This may not be the best place to ask, but is Evolutionary Psychology actually falsifiable?
TuviaDulin
Karma: 229
The fact that she was designed just for me...that in itself would ruin it for me.
That “difference” comes from the culture surrounding the two books, not any innate property or value of the books themselves.
“Did you learn this from an unbiased source?”
I’m pretty sure it was in Tolkien’s notes.
“Suppose you’re the prime minister of a parliamentary republic, and the neighboring country is ruled by hereditary nobility that mostly hate each other, and wars between the barons ruin a lot of the land and kill a lot of the peasants. You, being a genius engineer, have figured out a way to control people, but it requires they wear the device for an extended period of time, the effects are obvious, and they can take it off before the process is complete if they feel like it.”
Except that’s exactly what Sauron DIDN’T do. Mordor was not a parliamentary republic; more like a military dictatorship with semi-mindless orc drones enforcing Sauron’s commands over his human subjects. The monarchs who were given the rings—however just or unjust their rule might have been, and however flawed the notion of monarchy as a political system—were lied to about what the rings did, and the rings’ effects were very subtle at first.
Its also worth noting that the human kings didn’t become any kinder or more democratic in their sensibilities once they fell under Sauron’s influence. The Witch King was still a king, and a much more murderous one than he was in life. Unleashing barrow-wrights on a partially civilian population, torturing Gollum for information, and stabbing an innocent (if possibly misguided) hobbit when he didn’t have to are all things that the Witch King did in person.
“This hereditary nobility situation is obviously not going to fix itself- and you figure that the easiest way to fix it is to corrupt all the nobility, playing on their hatred of each other to get them to wear the devices long enough for them to work, and then have them give you power in a bloodless coup. As a bonus, you now have fanatically loyal assassins / spec ops forces, and an eternity of servitude seems like a fitting punishment for their misconduct as rulers.”
In other words, the only way to improve the world is to become just as bad as the people currently running it? The best solution to dictatorships is to make slaves of your own, and for all eternity no less?
I think you’re going out of your way to defend Brin’s essay rather than actually using your own moral judgement. You can easily say that the “good guys” in Lord of the Rings weren’t all that good, but Sauron was very obviously worse.
I’d like to think I would have noticed the moral problems with what the “good” guys were doing on my own, and without the benefit of knowing who the author was. I think I would have, but I’m not totally confidence in my Milgram Resistance.
The ending did bother me, though. Why was Hirou willing to believe everything Vhazhar told him without trying to verify it? Why did he kill Dolf instead of accepting that Dolf was simply limited by the moral myopia of his own society, which he clearly was? Maybe exceptionally good people like Vhazhar could see the problems with the status quo, but it wouldn’t take an exceptionally evil person to NOT see them, so Dolf wasn’t necessarily a bad guy. Couldn’t Hirou have looked for another wizard who was willing to volunteer for the process? Or, hell, found some other trustworthy person to become the new god, and let Vhazhar prove his virtue by sacrificing his OWN wizardly ass to fuel the spell? He didn’t even ask Vhazhar what his new world would look like; he just decided that Vhazhar’s ideas were probably good, and that he could be trusted to not become corrupt.
I guess that ending was the best we could expect from someone like Hirou.
I think Sauron did enough explicitly evil stuff to make himself the bad guy. Tricking the Numenorians into destroying themselves out of spite is pretty hard to justify.
There’s also the fact that orcs don’t have free will. They were created from tortured elves and mindraped into obedience. The fact that Sauron was willing to use them as canon fodder rather than trying to find a way to reverse what Melkor did to them speaks worlds about his moral virtue.
Finally, the rings. Using mind control to turn foreign leaders into your obedient thralls, consoling them with the promise that they will be able to crush others under their heel as you crushed them. Real nice of Sauron.
Middle Earth was a flawed world filled with the same evils and injustices as our own, but Sauron was almost definitely the worst thing in it. I’ll give David Brin some credit, though, as Tolkien did a pretty bad job of explaining the situation in Lord of the Rings. You have to read the Silmarilion (or, as in my case, talk to another guy who has read the Silmarilion, as I lacked the patience to wade through another gazillion pages of archaic English) to understand what’s going on, which is a major failing of LotR.
Indeed. His willingness to kill Dolf without asking any questions or making any attempts to verify the Dark Lord’s statements just shows that Hirou still hasn’t learned anything.
