We’re all incompetent compared to the theoretical limits of competence permitted by our current brain architecture. But with a smaller population, the stakes are lower for whatever blunders we do commit (up to a point, of course—there is obviously such a thing as a dangerously low population, but not even Wrongians would claim that we’re close to that boundary).
So, what is the first tier of secondary causes after the root cause of incompetence?
Yes, it’s a socially tough question. It might be so tough that the bulk of mitigation efforts might have to be put into the technological advancement side of the equation, and that seems to be what’s happening, though it’s unclear how deliberate this is.
But just because publicly acknowledging the nature of a problem will make one unpopular doesn’t mean that one should privately start to deny it. On the contrary, one should correct for the Koolaid by privately reminding one’s self what the real problem is, and that a socially acceptable framing of the problem has to be part of any solution that one expects to work.
how do you accelerate the rate of technological advancement?
That should be a new discussion.
That’s a pretty strong claim. How do you support it?
The fact that all serious criticisms of Mars 1 have to do with whether or not they’ll raise enough money to send a private mission to Mars in 2023 rather than any question than technological feasibility.
By colonizing, I don’t mean Dyson Cloud within our lifetimes, obviously. Just a permanent foothold outside Earth from which to start.
So… a majority or at least a vocal plurality of us believe that technology is not necessary for preventing population from overshooting the planet’s carrying capacity?
Or, you are so vehemently opposed to the very concept of limiting conditions that it discredits any argument it is part of, regardless of what the rest of the argument?
If that is what you meant then I do not understand how the world looks to you, or why you’re not spending this time fundraising for CSER / taking heroin.
Classy.
I have only 5 bins here with which to span everything in (0,1): theoretically possible but unlikely, somewhat likely, likely, very likely, and inevitable. The goal is a rough ranking, at this point, I don’t have enough information to meaningfully estimate actual probabilities. You have a good point, though: it would be more self-consistent to say conditional on no overshoot for the first set.
If flaming me is what it takes for you to think seriously about this, then maybe it’s worth it.
In this context, individual human civilizations.
Actually, for the first time in history, we might have achieved a global civilization, as well as a global single point of failure.
Okay—got it. What I don’t grasp is why you would care about the inner narrative of any particular instance of “you” when the persistence of that instance makes negligible material difference to all the other things you care about.
Maybe the same why as why do some people care more about their families than about other people’s families. Why some people care more about themselves than about strangers. What I can’t grasp is how one would manage to so thoroughly eradicate or suppress such a fundamental drive.
Well, we’re talking about cryonicists, not typical people. Typical people might be better off with term insurance. Cryonicists might be better off with whole life insurance.
Insurance is not an investment, it’s insurance.
So, I mean, the utility function is not up for grabs.
And yet, what is to be done if your utility function is dissolved by the truth? How do we know that there even exist utility functions that retain their currency down to the level of timeless wave functions?
If we both agree as to what would actually be happening in these hypothetical scenarios, but disagree about what we value, then clauses like “patternists could be wrong” refer to an orthogonal issue.
Patternists/computationalists make the, in principle, falsifiable assertion that if I opt for plastination and am successfully reconstructed, that I will wake up in the future just as I will if I opt for cryonics and am successfully revived without copying/uploading/reconstruction. My assertion is that if I opt for plastination I will die and be replaced by someone hard or impossible to distinguish from me. Since it takes more resources to maintain cryosuspension, and probably a more advanced technology level to thaw and reanimate the patient, if the patternists are right, plastination is a better choice. If I’m right, it is not an acceptable choice at all.
The problem is that, so far, the only being in the universe who could falsify this assertion is the instantiation of me that is writing this post. Perhaps with increased understanding of neuroscience, there will be additional ways to test the patternist hypothesis.
A thread sprung up here about self-funding your cryonics arrangements. This has important enough practical implications for cryonicists that I am responding to it at the top level.
In addition to my original arguments that most individuals should not self-fund...
No one is contractually obligated to pay for your suspension if your own “low risk” investments tank.
Unless you have a proven track record investing, you are likely overconfident in your ability to invest compared to professionals.
Creditors and heirs will find it easier to raid your investments than they will an insurance policy of which they are not beneficiaries.
...all of which are by themselves substantive reasons, I could slap myself for not having thought of the obvious fourth reason:
If you truly are making low-risk investments, it may take a while for them to add up to a sufficient sum of money to cover cryosuspension. Whatever your age, there is some risk that you will die before your investments reach that point.
The best practice is not to self-fund unless you have close to enough money to pay for it up-front and the skills to isolate that money in a long-term trust that will be well-insulated from third-party meddling. And if both of those things are true, it’s surprising to me that $80 US or so per month would be more than pocket change to you in the first place.
For more information, I recommend the article in this issue of Cryonics magazine, starting on page 7.
Full disclosure: my family and I set up our policies through this guy.
