Zero Contradictions
Sam Harris’s Argument For Objective Morality
The Race FAQs has lots of high-quality information on genetic group differences: https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/race
I don’t support the past eugenics or forced sterilizations that you’ve mentioned. However, I still support eugenics. I argue that reproduction licenses would protect human rights: https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/eugenics#human-rights
This is a great idea. I’ve brainstormed and compiled a list of additional ideas that could also help raise fertility rates. https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/overpopulation#boosting-western-fertility
The Case Against Moral Realism
This is honestly some of the best feedback that I’ve received on this site, so thank you for your comment. I edited the introduction and I clarified what I meant by “redundant” research.
I once tried to quantify the validity of academic research, but I gave up on trying that. I talk more about this in my reply to Seth Herd.
I didn’t come up with the title for the essay, but I re-titled this LW post, so thank you for your suggestion. In hindsight, I’ll agree that my comment came off as condescending to some extent, so I edited that as well. I just haven’t been in the best mood when I post on this site since I’ve gotten used to people giving me downvotes, disagreeing with my comments, and sometimes sending condescending comments into my inbox, though that doesn’t justify me being condescending to others. Regardless of the essay’s title, the essay’s contents raise serious questions about whether academia is intellectually honest.
I’ve thought about expanding my sequel essay even further to more precisely quantify and evaluate the research in each academic field, but I ended up not doing this since it would probably take me a week or longer to further detail everything. Another problem was that even if I finished it, people could always say that I failed to evaluate this or that, since there are tens of thousands of papers out there. Another issue is that not everybody agrees on what counts as “fake”, as I mentioned in the sequel essay. So even if someone quantified all academic research as best as they can, it’s not possible for them to make an overall assessment that a majority of people would agree with.
For these reasons, I don’t think it’s productive to quantify whether most academic research is true or false or high-quality or low-quality, which would explain why the author didn’t do so. I think it’s more productive to analyze how academia and the academic research process work and what kind of output such a system is likely to produce. From everything that I’ve seen across a multitude of fields, my overall impression is that most academic research tends to be low-quality. Blithering Genius’s analysis and my own analysis both conclude that that’s probably the case for most academic research.
Anyway, I appreciate your comment and reading your thoughts.
The bigger issue is that not everybody agrees on what’s true or false. I did my best to address these considerations in greater depth in my sequel essay: https://zerocontradictions.net/epistemology/academia-critique
Regardless, the point of the essay is that the overall academic enterprise is not designed to seek the truth. Ideological bias, perverse incentives, social circularity, naive/fake empiricism, and misleading statistics (e.g. p-hacking) compromise the production of truthful research. The sequel essay elaborates on all these ongoing issues. I could expand it even further, but it would probably take me a week to do so, when I have more important priorities.
Why Academia is Mostly Not Truth-Seeking
Climate Change And Global Warming
If you think that “humans will be living on Mars and O’Neill cylinders 30 years from now”, then you probably haven’t tried to calculate whether that’s actually economically feasible and whether it’s practical to get to Mars and live there:
The Square/Cube Law makes it physically impossible to build megastructures like space elevators, mass drivers, orbital rings, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law
12km is the maximum length that a steel cable can support its own mass at Earth surface gravity. If it is any longer, it will snap under its own weight.
O’Neill Cylinders will never be economically feasible to build. If we built an O’Neill Cylinder that’s 10km long and 6.4 km in diameter, with a 1m thick hull, then it would weigh 3 trillion kg (2 trillion kg of steel, with 1 trillion kg of material).
Putting 1 kg into LEO varies between $50,000 and $1,500. The lowest cost being the Falcon Heavy from SpaceX, but with only 3 completed launches, this is a somewhat optimistic estimate.
So, if we assume a cost of $1000/kg, then putting a 3 trillion kg cylinder into LEO would cost $3 quadrillion ($3,000,000,000,000,000), and that’s only for one cylinder.
For comparison, the world’s nominal GDP is less than 100 trillion dollars.
