KAHNEMAN: You seem to be describing this as something that is already happening. Are you referring to developments such as the plans to do away with death? That absolutely would not be a mass project. But could you elaborate on that?
.HARARI: Yes, the attitude now towards disease and old age and death is that they are basically technical problems. It is a huge revolution in human thinking. Throughout history, old age and death were always treated as metaphysical problems, as something that the gods decreed, as something fundamental to what defines humans, what defines the human condition and reality.
Even a few years ago, very few doctors or scientists would seriously say that they are trying to overcome old age and death. They would say no, I am trying to overcome this particular disease, whether it’s tuberculosis or cancer or Alzheimers. Defeating disease and death, this is nonsense, this is science fiction.
But, the new attitude is to treat old age and death as technical problems, no different in essence than any other disease. It’s like cancer, it’s like Alzheimers, it’s like tuberculosis. Maybe we still don’t know all the mechanisms and all the remedies, but in principle, people always die due to technical reasons, not metaphysical reasons. In the middle ages, you had an image of how does a person die? Suddenly, the Angel of Death appears, and touches you on the shoulder and says, “Come. Your time has come.” And you say, “No, no, no. Give me some more time.” And Death said, “No, you have to come.” And that’s it, that is how you die.
We don’t think like that today. People never die because the Angel of Death comes, they die because their heart stops pumping, or because an artery is clogged, or because cancerous cells are spreading in the liver or somewhere. These are all technical problems, and in essence, they should have some technical solution. And this way of thinking is now becoming very dominant in scientific circles, and also among the ultra-rich who have come to understand that, wait a minute, something is happening here. For the first time in history, if I’m rich enough, maybe I don’t have to die.
KAHNEMAN: Death is optional.
HARARI: Death is optional. And if you think about it from the viewpoint of the poor, it looks terrible, because throughout history, death was the great equalizer. The big consolation of the poor throughout history was that okay, these rich people, they have it good, but they’re going to die just like me. But think about the world, say, in 50 years, 100 years, where the poor people continue to die, but the rich people, in addition to all the other things they get, also get an exemption from death. That’s going to bring a lot of anger.
The TV Tropes article points out the absurdity of fictional situations where the characters invent supertechnologies to solve really hard problems in the plot, and then they put these new tools back in the box and you never see them again, even when these tools could solve other problems in the rest of the world.
I’ve noticed this in the Star Trek franchise, which tempers my nerd grieving over Leonard Nimoy’s True Death. The various series have shown transhumanism in general, and radical life extension in particular, in a bad light. And in the original series, the Spock character, seconded by Dr. McCoy, often said that they had to stop the enhanced bad guy, or keep him from living forever, no matter what it takes.
Yet when a main character, other than a Redshirt or a walk-on, needs revival or rejuvenation, why, the ship’s doctor can figure out how to do that. Yet these successful techniques mysteriously don’t become part of Starfleet medical practice.
I’m not sure. It has a lot of problems with timing and its global claims, but I could believe something like it is true since that would explain a number of otherwise puzzling things like the apparent extreme literality of religious beliefs in the distant past.
the apparent extreme literality of religious beliefs in the distant past.
What evidence do we have about that? First-hand, Homeric or earlier historical evidence is very scant and selective to begin with. We don’t have philosophical treaties written by the ancients of what they themselves believed and how literally they took it. The Homeric epics are also describing people who from to the writer were already old, different, and also heroic and not representative of the average man.
Why is this interpreted as taking (similar) religious beliefs more literally
Because if you don’t literally believe that the ritual will win you useful-in-real-life god’s favor, each sacrifice reduces your chances to survive and prosper.
Is there a quantitative argument to be made that more beliefs were more literal in older times
If you want to get numbers involved, you first need to specify (with numbers) what does “more literal” mean.
Because if you don’t literally believe that the ritual will win you useful-in-real-life god’s favor, each sacrifice reduces your chances to survive and prosper.
The same could be said about most religious rituals. There are various theories of signalling honesty, in-group commitment, and riches though costly sacrifices.
Why ascribe the change in sacrifices, for example, to a less literal modern religious belief, rather than to a less central role for modern religion, or sacrifice becoming less important compared to other religious behaviors?
If you want to get numbers involved, you first need to specify (with numbers) what does “more literal” mean.
I don’t know—gwern talked about more literal ancient beliefs, I only asked what he meant and how he knew it.
