domain:pedestrianobservations.com
07mk
1d ago
Human extinction is 100% inevitable.
I don't think anyone knows this with any meaningful level of confidence. The heat death of the universe through entropy is the only thing that I can think of that could guarantee this, but I don't believe we have a complete-enough understanding of physics and cosmology to state with 100% confidence that that's inescapable.
Because of that I am sympathetic to the idea that acting on one's values is ultimately more important than survival. It's the same as preferring to live a beautiful short life over a pointlessly prolonged one in a state of senility.
This is perfectly cromulent, but also, I think most people would prefer to live a beautiful long life over a beautiful but pointlessly short one. And the thing about prolonging versus ending life is that it's asymmetrical; if you prolong life when human civilization is barely lumbering along in a state of senility, there's always the chance in the future that that civilization becomes beautiful and prolonged. If it ends in a blaze of beauty, then no one ever gets to discover if there was a way to have a prolonged beautiful civilization. Believing that the end of civilization/humanity is worth it as long as my own principles and values got met by the last generation requires a God-like level of confidence in the correctness of one's own values. Which points to faith.
Which is also perfectly cromulent! I just wish people would talk about this honestly and openly.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I understand you cannot be brought around to prosocial motivations.
Who do you expect to pay your social security and wipe your ass when you’re old? Is it a work until MAID plan?
2rafa
1d ago
I've also heard theories this is a desperate hail mary to game the stats and have more white people committing "sex offenses" since the current stats are so stubbornly brown.
Very unlikely if you speak to anyone who has been catcalled in England.
07mk
1d ago
If progress results in civilization ending within a generation, then at least one generation has enjoyed the frouts of progress.
It's certainly perfectly cromulent to judge that as good and even better than the alternative of a civilization that keeps chugging along in a way that improves people's lives compared to not having civilization - and even improving the amount by which this is an improvement - without enjoying the fruits of progress, where progress here refers to the types of societal changes pushed for by people identifying as "progressives," rather than something more generic like "improving over time" or "moving forward." I don't think this is a common sentiment, though; what I see by and large is motivated reasoning that circumvents the issue altogether, by adopting a genuine, good faith belief that progress - again, referring to the specific meaning alluded above, not the general term - not only won't result in civilization ending within a generation, but that progress will help make civilization more robust against ending.
As a progressive, I would say that the odds that I'm mistaken about the goodness of my ideology - and more generally that people who agree with me are mistaken about the goodness of our ideology - is sufficiently high that I have a general preference to hedge my bets by having humanity keep moving forward long after my death. It's possible that we'll create literal heaven on Earth that you and I can enjoy until we die as the last humans to have ever lived, but it's also possible that, when good, intelligent, well-meaning people do their best, in good faith, to implement ideas that I consider to be good, this actually creates a hell on Earth that we all have to suffer through before we die as the last humans to have ever lived. I would prefer to avoid that.
If civilization continues forever without progress, then, from the point of view of at least N=1 progressive, what's the point of civilization?
The way I see it, the point of civilization is to organize humans in a way that helps make both surviving and thriving easier or more likely for them. Not uniformly or monotonically, but in some vague general sense. Which some/many people see as a good thing worth sacrificing for, even if no one ever enjoys the fruits of progress, again, by that specific meaning referenced above.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
The third is more general throughout the interminable arguments about US immigration, where a common conservative argument against open borders is that allowing anyone in who wants to come in would cause US society to worsen, including, at the limits, just destroying the country altogether. And one common sentiment, though rarely stated explicitly, among progressives who reject this argument, has been something along the lines of, "If open borders would destroy the USA, then so be it; at least we didn't discriminate against foreigners along the way." This happened to explicitly be my own position for a while, before I decided I was selfish enough to want to keep some of the benefits of USA society for myself in the future.
This is just as often reversed on immigration, though.
Lib: We need immigrants for economic growth, to bring in young productive people to support social security programs, to do jobs that are otherwise difficult to fill. Immigration makes America stronger!
Con: What does American economic growth matter if it doesn't benefit Americans? I'd rather see the American economy grow or collapse on the strength of Americans, than sell out my country to foreigners to get stronger.
Purity is typically a conservative basis for morality in Moral Foundations Theory. Refusal to compromise on one's beliefs is the essence of having beliefs, of having principles. Life for the sake of life is the philosophy of bacteria, the life has to mean something, be something.
TwiceHuman
1d ago
These questions are all meaningful to me. I'm weird, though. I'm not even particularly good at math.
I hate dynamic programming, but it seems that you can't "jump ahead" when calculating prime numbers. This feels like computational irreducibility. The world in which this property exists, and the one in which it doesn't, are meaningfully different.