Dementors don’t act like death incarnate, though. Death isn’t reactive to human expectations and sensibilities. Death doesn’t go out of its way to try to destroy people. Death is just a force of nature (or, rather, the point at which a force of nature terminates). Dementors act like a superstitious anthropomorphization of death.
We also know that there is a dark ritual that summons Death, which Quirrel knows but is afraid to perform.
We know, too, that spells modify reality based on the caster’s understanding of the natural world, rather than using the most simple and nature-compliant approach.
I have a very strong suspicion that the first dementors were created by the ritual that Quirrel spoke of. They are a fearful, human-imagined depiction of death, created by the spells of primitive wizards who didn’t understand death’s impersonal and causal nature. What I wonder, though, is whether casting that ritual is the ONLY way to create new dementors, or if they are also capable of reproducing on their own once summoned. According to the books, dementors can reproduce via a mysterious process that bathes the countryside in fog, but Yudkowsky’s dementors are already quite different from Rowling’s. It may be that their numbers remain constant unless someone uses that dark ritual to create more of them or a spell like Harry’s ubertronus to destroy some.
That’s only a legal formality, though. Harry hates the wizard society and wouldn’t use its laws against her, and he’d discourage others from acknowledging it.
Still, Hermione (unlike Harry) cares what others think of her, so being surrounded by people who act as if she belongs to Harry is going to hurt her.
Does the notion of future humans being irrational, self-deluded hypocrites really strike you as so implausible? Just because they think they’re smarter than our generation doesn’t mean they actually are.
I’ve thought about this as well. Its basically the same question as “If I had the option of living in a virtual reality fantasy world without ever knowing that the real world existed, and I would be happier in the VR world, would I rather live there?” Is increased happiness worth the cost of self-deception?
I’ve tried to do what you describe. It didn’t work, and it made me feel cheap, like I wasn’t respecting myself. That’s just my own subjective experience of course.
I read the first few sentences and was about to start formulating my enraged response, but then I looked at the date. Well played, my friend. Well played.
Economic: money is obsolete. Due to the ease of travel, transportation, and communication in this world, the problems with barter have evaporated, and we’ve gone back to our ancestral exchange of goods and services. For those instances when the only person who has what you want doesn’t want anything that you have, you can use a barter broker, which incurs an additional expense no worse than exchanging currency or buying on credit today.
Sexual: we’ve biologically altered ourselves to not care so ridiculously much about sex anymore. Its still a fun thing to do, and people who want it still have it, but its not something that takes up a large portion of our mental energy. Laws about sex and romance are nearly nonexistent, due to it being seen as trivial. Rape is still illegal, but its also less likely to be committed in the first place (since the people who would be rapists in our world are more likely to commit other, non-sexual crimes of domination in this one).
Governmental: human beaurocrats directed and organized by a powerful AI. The AI has a “constitution” hardcoded into it, but other than that it obeys the voters on all policy decisions. Everyone can vote on every policy question via computer terminals at their local government office. Some policies require a mere majority vote to be put into action; other, more drastic ones require a 2⁄3 or 3⁄4 vote.
Technological: we all live in the Matrix.
Cognitive: we’ve genetically modified ourselves into a caste-based society, with people being born with different cognitive faculties and dispositions that make them ideal for certain careers. No one is forced into a certain career, but they are born with a strong inclination to desire the kind of work that they will naturally excel at. There are three basic castes to this hive. At the bottom are unskilled laborers who are just barely sentient, and cheerfully do mindless work and enjoy simple pleasures. In the middle are specialists with IQ’s and personalities tailored for various skilled jobs. At the top are hyperintelligent, omni-benevolent cyborg bureaucrats.
Okay, maybe not strictly impossible, but probably harder than using one of the moons of Jupiter, or building a giant space colony with a simulated earthlike environment.
Personally, knowing that my verthandis were created specifically for me would make me want them less. Even if they were strong-willed, intelligent, and independent, I’d still -know- that their existence is tailored to suit my tastes, and this would prevent me from seeing them as real people. And I’d want real women.
I don’t see how those are mutually exclusive.
The clever fool doesn’t seem to have taken these facts into account. He was a fool, after all.
Presumably, your own personal verthandi(s) would have other hobbies, because you would want them to.
Well, realistically speaking Venus is probably impossible to terraform at all. The Mars and Venus thing seems to be included just for the symbolic value.
Conclusion: intelligence explosion might not be a good idea.