The same could be said about most religious rituals.
I don’t think this is true. Take contemporary mainstream Christianity or Judaism, as the religions most familiar to LW. Do most rituals meaningfully reduce the chances to survive and prosper?
to a less literal modern religious belief, rather than to a less central role for modern religion
“Less literal” belief and “less central” role are correlated :-)
Take contemporary mainstream Christianity or Judaism, as the religions most familiar to LW. Do most rituals meaningfully reduce the chances to survive and prosper?
The rituals require money (tithe and other church collections), time (church attendance) and effort (e.g. kashrut and ritual cleanliness). They also forbid some useful things like contraceptives.
Whether this reduces prosperity depends on how you define that, I guess. As for survival, I’m not well familiar with the form modern Christianity takes in places where survival is a real concern, like some African countries. Anyway, there are some good arguments that especially for the poor and weak, modern social religious organizations improve the chances to survive, because the locally big religions also tend to provide most of the private social and welfare services, and help organize smaller-scale social networks.
Is this very different from ancient practice? Does it matter if a farmer brings an ox to the Jewish Temple for sacrifice, or pays tithe and other taxes and fees to the Catholic Church? In both cases he discharges a mostly-mandatory religious obligation by paying a significant sum of money, or an object that can be bought for money.
“Less literal” belief and “less central” role are correlated :-)
Yes, but something being more or less central is very weak evidence for it being taken more or less literally.
In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong suggests that what Jaynes attributes to the bicameral mind might be explainable by pre-literacy. He points out that Jaynes places the time for the breakdown of bicamerality around the time that the phonetic alphabet was developed, and that many of the characteristics that Jaynes attributes to bicamerality, e.g.:
lack of introspectivity, of analytical prowess, of concern with the will as such, of a sense of difference between past and future
are characteristics of oral cultures, including contemporary oral cultures.
“What is Wrong with Our Thoughts? A Neo-Positivist Credo”
I’m not sure how I feel about this. A lot of it seems on-point but it seems unfair to take what may be complicated or subtle ideas and take paragraphs out of context to show that they are nonsense. If I took a random paragraph from a category-theory paper it might sound just as nonsensical to someone who didn’t have the context. Heck, I strongly suspect that if on used a Markov generator with math terms, telling the difference between real and actual material would be difficult if one restricted to small segments. The author is correct that these things are meaningless (by and large) but simply quoting them in this way doesn’t really establish it.
In your excerpt of “Intelligence: Is it the epidemiologists’ elusive ‘fundamental cause’ of social class inequalities in health?”:
As environments get better, genetics explain more of variance; as societies become more meritocratic, they become more unequal.
IOW, as environments get better, they become more uniform (in their effect). Is this saying that environments contribute mostly negative factors, not positive ones, to development, so the best environments affect outcomes least? And if so, how well established is it?
The trustworthiness of a web page might help it rise up Google’s rankings if the search giant starts to measure quality by facts, not just links.
...
Instead of counting incoming links, [Google’s system for measuring the trustworthiness of a page] – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. “A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy,” says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.
The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.
I’m guessing that in practice means ranking websites by the popularity of their delusions. The problem is that you can’t distinguish facts from fictions without reference to the external world. Furthermore, given how bad wikipedia is at getting its “facts” wright about any vaguely controversial topic, I don’t have a lot of confidence in the ability of the internet to settle on the truth.
Edit: speaking of bad sources of “facts”, why are you treating New Scientist as a reasonable source?
J. E. Farnham. Unusual methods of antigen transport. - Grana. − 1986. − 25 (1):89-92.
Available online. Not a conprehensive review, just a couple case studies, but (subjectively) beautiful. I wish TV medical shows were based on this kind of stuff.
What scares the new atheists
The vocal fervour of today’s missionary atheism conceals a panic that religion is not only refusing to decline – but in fact flourishing
Seems to be a combination of “they say there’s a high-variance trend, but look at all these short-term observations contrary to the trend!” and “here are some negative stereotypes of “the new atheists”″.
Short Online Texts Thread
Death Is Optional A Conversation: Yuval Noah Harari, Daniel Kahneman [3.4.15]
http://edge.org/conversation/yuval_noah_harari-daniel_kahneman-death-is-optional
The money quote:
The conversation is very nice, and Harari’s book is fantastic so far (I’m about a fifth of the way through).
