site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

If we're eventually going to fill up Earth, why bother reviving the corpsicles? The majority of them are just more dull, weak, stupid humans from the past. We have plenty of new humans if we want more humans, and those are ones who are better fitted for our society.

I think there's a lot of contradiction in the transhumanist ideals, and that's normal, but someone really should address "We're gonna have so many people on Earth we have to create space colonies and settle other planets" with "We can solve the problem of cryonics and revive people from now to live in the future where life extension is also a mostly solved problem".

I expect AGI to either kill us or provide more robust means of life extension in the next decade.

And the 40s and 50s techno-optimists expected we'd have lunar colonies, Mars colonies, and be travelling to other star systems by now. Be careful what you expect is going to happen in the near future, it hardly ever happens as we forecast it would.

None of these apply to a 80 year old with the body and mind of someone a quarter their age.

Two different problems there: life extension past what we currently consider the 'normal' limits (e.g. making sure most people will live to be 100) and reversing the effects of aging (you still die in your 80s but you remain fit and healthy as a 40 year old up to then). Think of Swift's Struldbruggs; what do you think people would choose, given the fear of death, between "you will live another 20-30 years but keep getting older" or "you will stay in your 40 year old state of health up till you die, but you die at 70-80 as usual"? Some people will pick the extra time, some people will pick the healthier body.

But we're not medieval peasants, we're at the cusp of real apotheosis

That's an amount of hubris that makes me laugh. Come back when you're 60 and few of your confident predictions have come true. The one thing that happens is that as we get to know more, we realise how much more complicated the problems are (space colonies! solving aging!) than the early optimism of the day imagined (we're so smart now and know so much, surely in 10/20/50 years we will know everything!)

Says the insane parson trying to stop the neurosurgeon from resecting their brain tumour.

So you're comparing being trans to - having a brain tumour? Are you sure you want to be quoted on that? 😁

If we're eventually going to fill up Earth, why bother reviving the corpsicles? The majority of them are just more dull, weak, stupid humans from the past. We have plenty of new humans if we want more humans, and those are ones who are better fitted for our society.

There's a reason I suggested a 1% chance of ever coming back, but surprise surprise, transhumanists, like their merely "humanist" kin, are capable of charity.

At a point in time where we can actually do this, it's not going to cost much for the living.

And the 40s and 50s techno-optimists expected we'd have lunar colonies, Mars colonies, and be travelling to other star systems by now. Be careful what you expect is going to happen in the near future, it hardly ever happens as we forecast it would.

I expect reality to set us straight, not fully-generalized-pessimism.

and reversing the effects of aging (you still die in your 80s but you remain fit and healthy as a 40 year old up to then).

That is not how aging works. The only way you're going to be able to pull that off is dragging your happy and healthy grandma behind a shed and introducing her to a baseball bat.

Age is not a coat of paint, it represents trillions of accumulated failures in complicated systems, which cause a super-exponential decline in capabilities (if it was merely exponential, some people would live centuries and more, instead of us being hard capped to 120 years).

You make people healthy (also known as reversing aging) and they will live longer.

So you're comparing being trans to - having a brain tumour? Are you sure you want to be quoted on that?

More of a comparison to abortion or what it means to be human, as far as I can tell.