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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Apparently, a lab in china has created a virus with a 100% kill rate in humanized mice. Combined with the fact that there's a decent chance that COVID was a lab leak, this sort of thing is extremely dangerous to be doing.
I'm not sure how best to make it so that people are not incentivized to do things like this, but ceasing to fund this variety of research (it looks like the US ended one program that was pushing this sort of thing last year), and instating some sort of legal liability on those who do this, and especially if they dispose of it badly, probably seem like good decisions.
Extremely dangerous diseases are among the top few things in being both disastrous to humanity (unlike climate change) and also relatively likely (unlike a massive asteroid hitting earth). Development of them is also something that is not excessively difficult to do. This is probably the closest thing we have so far to Bostrom's black ball metaphor. People joke about Yudkowskian airstrikes on data centers; would airstrikes on labs be similarly warranted? More seriously, though, there should be far more effort put into preventing this sort of thing than there currently is.
Bostrom's concerns should probably be something more important to be aware of. The ideal is just to not develop technology in specific fields to the point that killing millions is a cheap and easy thing to do. Of course, the tradeoff is totalitarianism, a terror of its own.
EDIT: Some of the comments have argued, relatively convincingly, that this particular news story was overblown and misleading.
I told you guys letting the scientists get away with millions of deaths with not even so much as the hint of a punishment would come to bite us in the ass.
I mean come on, at least give 10 years hard labor to single Dyatlov pour encourager les autres. It's not like there's any shortage of guilt to go around, the whole program the US supposedly ended was likely completely illegal and we even have people like Fauci actively conspiring to hide the mere consideration of COVID escaping from a lab.
When you refuse to render justice and punish the guilty, you are justly rewarded with larger and larger messes.
Unlike Bostrom I don't believe in an infinitely large mess that consumes all mankind, I think nature is very rarely that self reinforcing and that extinction is more likely to come from slow decay or the completely unpredictable. If fucking with nature could totally wipe us out we'd probably already be dead a thousand times over already given how fast and loose we've been playing with the forces of nature these past few centuries.
That said, since I'm not really eager for a new black plague, can't we just, this one time, agree not to pursue something that's totally worthless as a weapon, actively harmful to humanity and doesn't even answer any questions about the universe we really want the answer to?
Why do you believe that humanity could never invent something capable of causing our extinction? Even if you think strangelets are safe, is there some rule that says they have to be? What about nanobots? What happens when you create an AI advanced enough to make itself more advanced?
"Nature doesn't work that way." Why? What does that mean? Why are you using the word "nature" and not "technology and its future"?
Futurists tend to have this problem where they're so fixated on hypothetic possibility they tend to forget anything we do, including novel technology, is still part of nature and still restricted by the same limits as everything else. It's rare that we can come up with something that is both legitimately more efficient than what evolution has come up with and sustainable in time.
In this instance, we know what the behavior of a very deadly virus is: it kills a bunch of people until eventually its death rate catches onto its propagation rate and it smothers itself or it manages to mutate into a less deadly strain that can become endemic and live in a population by not killing it fast enough.
To guarantee extinction we then have to reach for effects that are so radically deadly and permanent that they can actually effect all or virtually all of the human population and have enough staying power that you can't escape by living in some remote place for a bit. Even total nuclear war doesn't pass that test. Humanity can still thrive with high rates of cancer, and wildlife has long since forgotten about Chernobyl even as we did not.
I don't believe in extinction McGuffin because to create something that can affect us in totality is extremely difficult; and it is so as I've stated because the processes of nature, down to even physics, are self limiting most of the time.
I'd still feel more secure if we had two planets, nay, if we had two solar systems. Because there are a decent amount of events that pass that threshold. But I'm a lot less concerned with extinction as I am with widespread catastrophe.
If your standard is life by any measure goes on, then ok. But it's not like mass extinction has never happened, and given enough time, will not happen again. The Permian–Triassic extinction event knocked out something like 81% of all marine species, according to wiki. Some things lived on or recovered over the course of millions of years, but plenty of creatures got perma-wiped. I don't see why humans could never ever be like the trilobites.
Oh I'm not saying humanity can't go extinct, not at all. But it's not like those trilobites engineered their own destruction or something. Some impossible to prepare incomprehensible new circumstance just came about and wiped them out. That seems much more likely to me than the Frankenstein scenario we're all so obsessed with.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link