Everything is heritable:
“Genetic contributions to variation in general cognitive function: a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in the CHARGE consortium (n=53949)”, Davies et al 2015 (excerpts)
“Genetic influence on family socioeconomic status and children’s intelligence”, Trzaskowski et al 2014 (excerpts)
“Comparative analysis of the domestic cat genome reveals genetic signatures underlying feline biology and domestication”, Montague et al 2014 (commentary; complex behavioral traits can be modified by relatively small shifts in many genes)
Politics/religion:
“What Politicians Believe About Their Constituents: Asymmetric Misperceptions and Prospects for Constituency Control” (excerpts)
“The Deflationist: How Paul Krugman found politics”/”Paul Krugman Is Brilliant, but Is He Meta-Rational?”
“Father, Son and the Double Helix” (Gender politics of maternity/paternity DNA testing in India.)
Wittgenstein’s “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough”
“North Korean border guards prefer married women?” (commentary)
Statistics/AI/meta-science:
“50 Years of Deep Learning and Beyond: an Interview with Jürgen Schmidhuber”
“Interpreting observational studies: why empirical calibration is needed to correct p-values”, Schuemie et al 2012 (excerpts)
“Large-Scale Simultaneous Hypothesis Testing: The Choice of a Null Hypothesis”, Efron 2004
Psychology/biology:
“The Trip Treatment: Research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is now yielding exciting results”
“Intelligence: Is it the epidemiologists’ elusive ‘fundamental cause’ of social class inequalities in health?”, Gottfredson 2004 (excerpts)
“Low-dose paroxetine exposure causes lifetime declines in male mouse body weight, reproduction and competitive ability as measured by the novel organismal performance assay”, Gaukler et al 2015 (excerpts)
“There is Only Awe” (on Jaynes’s Bicameral Mind Theory)
“A Novel BHLHE41 Variant is Associated with Short Sleep and Resistance to Sleep Deprivation in Humans”, Pellegrino et al 2014
“Refugees of the Modern World: The “electrosensitive” are moving to a cellphone-free town. But is their disease real?”
“How fast does the Grim Reaper walk? Receiver operating characteristics curve analysis in healthy men aged 70 and over”
Technology:
“If the NSA has been hacking everything, how has nobody seen them coming?”
“Freedom Zero” (“In the long run, the utility of all non-Free software approaches zero. All non-Free software is a dead end.”)
“The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator, Visionary and Genius”
Project Iceworm
“The Postmodern Ponzi Scheme: Empirical Analysis of High-Yield Investment Programs”, Moore 2012 (excerpts)
Reed Richards Is Useless
Economics:
“Automation and Employment”, Richard Posner
“Does Affirmative Action Do What It Should?”
“Brickyard Blues: Numbed by cold, pelted by rain, enduring smashed fingers and toes, poorly paid brick salvagers keep coming back for more”
“How the recession turned middle-class jobs into low-wage jobs”
Philosophy:
“What is Wrong with Our Thoughts? A Neo-Positivist Credo”
“Scientists discover that atheists might not exist, and that’s not a joke”
“Reed Richards Is Useless”:
The TV Tropes article points out the absurdity of fictional situations where the characters invent supertechnologies to solve really hard problems in the plot, and then they put these new tools back in the box and you never see them again, even when these tools could solve other problems in the rest of the world.
I’ve noticed this in the Star Trek franchise, which tempers my nerd grieving over Leonard Nimoy’s True Death. The various series have shown transhumanism in general, and radical life extension in particular, in a bad light. And in the original series, the Spock character, seconded by Dr. McCoy, often said that they had to stop the enhanced bad guy, or keep him from living forever, no matter what it takes.
Yet when a main character, other than a Redshirt or a walk-on, needs revival or rejuvenation, why, the ship’s doctor can figure out how to do that. Yet these successful techniques mysteriously don’t become part of Starfleet medical practice.
Does “Jaynes’s Bicameral Mind Theory” have any validity?
I’m not sure. It has a lot of problems with timing and its global claims, but I could believe something like it is true since that would explain a number of otherwise puzzling things like the apparent extreme literality of religious beliefs in the distant past.
What evidence do we have about that? First-hand, Homeric or earlier historical evidence is very scant and selective to begin with. We don’t have philosophical treaties written by the ancients of what they themselves believed and how literally they took it. The Homeric epics are also describing people who from to the writer were already old, different, and also heroic and not representative of the average man.
