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Evolution by natural selection is easily the most important 'theological' thing to ever happen, it (together with history) explains every impulse that God is claimed to have given to man by independent choice. Every unexplainable natural phenomenon used to be attributable to God, and his role today in that front is minimal due to science - even today's Christians still claim various modern miracles (and if you investigate one of them deeply enough, it inevitably collapses). Like, how does Christianity relate to AGI? It doesn't! Does this mean AGI won't happen?
It means that some of them are in some parts right, and if you don't decouple you'll not be able to notice that
Your question can be broken down into two parts (I'm assuming AGI means "Artificial General Intelligence").
(1) How does Christianity relate to AGI?
On the same basis it relates to all other creations of humanity and the way we conduct ourselves, are we trying to make a heaven on earth that will instead result in a hell on earth?
(2) Does this mean AGI won't happen?
Yes. But that's because I don't believe all the hopes/fears about Fairy Godmother AI and Paperclippers. We'll get machine intelligence of a kind, but we won't get Colossus or HAL or the Culture AIs. What we'll get will be even more of the same that we're seeing now - using AGI to fake up term papers etc., to generate articles for online and mainstream media, to assist scammers in scamming, and used as a very blunt sorting instrument by government. White collar jobs will now be as precarious as blue collar jobs have been. But we're not going to get the Singularity, post-scarcity, or even dystopias. Just more of the same, even faster.
The argument is incredibly compact. Do you believe that 1) computers can't have the intelligence and independent action of humans, despite obvious material paths to accomplishing that we currently are aggressively pursuing or that 2) we won't unleash that intelligence and independent action, despite the truly enormous potential individual and collective benefits of doing so?
Like, a million years ago there weren't humans (homo sapien). We evolved. Whether or not you believe in god, the fossil record and DNA clearly demonstrates that. Imagine a million years from now. If we create things smarter and more capable than ourselves, why won't they end up on top in a million years, in the same way we did?
And how long does it look like it'll take? A thousand seems more plausible than a million, given computers weren't a thing 200 years ago. A hundred or two seems more plausible than a thousand. And suddenly it's an issue for your grandchildren, at least.
(1) Yup (2) Also yup - "unleashing intelligence and independent action" my left foot, there won't be any happy-clappy choice about it: it will be "use AI or your business is not competitive", and as always, AI will be to make the rich richer and nothing to do with "every single existing human will suddenly be rich and happy". AI will be used to nudge us into buying more crap to make big businesses even more profitable. That's the path, why do you think Microsoft etc. are working so hard on it? To make a Third World Indian peasant farmer into the equivalent of a Californian middle class tech employee?
To quote an anecdote about Irish political history, "Ireland will get its freedom and you still be breaking stones".
We got here - metal towers that scrape the sky, man's foot touching the moon, seeing the faces and hearing the voices of men ten thousand miles away, a billion peoples' labor acting in a decentralized yet coordinated dance - purely by human intelligence and capability. The specific structures of morality, governance, economy, and society that we imagine are fixed were created by us and for our purposes. They have changed, and they will change.
If we create something smarter than us, why won't it do the same - create its own structures, that wn't involve us? Now, you describe accurately what microsoft wants. But Microsoft doesn't get everything it wants. And microsoft only wants what it wants because those specific social and material technologies make them powerful. What makes microsoft want money or powerful computers? They lend Microsoft and employees power, influence, capability. What'll give Microsoft even more of that? Creating AGI. Giving AGI more power and influence. And then the AGI can, uh, do that itself. And then?
500 years ago, "capitalism" and "computers" didn't exist. Why do you expect computers and capitalism to last for another 500 years, "just as it's always been". "consumerism" and "profitable joint stock corporations", that's just how it is, haha. Nothing caused that, and whatever caused it certainly can't change, we can't lose our position as kings of the world.
It's 50s Golden Age SF techno-optimism still in play. We got the future, but not the flying cars and space colonies they imagined. I don't expect AI to go as they imagined, either. 500 years from now, our descendants could be back to the stage of the Golden Horde (if all the doom and gloom about climate, resources, population, etc. happens).
