with what you said in the first half of your response. However, I would suggest that these problems also are the result of the myopically applied science that I complain about. Global warming was the result of using combustion to make shit and get us places without thinking about the production of greenhouse gases, obesity was the result of food science creating hyperpalitability without thinking about wether it was a good idea, ditto for birth control.
While the spread of over-engineered McDonald's-style fast food can't have helped, I don't think "food science" was more than a force multiplier here. There's enough palatable and addictive foodstuffs in nature and traditional recipes to build an obesity crisis. When economic development reaches a level where any idiot can buy as much chocolate and bacon as he can eat, it becomes the natural outcome with or without scientists to formulate ever more addictive forms of mass-produced slop. Sufficiently idle pre-modern noblemen became fat and gouty just fine, living off the most non-processed kind of food imaginable (game hunted from their lands).
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Thank you for the clarification!
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This stance would be far more defensible if the last five years hadn't happened. When it comes to "science" and "scientists", the institutions, their leaders, and their rank and file members have displayed what could be charitably described as a certain flexibility on topics where they should be trustworthy.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-health-protests-301534
Remember this one? Am I genuinely supposed to believe that was fair, impartial, disinterested Science talking?
From where I'm standing, it looks like the people that spent the last five years throwing their credibility on a big credibility bonfire and setting it on fire are upset that the fuel is gone.
There was also when Nature or some other large, prestigious journal (might had been Science itself) yes_chad.jpg'd it in reaffirming that, indeed, protecting and/or advancing the interests of Vulnerable Groups takes precedence over impartial truth-seeking. It's not political nor bias-inducing, of course; it's called being a decent scientist. Whether it be on Reddit or on here we discussed this one when it happened, but I couldn't find the discussion upon a brief searching.
This one?
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Yep, agreed. It's so fucking dumb and idiotic because it's sacrificing the ability to actually take a scientific approach towards solving problems in the future. Every time I hear this kind of shit from my colleagues I want to shake them: you are burning political capital for short-term gain.
Also see what I wrote above:
The problem is that science itself does not have a metaphysical system. Scientism, the sort of religion that has grown up around science, has a particular moral outlook. Science as a praxis, a way of discovering empirical truths, does not and cannot have much to say on moral questions, as morality and metaphysics are definitionally outside of the domain of science.
Yup. It's internecine war on the left. The foundational group desire is atheism. This part is the sacred, in Robin Hanson's terminology. There is a long history of trying to wield science as a sword for atheism, but in doing so, one runs headlong into pesky intellectual challenges. The core of this conflict is how to deal with them.
One common attempt is to just deny that there's any problem to be solved. The charitable view is to observe that such folks have mistaken methodological constraints for a metaphysical theory. But you sort of can't keep it from bubbling up, so you have to keep denying, keep refusing to talk about it. For example, since mathematics is so useful to the scientific method, it is natural to desire to include some grounding there. But, like, how does that work? What is the philosophy of mathematics, and how does it fit into the scientismist view? Let's not talk about it.
On the morality front, it has left most of the left just grasping for a naive form of meta-ethical relativism. When poked, there are often half-hearted appeals to game theory. I think that both sides of the internecine war do feel like this is their best grounding, but it's sort of interesting that one side just doesn't actually understand even the most basic components of what game theory is about. That's why they're surprised by the most basic concept in game theory - unilateral defection. The other side, the wokies, grok unilateral defection. They grok that once it has been accepted that it is declared not possible to reach the truth of a matter via rational argumentation, when the only thing left is game theory, one can simply move to brainwashing, shaming, canceling, deplatforming, intimidating, and maybe even having struggle sessions or genocides.
The thin line of hope for scientism on these issues was, "Since we have no clue what else to do, but we're trying to prop up science as the answer to all the things, I guess what we'll do is just ask the scientists to answer everything for us." That ran hard into unilateral defection. When the scientists are the new priesthood, it's pretty straightforward (and unsurprising to religious folks) to see that a simple strategy is to just corrupt the priesthood. The biggest difference between the corruption of the academic priesthood and the ratheism/atheism+ schism was that the former took time and was done with most people somewhat unaware, while the latter was quite sudden and visible. Neither is surprising; it's just unilateral defection, fighting the sectarian war by the only means remaining once one abandons intellectual rigor in favor of scientism.
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I think in most cases it’s much worse than that: they are burning political capital for no gain at all (well, except in their own personal/social lives, perhaps). Was anyone, any single solitary person, actually convinced by the argument that “the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus”? I highly doubt it. On the other hand, did people who read things like that lose their faith in the fields of science and medicine? Quite plainly yes, by the hundreds of thousands.
I’m not sure that was the turning point- in practice lots of people just decided to hell with it around Easter.
Not sure I'm following you correctly -- do you mean the turning point of average people's trust in the lockdown regime? If so, that's relevant, but not really what I was trying to get at.
I don't think there was any one singular turning point as relates to the public's trust in science & medicine writ large, more of a death-by-a-thousand-cuts scenario. There were countless examples of public-facing scientists, and crucially actual public health officials either blatantly making things up as they went along while pretending they had a plan, or outright lying for naked partisan gamesmanship. I suspect I don't really need to remind you of these times. And every time an official said something obviously false it killed the institutional trust of another chunk of average everyday people. Add this up over many, many examples of lying and flagrant idiocy and you get the crisis of trust we have today.
A lot of scientists and doctors at the time (and seemingly a fair number still today) seemed to believe that because they were trusted by the public, they could make pronouncements on social issues and be taken seriously, basically lending their gravitas to the cause of the day. This started relatively rationally with the pandemic measures and then rapidly metastasized into the "racial justice" situation. The problem was they had the flow of authority exactly backwards. People trusted scientists and doctors because they were apolitical. The trustworthiness of scientists comes from their being fixated on their particular field of interest -- "those eggheads might be weirdos, but they sure know their stuff when it comes to biochemistry/astrophysics/[insert niche interest]" is the longstanding popular image of science.
The whole point is that they're dealing with something way over the head of Joe Sixpack, but it's clear that they've devoted their lives to it, so they can be trusted when they talk about that particular thing. This trust does not -- and in fact cannot -- generalize outside of their one particular domain. If anything it anti-generalizes. In other words if a bunch of chemists start talking about structures of intersectional oppression instead of chemistry, people start to question how much they really cared about chemistry in the first place.
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You know, this reminds me of some of the studies done on flat hierarchy companies. By not using explicit organization and hierarchy, you get implicit organization and hierarchy, which is almost always dominated by people who are really good at deniably using soft power while pretending they aren't.
I wonder if something similar is happening in the sciences. By ignoring explicit politics, you accidentally optimize for people who are really good at politicking with plausible deniability.
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