The very widespread practice of non-symbolic sacrifices, for example.
What sacrifices count as non-symbolic? Animal sacrifice? Human?
Why is this interpreted as taking (similar) religious beliefs more literally, rather than just having different beliefs?
Is there a quantitative argument to be made that more beliefs were more literal in older times, apart from some examples?
Because if you don’t literally believe that the ritual will win you useful-in-real-life god’s favor, each sacrifice reduces your chances to survive and prosper.
If you want to get numbers involved, you first need to specify (with numbers) what does “more literal” mean.
The same could be said about most religious rituals. There are various theories of signalling honesty, in-group commitment, and riches though costly sacrifices.
Why ascribe the change in sacrifices, for example, to a less literal modern religious belief, rather than to a less central role for modern religion, or sacrifice becoming less important compared to other religious behaviors?
I don’t know—gwern talked about more literal ancient beliefs, I only asked what he meant and how he knew it.
I don’t think this is true. Take contemporary mainstream Christianity or Judaism, as the religions most familiar to LW. Do most rituals meaningfully reduce the chances to survive and prosper?
“Less literal” belief and “less central” role are correlated :-)
The rituals require money (tithe and other church collections), time (church attendance) and effort (e.g. kashrut and ritual cleanliness). They also forbid some useful things like contraceptives.
Whether this reduces prosperity depends on how you define that, I guess. As for survival, I’m not well familiar with the form modern Christianity takes in places where survival is a real concern, like some African countries. Anyway, there are some good arguments that especially for the poor and weak, modern social religious organizations improve the chances to survive, because the locally big religions also tend to provide most of the private social and welfare services, and help organize smaller-scale social networks.
Is this very different from ancient practice? Does it matter if a farmer brings an ox to the Jewish Temple for sacrifice, or pays tithe and other taxes and fees to the Catholic Church? In both cases he discharges a mostly-mandatory religious obligation by paying a significant sum of money, or an object that can be bought for money.
Yes, but something being more or less central is very weak evidence for it being taken more or less literally.
In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong suggests that what Jaynes attributes to the bicameral mind might be explainable by pre-literacy. He points out that Jaynes places the time for the breakdown of bicamerality around the time that the phonetic alphabet was developed, and that many of the characteristics that Jaynes attributes to bicamerality, e.g.:
are characteristics of oral cultures, including contemporary oral cultures.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. A lot of it seems on-point but it seems unfair to take what may be complicated or subtle ideas and take paragraphs out of context to show that they are nonsense. If I took a random paragraph from a category-theory paper it might sound just as nonsensical to someone who didn’t have the context. Heck, I strongly suspect that if on used a Markov generator with math terms, telling the difference between real and actual material would be difficult if one restricted to small segments. The author is correct that these things are meaningless (by and large) but simply quoting them in this way doesn’t really establish it.
In your excerpt of “Intelligence: Is it the epidemiologists’ elusive ‘fundamental cause’ of social class inequalities in health?”:
IOW, as environments get better, they become more uniform (in their effect). Is this saying that environments contribute mostly negative factors, not positive ones, to development, so the best environments affect outcomes least? And if so, how well established is it?
subjectively, an octopus is probably something like an unruly parliament of snakes ruled by a dog.
Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links
...
I’m guessing that in practice means ranking websites by the popularity of their delusions. The problem is that you can’t distinguish facts from fictions without reference to the external world. Furthermore, given how bad wikipedia is at getting its “facts” wright about any vaguely controversial topic, I don’t have a lot of confidence in the ability of the internet to settle on the truth.
Edit: speaking of bad sources of “facts”, why are you treating New Scientist as a reasonable source?
...wait, what?
...I guess they don’t actually mean “unanimously”...
J. E. Farnham. Unusual methods of antigen transport. - Grana. − 1986. − 25 (1):89-92. Available online. Not a conprehensive review, just a couple case studies, but (subjectively) beautiful. I wish TV medical shows were based on this kind of stuff.
What scares the new atheists The vocal fervour of today’s missionary atheism conceals a panic that religion is not only refusing to decline – but in fact flourishing
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/03/what-scares-the-new-atheists
Seems to be a combination of “they say there’s a high-variance trend, but look at all these short-term observations contrary to the trend!” and “here are some negative stereotypes of “the new atheists”″.