I’ll continue to doubt the practicality of cryonics until they freeze a rat and restore it 5 years later to a state where they can tell that it remembers stimuli it was taught before freezing. If that state is a virtual rat running on silicon, that will be interesting too.
...and this is a weakly continualist concern that patternists should also agree with even if they disagree with the strong form (“a copy forked off from me is no longer me from that point forward and destroying the original doesn’t solve this problem”).
But this weak continualism is enough to throw some cold water on declaring premature victory in cryonic revival: the lives of humans have worth not only to others but to themselves, and just how close exactly is “close enough” and how to tell the difference are very central to whether lives are being saved or taken away.
I guess this would be my attempt to answer your first question: articulating what I meant without the phrase “level of death”.
My answer to your second question it tougher. Somewhat compelling evidence that whatever I value has been preserved would be simultaneously experiencing life from the point of view of two different instances. This could be accomplished perhaps through frequent or continuous synchronization of the memories and thoughts of the two brains. Another convincing experience (though less so) would be gradual replacement of individual biological components that would have otherwise died, with time for the replacement parts to be assimilated into the existing system of original and earlier-replaced components.
If I abruptly woke up in a new body with all my old memories, I would be nearly certain that the old me has experienced death if they are not around, or if they are still around (without any link to each others’ thoughts), that I am the only one who has tangibly benefited from whatever the rejuvenating/stabilizing effects of the replication/uploading might be, and they have not. If I awoke from cryostasis in my old body (or head, as the case may be) even then I would only ever be 50% sure that the individual entering cryostasis is not experiencing waking up (unless there was independent evidence of weak activity in my brain during cryostasis).
The way for me to be convinced, not that continuity has been preserved but rather that my desire for continuity is impossible, does double duty with my answer to the first question:
[Unambiguous, de-mystifying neurological characterization of...]
whatever routine occurrence it is that supposedly disrupts my brain state as much as a destructive scan and rounding to the precision limit of whatever substrate my copy would be running on.
Upvote.
This just illustrates the craziness. You present a fact of basic algebra in the abstract, and nobody has a problem with it. Even though it’s a direr prediction because it is fully general in its relevance.
I say the same thing but on a local scale, and get a very vigorous reaction.
“the Green Revolution disproves”
“the technology to use their fields efficiently”
“developing plants and irrigation methods”
“with modern technology it is almost completely renewable”
This illustrates precisely what I’m trying to say. The reason we haven’t experienced a Malthusian Crunch is not that the concept itself is impossible or absurd, but because we develop new technologies fast enough to continually postpone it.
This has some implications:
If technological development is derailed by cultural backlash, prolonged recession, or political lunacy, we may find ourselves having to cope with population overshoot on top of whatever the original problem was.
Responsible global citizens need to defend and promote technological progress with every bit of the same zeal they currently have for the natural environment.
Extrapolations of continued technological progress based on past performance are inherently unreliable. So if our extrapolations of not having to worry about overshoot are in effect extrapolations of extrapolations about technological progress, then those extrapolations are themselves not reliable and we cannot afford complacency.
Yes, exactly.
Maybe the question to population deniers should be framed as:
What upper and lower bounds do you place on the hard limits of how many humans the planet can support indefinitely?
What upper and lower bounds do you place on the rate at which technological progress pushes the practically achievable limits toward the hard limits above?
What upper and lower bounds on future world population levels given that the current number is 7 billion?
From this we can then derive at least a self-consistent probability that overpopulation deniers should assign to Malthusian Crunch.
Right. What’s disturbing is that people who don’t share these biases don’t respond with estimates of their own. They respond with “too negligible to matter”.
So, what would be a rational way to update based on both the detailed numbers provided by sources biased toward believing that overpopulation is a threat and on vague numbers provided by sources biased against believing that overpopulation is a threat?
What do you think the nature of each of these biases might be? Perhaps that might shed some light on how to correct for them.
By the way, how is this any different from half a century of predictions that AI is just around the corner?
I’m envisioning a slowly growing Dyson Cloud, limited by the total output of the sun, availability of atoms in the solar system, and the 14 or so billion years until the sun burns out.
So, if not “many” orders of magnitude then would perhaps “several” be appropriate?
If you believe we can freely choose to do so on a global basis as a preventative measure, you are far more of an optimist than I am.
If you believe that things will get bad enough that we will be forced to do so, you might be more of a pessimist than I am.
Yes, if you’re tempted to use magic numbers you should just use unknowns with clearly stated support ranges and get a general result. I would rather have this discussion at the level of “let f(m,t) be the fraction of earth’s maximum capacity ‘m’ we can exploit at technology level ‘t’ , let k(x) be the technology level at year ‘x’, and let p(x) be population at year ‘x’. What properties must f(m,t), k(x), and p(x) have to insure that p(x) - f(m,t) > 0 for all x > today()?”
I’m plugging in magic numbers because otherwise I’ll be misunderstood even worse. Maybe I’m wrong about that.