The Collatz conjecture, and BB, relate to the ability to generate large things from small ones. It seems relevant for this question: Can you design a society which is both novel and stable over infinite time? Would it have to loop, repeating the same chain of events forever, or is there an infinite sequence of events which never terminates, but still stays within a certain set of bounds? If we became all-powerful and created an utopia, we might necessarily trap ourselves in it forever (because you cannot break out of a loop. If you loop once, you loop forever). It may also be that any utopia must necessarily be finite because it reaches a state which is not utopian in finite time.
Some other questions are about the limitations of math. It's relevant whether a system of everything is possible or not (if truth is relative or absolute). If trade-offs are inherent to everything, then "optimization" is simply dangerous, it means were destroying something every time we "improve" a system. It would imply that you cannot really improve anything, that you can only prioritize different things at the cost of others. For instance, a universal paperclip AI might necessarily have to destroy the world, not because it's not aligned, but because "increase one value at the cost of every other value" is optimization.
I also have a theory that self-fulfilling prophecies are real because reality has a certain mathematical property. In short, we're part of the thing we're trying to model, so the model depends on us, and we depend on the model. This imples that magic is real for some definitions of real, but it also means that some ideas are dangerous, and that Egregores and such might be real.
Rosencrantz2
1d ago
Human extinction is 100% inevitable. Because of that I am sympathetic to the idea that acting on one's values is ultimately more important than survival. It's the same as preferring to live a beautiful short life over a pointlessly prolonged one in a state of senility.
Btw I think extinction rebellion is named that because of mass wildlife extinctions rather than human extinction.
Lazuli
1d ago
There's no centralized repository.
If the program's mission is to whip people into writing publishable work every day, there should be a place where anyone can read the pieces. I hope the organizers offer some insight into that.
Which, to me, is interesting to think about with respect to the concept of a "progressive," which indicates someone who wants to "progress" - but what's the point of progress if there's no one around to enjoy its fruits?
If progress results in civilization ending within a generation, then at least one generation has enjoyed the fruits of progress. If civilization continues forever without progress, then, from the point of view of at least N=1 progressive, what's the point of civilization?
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1d ago
Modern India, modern South Asia are completely dysgenic hellholes with terrible human capital. India of all places, stands out here because castes ensured clusters of higher IQ people in the elites which is also why you see many Indians doing well.
Whenever I read wholesale dehumanization of groups of people who live in squalor I think to myself: maybe it's the empathetic part of the human brain becoming overloaded and the response from the rest of the brain is to rationalize it as "Well, they're not humans like me.". Yes, words like "dysgenic" and "caste" and "elite" qualify as dehumanization for me, even if they don't for everybody.
The alternative is the empathetic part of the brain continuing along in pain from the knowledge that humans no different from itself are living in abject poverty and destitution. It could cry out, "Why do you do nothing for your fellow man?" - but it would be simply silenced by the retort "They are not my fellow men." This dovetails nicely with some of the alt-right "empathy is weakness" messaging that's been floating around.
But maybe it's more along the lines of prosperity gospel, "I deserve this because I am special / chosen / of higher genetic quality": a defense mechanism against self-doubt that the only thing separating you from such a life are a coin tosses of fate. It would be crippling to spend every day contending with the possibility of living that way due to random chance, and so it's better to destimulate the brain and rationalize it away with a convenient belief system.
Not that it's been solicited, but my take is that the world changed too fast for India, and India grew too fast for how the world has changed. I see a similar story in the favelas in South America. Some peoples had the joy of riding the wave of modernization like surfers, and others were hit in the face by the break - like a Maxim gun nest firing on charging Ndebele warriors. To your main point, could the sociopolitical structures that Hinduism built play a role in India having not been prepared for modernization?
Rosencrantz2
1d ago
Well the jogging stark naked guy is probably crazy. Even if not though, streaking is way more wholesome than flashing!
As you say though all this is quite culture relative and I often think about how a woman willing to ditch the head scarf in a very repressive country is doing something that must feel brazen to her and read as overtly sexual to men around her.
faceh
1d ago
Here's the thing though. I'm fine with human civilization ending. I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization continuing. And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending.
What can I say, I live here.
I'd like to see what else is out there in this gigantic universe.
If Civilization recedes in my lifetime, there's a serious chance it won't come back to the tech level necessary to get off the planet. At which point, we are STUCK here until a rogue asteroid smashes us, solar flare fries us, an alien Civ shows up, or some other cataclysm. Eventually the sun dies out too.
Then its game over for reals.