And that’s only the cost to put an O’Neil Cylinder in Low-Earth Orbit. If we had to send an O’Neil Cylinder to Mars (or something that’s comparable for sustaining human life), then the costs for space travel get exponentially worse than that due to the Rocket Equation.
For more information, I recommend reading Futurist Fantasies by T. K. Van Allen. The book packs an impressive amount of information into just 100 pages.
in which case the fundamental Georgist argument of “you can’t make more land” isn’t true.
It is true. You can’t make more land. Humans still must obey the laws of physics, whether we like it or not. Both the Moon and Mars are absolutely horrible places for any human to live, so humanity has nothing to gain from trying to live outside the Earth.
Now, I already showed my calculations for why I believe it’s far too expensive to try that. I didn’t even go over all the physical challenges that would make it virtually impossible. My judgment is that space colonization won’t be possible for several decades, possibly longer, and probably never. It will probably take many people and many LessWrongers a while to reach similar conclusions.
In the 1960s, people thought that Humanity would’ve achieved the technological advancements in 2001: A Space Odyssey two decades ago, and that still hasn’t happen by now. People need to recognize that technological process has clearly slowed down, and we’ve nearly reached its limits.
Another misconception that’s worth clarifying is that the value of land matters more than the supply of land. There’s obvious reasons why lots in Manhattan are worth more than acres in the Sahara Desert.
It seems like you can get 90% of the benefit of Georgism just by going full YIMBY and you don’t have to wait 30 years to do it.
No, that’s a huge oversimplification, and it’s much more complicated than that. Any society would have to wait at least a few decades to transition to Georgism, but then the benefits will become progressive and compounding. I recommend reading Georgism Crash Course for a concise introduction.
If it will take at least 30 years to transition to Georgism because otherwise we screw over most people who have >50% of their net worth invested in their homes, then why bother?
Because we live in reality, not a sci-fi fantasy world where humans are invincible.
Even if humans could live on Mars, why would anyone want to live on Mars when you can live on Earth instead? Even Antarctica is a thousand times better than Mars. I will never understand why people fantasize about colonizing Mars when humans haven’t even colonized Antarctica.
If your goal was to post stupid comments with the intent of angering me, then you did not succeed. The only thing you have accomplished is wasting your own time. I will not respond to you any further.
One can only imagine how empty and miserable your life is, given that you have nothing better to do besides trolling strangers on the Internet. Out of everything else that you could do with your time, that’s really what you like to do for fun?
If you’re just going to mock my ideas without rationally engaging with them, then take a hike. You clearly don’t have anything to offer to this thread, besides making comments that suggest that your intelligence is quite lacking.
You still don’t have any rational arguments to defend your views, so there’s no reason to consider anything that you say. Again, your behavior is pathetic, disrespectful, irrational, and unacceptable.
My point is that when LessWrongers see not enough water for a given population, we try to fix the water not the people.
That’s also what I proposed. On my Georgism page, I explained that I support taxing water so that water will be used more efficiently. In the Overpopulation FAQs, I explained why that’s only a temporary solution, not a long-term solution to overpopulation, but you didn’t know that because you never bothered to read it and engage with the arguments that I made.
I read your argument that preventing people from dying of starvation and/or disease is bad:
And you’re still misrepresenting it. I didn’t say that it’s “bad”, I explained that it’s putting the cart before the horse. Abundant food and increased disease resistance would increase the population and the risk of overpopulation. If we have a viable long-term solution to overpopulation, then we won’t have to worry about that if we proceed to reduce starvation and disease.
I would rather we do the hard work of supporting a higher population.
I explained in rigorous, comprehensive depth that raising the carrying capacity is not long-term solution to overpopulation, not without population control.
I also explained that population control would protect human rights, rather than harm them.
solar panels
Solar panels have a low EROI, so they are an inefficient use of resources.
Desalination
Desalination could work in some areas, but it also has environmental consequences, and it would be better to focus on using water more efficiently in many countries.
I want to read actual interesting posts and not posts about “Why doesn’t LessWrong like my content? Aren’t you a cult if you don’t agree with me?”.