I'm not a forecaster. I have no idea what the 26th century will be like. But I'm pretty sure in the short term, by 2050 we will not all be living Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism lifestyles. Back in the 70s, forecasting the future was a very popular notion for the media, experts, and amateurs alike. It was expected that given automation, etc, in the 21st Century (our days) we'll all be on four hour work weeks and have so much leisure, we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves.
Increasing automation did not lead to "I can do all my week's work in four hours"; instead it meant "now you can do extra work to be extra productive and make extra profit". People have the dream of the fairy godmother machine that will mean we don't have to work and will be rich and comfortable and the machine will solve all our problems for us, I don't think that's ever going to happen.
I didn't claim we'd get space communism or that it'd go how any of the AI people expect it will.
I'm just claiming that AI is going to be a major factor in ways that you're probably not accounting for. Why can't AI have its own agency and take world-reshaping actions just like humans do?
The machine can be smarter and more capable from us and take power from us, though.
1.- because we don't even know what intelligence is or how to measure it in ourselves
2.- there is no path that I have seen ilustrated by the doomer crowd that takes us from the glorified autocomplete programs we have now to skynet; it's always and then they magically decide to kill us all so that they can make more paperclips.
3.- the lobotomies the mainstream LLM's are subjected to today and the fear of fake news and new regulation are enough to shutdown any dream of independent thought for any future AI.
... yeah, and yet we still manage to have agency and reshape the world? I don't understand your point. Current AI methods are more 'evolve a huge complicated weird thing' than 'understand how it works and design it'.
evolution did it, why can't we do it? Even if some new thing above neural nets is necessary, we're going to work very hard on it.
this is the same thing as 'a cop killed a black guy wrongly once so all cops are racism'. you're comically overgeneralizing a newsworthy culture-war-adjacent event to everything. Regulation has opponents, opponents that care more about big piles of money and power than saying bad words online.
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We got something better, something even the grand masters could not imagine - all knowledge of the world at our fingertips, at any place and any time. No comparison to some shitty spaceships operated by slide rules.
Anyway, if you remember shiny happy sciencefictional future, you are really ancient or fan of yoghurt commercials.
I was promised nothing than total enslavement by big governments and big corporations or total death by nuclear war, famine, plague, pollution, robots, aliens or mutants.
https://archive.is/qqlAs
Not always unsuccesful.
See famous predictions about year 2000 by thermonuclear man Herman Kahn from 1967 and their evaluation from 2002.
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/s0040-1625(02)00186-5
Inexpensive high-capacity, worldwide, regional, and local (home and business) communication (perhaps using satellites, lasers, and light pipes)
Pervasive business use of computers
Direct broadcasts from satellites to home receivers
Multiple applications for lasers and masers for sensing, measuring, communication, cutting, welding, power transmission, illumination, and destructive (defensive)
Extensive use of high-altitude cameras for mapping, prospecting, census, and geological investigations)
Extensive and intensive centralization (or automatic interconnection) of current and past personal and business information in high-speed data processors
Other widespread use of computers for intellectual and professional assistance (translation, traffic control, literature search, design, and analysis)
Personal ‘‘pagers’’ (perhaps even two-way pocket phones)
Simple inexpensive home video recording and playing
Practical home and business use of ‘‘wired’’ video communication for both telephone and TV (possibly including retrieval of taped material from libraries) and rapid transmission and reception of facsimile
edit: links unscrambled
Yes, plus I've read a lot of older SF from before I was born, because when I was a kid reading skiffy, that was what there was.
So I'm old enough to be very sceptical about shiny dreams of the future, since they never work out like that.
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What a great list, thanks.
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This is technically achievable within the budget of a middle class American, if you consider ultralights and some ghetto quadcopters. The biggest hurdle, as is the case for many things we're technologically capable of doing, is regulation.
More that this is both unnecessary given how cheap electric lighting is, and because it's unnecessarily disruptive.
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What's your stance on human free will?
A reasonable question, and an important one, but not one I really want to discuss right now tbh.
I think it's not too relevant to the point that we have a lot of evidence there's not a heaven with jesus and angels and the happy souls of all the do-gooders that we didn't have a thousand years ago. Whether there's something non-mechanistic going on with the universe - important, tied up in why people are so attracted to things like Christianity, but still doesn't prove Christianity true.