If there is any real purpose, any endgame, any way to discover the answer to the last question, it's probably only accessible to Kardashev II and above civilizations.
But really, I just think its more fun for everyone if civilization continues. One thing I think that is fair to say about most of human history: MOST of humanity was not having fun MOST of the time. Quite the opposite. Wars suck. Famine Sucks. Manual labor for sheer basic survival sucks. So civilization receding will suck.
We should be trying to have more fun.
But since we're bootstrapped sentient primates running on ancient murder monkey software and have access to nuclear weapons and we're bad at large-scale coordination, maybe this was always our fate. But I prefer to believe not.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
TBH I think I'm struggling with a culture and language barrier, but would it be fair to summarize your rebuttal as "Hinduism didn't fail India, India failed Hinduism"?
TwiceHuman
1d ago
Here's some of my own insights, hopefully some of them are new or useful to you. I will compare artistic people to those who try to understand the world. The "critique society and power" group can be dismissed as politics/tribalism/activism/preaching, it's part power-struggle and part mental illness, so I will exclude it.
Academic communities tend to have a consensus, and to punish those who challenge it. This is much less prevalent in artisic communities, as most people there recognize that many different styles can be appealing for different reasons. You could argue that this is a kind of tribalism, but I think it's also a way of viewing the world: That there's one correct answer (that truth is unique), that truth is universal (rather than possibly local), and that everything can be made legible (that logic and math is sufficiently powerful to explain everything which can be explained), and that you can unify everything without ruining it in the process (that a theory of everything is possible).
Artistic people do indeed share a part of themselves when they share their art, or at least reveal something about themselves. This doesn't happen much in academia, you don't have to take responsibility for the discoveries you make, for they're true or false independently of you. Academia is about discoveries where art is about creations.
I also think that bad art is harmless to other art, and mostly harmless to other people. Making a mistake in academic work could potentially harm a lot of people, or slow down progress of "the whole". This punishes experimentation.
Finding flaws in work is a costly mental heuristic. It's basically conditioning yourself to only see the bad aspects of things. But while this seems to make academics treat eachother harshly, I find that this is less rare in artistic spaces. What usually happens instead is that artists are extremely hard on themselves and their own work, but encouraging of other people. I think artists who are unhappy with their own are similar to people who undergo plastic surgery again and again. Staring at something for too long seems like a bad idea, be it your own work or your own face.
The mean of the distributions of personality traits also seem different between the two groups. Artistic people are more subjective, less analytical, more social, and they tend to expand their worldview until they get lost in it, whereas many mathematically minded people tend to reduce reality to abstract models and thus tend towards nihilism and simplicity. I'd also argue that scholary types tend to have bad taste by default, - you have to be a bit of a pervert to want to look beneath the surface of everything (unlike artists, who appreciate the surface, or use it to conceal the depth of life that they cannot deal with)
I think that artistic people and academic derive enjoyment from different things. I love correcting people who are wrong, I think it feels really good when I get a new insight, and climbing the mountain of knowledge is also a joy in itself. Art is beauty, the joy of creation, it's experience, and it's anti-nihilistic. Art is quite human, whereas the objective is simply anti-human (another user on here probably disagrees very strongly with this, but I did the math)
I've once heard that intelligence is inversely correlated with instinct. It could be because instinct is innate intelligence, and that this competes with generalized intelligence, since the latter has to be able to overwrite it in order for you to update your beliefs and adapt to a new environment than what your innate intelligence is fit for. It could also simply be a trade-off between developing yourself, and aligning yourself with something else until you yourself disappear. Do you want to chop off a part of yourself in order to fit in, or will you believe in that part of yourself and work to make it more appealing?
I guess that people of a field tend to grow tired of teaching beginners because they have to explain the same things maybe 50 or 100 times. First time I saw somebody use Popper's paradox of tolerance as an argument, I though "Hmm, something about this doesn't seem right". Now I simply tell them "You're acting in bad faith, and you know it. You also don't know what comes before or after this quote, since you've never read the paper that it's from. You didn't think it through, you merely copy-pasted it because it seems like an authority which agrees with you". Of course, if somebody is so put off by stupid questions, I think they should just delete their stackoverflow account.
Finally, have you noticed the general tendency towards homogeneity? Everything is becoming more alike over time. Academic people are contributing to this problem, wheras artist people don't seem to be. Academia is, from my perspective, excessive order. Many artistic people are a little bit chaotic because they're a little bit crazy, but I personally like that
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
But how horrifying is it to hear that, since we must treat women as indistinguishable from men, and since that's clearly untenable, the solution is to abolish women‽
This reminds me of a pair of comments on either /r/SSC or /r/TheMotte (sadly I did not save them) where 2 philosophers of the highest kind had a discussion about how consciousness in women was a mistake by evolution. In the ensuing fallout, both comments were deleted, and quite possibly both accounts as well. One of my favorite "elmo watching the nuclear blast" moments.