That was not the point of the post. The post has many interesting linked essays for you to read, if you bothered to click on the hyperlinks and read them.
how we’re going to run out of water
The Overpopulation FAQs is about overpopulation, not necessarily water scarcity. Water scarcity can contribute to overpopulation, but it is only one of multiple potential causes.
if we don’t forcibly sterilize people
That is a strawman accusation. I never proposed forcibly sterilizing anybody, except for murderers, rapists, thieves, and other criminals. A hundred years ago, that policy would’ve had strong public support.
EA is bad because altruism is bad
I wrote that EA is mostly misguided because it makes faulty assumptions. And to the contrary, I did praise a few things about EA.
Sorry, I just can’t escape my cult programming here.
Yeah, I can tell. You can’t make any rational arguments. Your behavior is the antithesis of rationality.
It would be more rational for you to engage with the bullet points and the essays that are hyperlinked on the page. There is nothing wrong with giving a comparison of disagreements between two different movements. If anything, it’s necessary to do that in order to explore different (and potentially better) ideas. Your paragraph of mockery and gibberish is pathetic, and it doesn’t accomplish anything.
A Comparison Between The Pragmatosphere And Less Wrong
Viva Longevity by Chris MacAskil has some good videos on this topic. The descriptions for these video have more links to other videos and articles on the same topic.
The Poop Whisperer: Dr Johan Van Den Bogaerde on Gut Health—Viva Longevity
Actually, this was supposed to be a linkpost. I thought had I had submitted the post this way, but I guess not. In any case, the PDF version and the video version were already included I first submitted this post, and I edited this to be a linkpost to link to the original essay.
The post makes a separate claim with each sentence and, instead of going on to reasons, continues with yet another claim.
I don’t think you read the entire essay then. Only the essay’s introduction can be seen directly on this post. You’d have to view the PDF, the video, or the blog post to see the rest of the post and the justifications for the claims made in the introduction. That’s pretty normal in most writing.
Freedom of speech can be limited by the state, corporations, the mob or individuals acting alone. Any use of coercion to suppress ideas is an attack on freedom of speech.
In the PDF version, you can most clearly see that there is a section of the essay dedicated to explaining how each of these can happen.
It [freedom of speech] protects people with minority views from persecution by the state or the mob.
As the author defined “freedom of speech” in the first paragraph of the essay, “Freedom of speech is the principle that coercion should not be used to suppress ideas.” So of course having freedom of speech would protect people with minority views from persecution due to their ideas.
This seems significantly misleading.
How is it misleading? There are plenty of examples throughout history where not having freedom of speech lead to persecution.
Ideas should be selected based on their merits
You’re missing the point of the essay. The author agrees that ideas should be selected based on their merits. If a society truly has social rationality, then it’s already implied that the ideas that get selected and promoted by the society will be rational ideas. The point of free speech is to ensure that society never misses out on hearing a good idea.
And how are you defining “merit”? And from what perspective? When the Catholic Church put Galileo Galilei under house arrest, they censored him on the basis that his ideas contradicted their sacred texts. From the Church’s perspective, his ideas did not have any merits.
Thus, suppression of ideas could be a positive thing to social rationality.
I don’t think so. Can you give some examples of what you’re talking about?
Ideas should be selected based on their merits, and that requires that some ideas do not survive.
If a society has social rationality, then it’s going to reject irrational ideas by itself. The irrational ideas won’t survive. That means that it isn’t necessary to suppress “bad” ideas. If any ideas were being suppressed at all in a rational society, then there’s a risk that the society will limit its exposure to good ideas.
Why do you think that it’s better to forcefully suppress ideas that a fully rational society would reject anyway? How would you suppress the ideas that you think should be suppressed? How can you be sure that you would be suppressing the right ideas? You’re doing exactly what you’re accusing the author of doing in the essay.
I don’t believe that gene-editing is a viable solution to preventing dysgenics for the entire population.
Unregulated reproduction has the potential to harm others, so it’s reasonable to regulate it.