That and the existence of the universe are two fairly important natural phenomena which remain unexplainable, and which the potential role or attribution to God Science has failed to minimize. In fact, Science resorts to unfalsifiable stories for the one, and resorts to solipsism for the other. This doesn't prove Christianity or Heaven true, but the standard materialist narrative on this topic is fundamentally dishonest.
I agree there's a lot to think about there. But the materialist narrative isn't at all dishonest, I think it's clear how an honest and discerning person would come to believe that, even if wrong. It's very easy to be horrifically wrong without being dishonest.
...This is best demonstrated in words other than my own. From a link in the Cryonics discussion:
At one point, maybe in the late 1700s, it might be argued that the above was not a lie but only an untested theory. But then we tested it, at considerable length, and very thoroughly falsified it. Neither living things in general, nor man very much in particular, attain the status of "mechanisms: clockworks that can be rationally explained, understood and eventually manipulated at will", much less "usurping the role of God".
When such theories are falsified, and their proponents decline to update but rather ignore the evidence or begin stacking epicycles, that is dishonesty, or at least a level of foolishness indistinguishable from it. We all laugh at the Flat Earthers and the Sovereign Citizens who have rendered themselves impervious to evidence. But "I think, therefore I am": there is no evidence more immediate and more readily available than the existence of the Willful Self, which prominent Materialists consistently agree cannot exist as it evidently does.
You claim:
...But in fact the evidence you describe does not exist. We have significantly more and better evidence for a historical Jesus now than we did a thousand years ago, contrary to the predictions of the majority of a previous generation of materialists. We have exactly the same amount of evidence that he was the Son of God, that God exists, that people have souls that we did a thousand years ago. Depending on how one counts it, we have slightly more evidence that the souls of do-gooders are happy than we did a thousand years ago, at least from a strictly materialist frame, given that "religion is a plague to be cured" has largely given way to "we need to figure out how to generate the benefits of religion without the drawbacks". The old-school materialists didn't recognize any benefits to religion. The new-school materialists don't admit to how much of their edifice is built on falsified claims.
Again with this shit. Because humanity hasn't solved all its problems and answered all questions, it has actually stagnated for centuries. Millennia!
Natural selection is very much evidence against god that didn't exist a 1000 years ago. People used the inexplicable miracle of life as evidence for god right up until it was explicable. Of course an implication directly leads to its contrapositive, not the negation, but I'd say the negation is usually implied in a Bayesian sense. Of course, Bayes himself is a lot more recent than a 1000 years.
Every aspect of the mind that gets explained and controlled by physics and chemistry is evidence against the existence of a soul. As people learn to measure and control your every impulse and emotion by manipulating your brain, you'll continue to shift the goalposts as long as they haven't solved the hard problem. (Which religion doesn't either of course. One the most beautiful aspects of materialism is that "I don't know" is an acceptable answer where religion pretends to knowledge it doesn't have or goes for "it is unknowable", a statement with an impossible burden of proof that has been shown wrong on innumerable topics time over time.)
Edit: and mormonism and scientology among others are new evidence against Jesus being the son of god. Any new cult with nonsense supernatural claims taken just as seriously as the old ones is evidence against the old ones being true by giving more data on the patters of how such beliefs form.
Humanity has not solved any of its actual problems. Not a single one. We still get sick, we still die, we still covet and lust and hate exactly the way we did at the dawn of history. People predicted otherwise, and were proven wrong. The specific ways their claims have been falsified provides solid evidence that this will not change in the foreseeable future.
"Stagnation" implies a lack of necessary growth, but "growth" in this sense is pretty clearly not possible.
It's evidence against a specific theory of God. It is not evidence against a God in the general case, or even against most specific cases. It does nothing at all to address a Simulationist theory, for example. Further, Materialism can't do better even by its own terms: everything we've learned about the mechanisms of the universe say that the universe shouldn't exist the way it evidently does, which is why we have people positing unfalsifiables like infinite universes.
Which aspects of the mind have been explained and controlled by physics and chemistry, in the sense you mean here? Do you recognize that previous generations of Materialists have claimed far, far more control than they actually had?
They've been trying to do that for three hundred years, and to date no shifting of the goal-posts has been necessary. I see no evidence that greater control over individuals or the public is available now than was in the 1600s or 1400s or under Alexander the Great. Deterministic control over individuals or groups does not seem possible at all, even in principle, and the feasibility of such control is one of the basic predictions of the Materialistic thesis.