Rosencrantz2
1d ago
Yeah, this might be true and if they could keep their cat calling within their section of society maybe that would be okay? But not very practicable if we're talking about whistling at strangers.
07mk
1d ago
Seeing this written out explicitly, it makes me wish that more people would be open and honest about their view on this like here. Because this comment reminded me of 3 different things.
One was during the aftermath of 9/11 when the PATRIOT ACT and War on Terror were pushed through, with one of the arguments from the Republican/conservative side in favor of these things being that "the US Constitution is not a suicide pact," which was completely ineffective as an argument against most Democrats/liberals/progressives by my observation. The reasoning being that, if adhering to the Constitution would result in the destruction of the country that follows it, then that justifies not adhering to it, so that the country that actually makes the Constitution meaningful beyond some scribbles on paper, can keep on keeping it meaningful. And the most common counterargument was some variant of, "If this means the USA is destroyed, then so be it, at least we followed principles of civil liberty and privacy and etc. along the way."
Another was part of an interview in a documentary called The Red Pill, which was made by a feminist named Cassie Jaye as a way to explore the red pill community/movement/whatever and related man-o-sphere groups like men's rights activists and men going their own way. She interviewed a lot of people, but one of them was a feminist academic, and one of the questions had to do with the idea that, what if the Patriarchy, as feminist academics like herself, understood it, was something that was needed in some form in order to keep human civilization going, since women freed from its shackles empirically keep choosing to have too few children to keep above replacement. Her answer was pretty much "that's a depressing thought," followed by a non-answer in a way that gave the impression that she clearly had thought very little about this possibility, i.e. that this possibility just wasn't something she particularly cared about.
The third is more general throughout the interminable arguments about US immigration, where a common conservative argument against open borders is that allowing anyone in who wants to come in would cause US society to worsen, including, at the limits, just destroying the country altogether. And one common sentiment, though rarely stated explicitly, among progressives who reject this argument, has been something along the lines of, "If open borders would destroy the USA, then so be it; at least we didn't discriminate against foreigners along the way." This happened to explicitly be my own position for a while, before I decided I was selfish enough to want to keep some of the benefits of USA society for myself in the future.
In each of these, one can make some argument based on facts for why the bad thing won't happen: even without the PATRIOT ACT, USA would remain a safe and powerful country; even with maximal female emancipation and sex equality for whatever those mean for any given feminist academic/activist, human society could keep surviving and even thriving; even with open borders, it's possible that USA will be just as prosperous and safe a nation to live in as before, just servicing more and poorer people. There are good and bad arguments for and against all of these positions. But looking from the inside, it seemed to me that these arguments weren't made based on good faith belief in them, but rather based on motivated reasoning, in order to avoid having to make the argument that the benefits are worth the harms, in favor of just denying that harms exist (this is a common pattern you've probably seen in every aspect of life, from the most minute decisions one might make in everyday life all the way to the biggest, most world-altering policies or military actions).
Now, I have little idea if this is a left/progressive thing; I've just observed it in that group because I am part of that group and have spent most of my life surrounded by people in that group. I suspect that conservatives, by their nature of preferring tradition - such as the tradition of keeping civilization going for the next generation - have a greater tendency to want to keep humanity and human civilization going than progressives, who tend to be skeptical of tradition. But either way, I'm quite sure this attitude of "why care about humanity's survival when we have my favorite principles to worry about" is extremely common among progressives. Usually, it's not explicitly spoken or even thought, it gets laundered in, as alluded to above, by motivating oneself to believe that the evidence indicates that one's principles don't actually conflict with other goals such as survival of humanity/human civilization (in fact, I see such motivated reasoning often leading people to believe that their principles are actually synergistic to good goal, such as game devs genuinely believing that putting in characters that conform with their ideology would also lead to more sales due to expanding the market).
Which, to me, is interesting to think about with respect to the concept of a "progressive," which indicates someone who wants to "progress" - but what's the point of progress if there's no one around to enjoy its fruits? One way to think about it might be that we've "progressed" beyond ideologies for the benefit of the comfort and life satisfaction of mere animals such as ourselves and to pure principles that are Good or Bad due to arguments that I found convincing, rather than due to empirical consequences of following them. Which looks a lot like inventing a god or a religion.