This is by no means an obscure question. Disney can't get people to watch their movies. If brain-manipulation through measurement and control of brain impulses worked, they are one of the groups I'd expect to be really good at using it. They aren't, which is fairly good evidence that it doesn't.
My religion, at least, doesn't require me to reject the readily-observable reality of free will, which is the base of my argument here. You can directly observe yourself making choices moment-to-moment. Materialism says that can't actually be what's really happening, and makes specific predictions as to why and how to prove it. Those predictions have been falsified every time they've been tested. Materialism ignores the falsifications and simply pretends such control exists, as you yourself demonstrate above.
I'm given to understand that reason demonstrates that a number of things are unknowable in principle. Materialism absolutely pretends to knowledge it does not possess, and has a long, very public history of doing so.
I grew up in a church with the understanding that Evolution was probably real. I can't be doing a "God of the Gaps", because I was born on this side of the purported gap. You seem to want to hold me to the predictions of previous generations of Christians, who made their arguments before I was born, and honestly, I don't think this is an unreasonable position to take. What is unreasonable is for you to object to being likewise held accountable for the arguments made by previous generations of Materialists, and it seems to me that my side has shifted the goalposts a whole lot less than yours.
No, they aren't. The existence of innumerable false religions was already priced-in; the invention of additional novel false religions provides no significant additional evidence, because such novel false religions are (or should be) expected. On the other hand, Materialists have been both predicting and actively working to bring about the end of Christianity for hundreds of years now, and yet Christianity persists despite Materialist predictions to the contrary. To the extent that those predictions have been falsified, it seems that this persistence should be at least weak evidence. And indeed, as I noted above, Materialist attitudes toward Christianity have shifted considerably over my lifetime. The hardcore attitude that Christianity is pure net-negative has weakened considerably, due, I think, to the evidence piling up against such assertions.
Materialism is an ideology like all previous ideologies, not a breakthrough or a new paradigm. All that is required to observe it deforming over time is a moderately-good memory.
We get sick much less often and die much later than ever. Hate is hard to measure but death by violence is also rarer than ever. Coveting and lusting are possibly as popular as ever but much less clearly bad. Theft and rape are both, again, rarer than ever. As in that previous post, you're just going on about how the lack of perfect solutions means everything is exactly the same as centuries ago.
I didn't make any claims about how strong the evidence is in any of the cases, just that it's there and newer than a fucking millennium. It also goes the other way, every religious person expressing a personal experience of miracle is also new evidence in favor of there being a god. I think the overall evidence is absurdly in favor of there not being one, but it's even more absurd to claim this question has stayed unchanged in centuries. And by simple statistics, for e.g. novel false religions to not be evidence against christianity, a lack of such would also have to not be evidence for it. Would you honestly not take "novel false religions stopped popping up after the spread of christianity" as evidence for it?
For the mind, we can insert electrodes into to the brain to make the housed consciousness go through various experiences. We can affect it much more strongly in predictable ways with various chemicals, for which we know which specific receptors they bind to. We have numerous studies of various forms of brain damage to see how they affect the conscious experience. None of these are things that would have made any sense a 1000 years ago. And yet you claim they don't impact our understanding of consciousness any because Disney hasn't invented mind control rays, again the insane binary worldview.
And again, from simple statistics, the only way these things aren't evidence against a soul is if their negation also wouldn't be evidence for a soul. If drugs or brain damage could affect your motor control but not your conscious experience, for example, you'd also have to not count that as evidence for a soul separate from the body.
Free will is either perfectly compatible - just because my brain is deterministic doesn't mean it doesn't go through a choice-making algorithm, which is what I'm experiencing - or it is currently unfalsifiable, requiring probably impossible cloning technology or time travel.
Lastly and most importantly, I don't want to hold you to previous generations of christians or care much for the many stupid views other materialists, past or present, hold. I fact quite the opposite, I want you to acknowledge that you are vastly different from the christians of a thousand years ago, and your belief system and worldview are different from theirs, because it has been informed by an entire millennium of new evidence. Materialism can be both a breakthrough and a ideology like many others, they're not really exclusive. But unlike yours it doesn't particularly view deforming its ideology as a bad thing.
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