Traditional religions make this kind of argument all the time, of course, under the justification of God, who is said to be intrinsically good and beyond understanding and judgment by mere mortals such as ourselves. And He might also punish/reward us in the afterlife, which means even from a completely selfish cynical perspective, following His principles is in my interest. Convincing if you already believe in Him, not so much if you don't. But progressive ideology largely rejects religion and associated supernatural beliefs, and so there is no Heaven or Hell to reward the souls of extinct humans; we just stop existing. And there's no God or faith in God to use as a compass for figuring out what principles are good, we just have academics at our local Critical Theory-related college departments to instruct us what's good. I'm reminded of the criticism often thrown at "wokes," that they copied the original sin of Christianity without copying the forgiveness and redemption.
There's also the reality of a group like "Extinction Rebellion," which is explicitly against the extinction of humanity and what most people would agree is a "progressive" group. However, the fact that the group's mission has to do with stopping global warming, something I don't think I've seen anyone seriously argue has a meaningful chance at making humanity go extinct or even destroying human civilization to enough of an extent to be close enough, makes me think it's more motivated reasoning with an intentionally eyebrow-raising name than genuine motivation.
In any case, I doubt that more than a handful of particularly honest and self-aware progressives explicitly believe this notion, but I commonly see this attitude of "human civilization is a small price to pay for achieving our principles" at virtually every level of analysis and rhetoric put forth by people belonging to this cluster of ideologies. I just wish everyone was more honest and open about this. A progressive who thinks like this and a conservative who wants human society both to stay alive and stay just as good, if not become better, are actually, fundamentally, at odds with each other in terms of goals, not just the methods. If people actually have honest, true, correct beliefs about the goals and principles of others, a lot less time and effort can be wasted in making arguments that falsely presume a common ground.
I'm also reminded of the commonly known "thrive/survive" dichotomy, where progressives are characterized as focusing on how we can thrive, which is only possible in times of plenty, and conservatives are characterized as focusing on how we can survive, which is most relevant in times of not plenty. Sacrificing thriving too much for the sake of survival seems like a likely failure mode of the latter, while sacrificing surviving too much for the sake of thriving seems like a likely failure mode of the former.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
The problem with the end of civilization is that the alternatives suck.
Furthermore, I think we have a serious problem in humanity civilization or not if basic biological necessities like perpetuating the species or not eating ourselves to death, or those kinds of things. I’m hypothesizing that we’re creating a very hyper stimulating environment that hijacks our normal biological systems in ways that are more stimulating than the normal activities that our hyper stimulating environment creates. I’m looking into a minimalistic sort of entertainment tech detox that im suspecting will prove this out. But if people are hyper stimulated by media, technology and so on to the point that they don’t end up socializing as much as they should, or if porn (which I don’t do) is hyper stimulating to the point that real life humans and dating them cannot compete, I think we may be engineering our own species out of existence much like we created beer bottles for Australian beetles to prefer to hump over real female beetles. If this is the case, it needs to be dealt with unless the royal we are perfectly okay with killing off the most intelligent species we know of in the entire universe to make the money printer go brrrrr.
I always imagined the Great Filter might be something exciting like a war or a plague. Turns out that it might be us creating systems that stimulate our brains too much.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
hail mary to game the stats
Or maybe it was a way to keep them busy and out of the way of people doing actual work.
Why not both? And I don't mean game the stats to get more white offenders or whatever, I mean it in the usual sense that police departments game the stats by going out trying to write lots of citations to hit their quotas for the week. These lady cops (or their supervisor) had the bright idea to go out doing this to generate some citations and pump the numbers, and the supervisor might have signed off on it to help his employees hit their numbers, as well getting them out of the way for some actual work being done. Unremarkable business as usual for police departments.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
This is not the sort of engagement we are looking for here. You are a brand-new account, and do not appear to understand the rules here or the intent behind them. Banned for a day; please familiarize yourself with the rules linked in the sidebar before engaging further.
I have been reading your posts for quite some time now. I do not understand, you are in a dire situation without career/future/life and you are writing irrelevant articles after articles doing absolutely nothing. Please help your self. None of this matter really. Look at your last 10 posts in this light. Come to your senses man. Hello???
MollieTheMare
1d ago
Annoying nitpick. Civilization ending and the human species existing are not necessarily equivalent.
I personalty would prefer for any future descendants to live in a high functioning civilization, but presumably the anarcho-primitivists might still have preference for human species existing but also for civilization ending. Return to Monke, and all that.
There 100% is. Women walking around in their underwear is an unfortunate commentary on the state of society; it’s not directly threatening.
More options
Context Copy link