/lit/ - Literature

>>22457438
Ted's collapse theory is weak.

https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/kaczynskis-collapse-theoryhtml

https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/kaczynskis-collapse-theoryhtml

https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/kaczynskis-collapse-theoryhtml

>Kaczynski dismisses the possibility that world-spanning competitors might anticipate the possibility of large correlated disasters, and work to reduce their frequency and mitigate their harms. He says that competitors can’t afford to pay any cost to prepare for infrequent problems, as such costs hurt them in the short run. This seems crazy to me, as most of the large competing systems we know of do in fact pay a lot to prepare for rare disasters. Very few correlated disasters are big enough to threaten to completely destroy the whole world. The world has had global scale correlation for centuries, with the world economy growing enormously over that time. And yet we’ve never even seen a factor of two decline, while at least thirty factors of two would be required for a total collapse. And while it should be easy to test Kaczynski’s claim in small complex systems of competitors, I know of no supporting tests.

>>22288489
His collapse theory is retarded.

https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/kaczynskis-collapse-theoryhtml

>Kaczynski claims that the Fermi paradox, i.e., the fact that the universe looks dead everywhere, is explained by the fact that technological civilizations very reliably destroy themselves. When this destruction happens naturally, it is so thorough that no humans could survive. Which is why his huge priority is to find a way to collapse civilization sooner, so that at least some humans survive. Even a huge nuclear war is preferable, as at least some people survive that.

>Why must everything collapse? Because, he says, natural-selection-like competition only works when competing entities have scales of transport and talk that are much less than the scale of the entire system within which they compete. That is, things can work fine when bacteria who each move and talk across only meters compete across an entire planet. The failure of one bacteria doesn’t then threaten the planet. But when competing systems become complex and coupled on global scales, then there are always only a few such systems that matter, and breakdowns often have global scopes.

>Kaczynski dismisses the possibility that world-spanning competitors might anticipate the possibility of large correlated disasters, and work to reduce their frequency and mitigate their harms. He says that competitors can’t afford to pay any cost to prepare for infrequent problems, as such costs hurt them in the short run. This seems crazy to me, as most of the large competing systems we know of do in fact pay a lot to prepare for rare disasters. Very few correlated disasters are big enough to threaten to completely destroy the whole world. The world has had global scale correlation for centuries, with the world economy growing enormously over that time. And yet we’ve never even seen a factor of two decline, while at least thirty factors of two would be required for a total collapse. And while it should be easy to test Kaczynski’s claim in small complex systems of competitors, I know of no supporting tests.

>Yet all dozen of the reviews I read of Kaczynski’s book found his conclusion here to be obviously correct. Which seems to me evidence that a great many people find the worry about future competitors to be so compelling that they endorse most any vaguely plausible supporting argument. Which I see as weak evidence against that worry.

>>21704358
His collapse theory is probably wrong.

https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/kaczynskis-collapse-theoryhtml

His collapse theory is retarded

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/01/kaczynskis-collapse-theory.html

>>21527027
His collapse theory is retarded

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/01/kaczynskis-collapse-theory.html

>>21475567
Ted's collapse theory is weak.

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/01/kaczynskis-collapse-theory.html

>>21016770
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yDw6sJV_ng

>>20451362
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/01/kaczynskis-collapse-theory.html

>Similarly, many argue that we should be wary of future competition, especially if that might lead to concentrations of power. I recently posted on my undergrad law & econ students’ largely incoherent fears of one group taking over the entire solar system, and how Frederick Engels expresses related fears back in 1844. And I’ve argued on this blog with my ex-co-blogger regarding his concerns that if future AI results from competing teams, one team might explode to suddenly take over the world. In this post I’ll describe Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski’s rather different theory on why we should fear competition leading to concentration, from his recent book Anti Tech Revolution.

>Kaczynski claims that the Fermi paradox, i.e., the fact that the universe looks dead everywhere, is explained by the fact that technological civilizations very reliably destroy themselves. When this destruction happens naturally, it is so thorough that no humans could survive. Which is why his huge priority is to find a way to collapse civilization sooner, so that at least some humans survive. Even a huge nuclear war is preferable, as at least some people survive that.

>Why must everything collapse? Because, he says, natural-selection-like competition only works when competing entities have scales of transport and talk that are much less than the scale of the entire system within which they compete. That is, things can work fine when bacteria who each move and talk across only meters compete across an entire planet. The failure of one bacteria doesn’t then threaten the planet. But when competing systems become complex and coupled on global scales, then there are always only a few such systems that matter, and breakdowns often have global scopes.

>Kaczynski dismisses the possibility that world-spanning competitors might anticipate the possibility of large correlated disasters, and work to reduce their frequency and mitigate their harms. He says that competitors can’t afford to pay any cost to prepare for infrequent problems, as such costs hurt them in the short run. This seems crazy to me, as most of the large competing systems we know of do in fact pay a lot to prepare for rare disasters. Very few correlated disasters are big enough to threaten to completely destroy the whole world. The world has had global scale correlation for centuries, with the world economy growing enormously over that time. And yet we’ve never even seen a factor of two decline, while at least thirty factors of two would be required for a total collapse. And while it should be easy to test Kaczynski’s claim in small complex systems of competitors, I know of no supporting tests.

>>20424218
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/01/kaczynskis-collapse-theory.html

>Kaczynski claims that the Fermi paradox, i.e., the fact that the universe looks dead everywhere, is explained by the fact that technological civilizations very reliably destroy themselves. When this destruction happens naturally, it is so thorough that no humans could survive. Which is why his huge priority is to find a way to collapse civilization sooner, so that at least some humans survive. Even a huge nuclear war is preferable, as at least some people survive that.

>Why must everything collapse? Because, he says, natural-selection-like competition only works when competing entities have scales of transport and talk that are much less than the scale of the entire system within which they compete. That is, things can work fine when bacteria who each move and talk across only meters compete across an entire planet. The failure of one bacteria doesn’t then threaten the planet. But when competing systems become complex and coupled on global scales, then there are always only a few such systems that matter, and breakdowns often have global scopes.

>Kaczynski dismisses the possibility that world-spanning competitors might anticipate the possibility of large correlated disasters, and work to reduce their frequency and mitigate their harms. He says that competitors can’t afford to pay any cost to prepare for infrequent problems, as such costs hurt them in the short run. This seems crazy to me, as most of the large competing systems we know of do in fact pay a lot to prepare for rare disasters. Very few correlated disasters are big enough to threaten to completely destroy the whole world. The world has had global scale correlation for centuries, with the world economy growing enormously over that time. And yet we’ve never even seen a factor of two decline, while at least thirty factors of two would be required for a total collapse. And while it should be easy to test Kaczynski’s claim in small complex systems of competitors, I know of no supporting tests.

>Yet all dozen of the reviews I read of Kaczynski’s book found his conclusion here to be obviously correct. Which seems to me evidence that a great many people find the worry about future competitors to be so compelling that they endorse most any vaguely plausible supporting argument. Which I see as weak evidence against that worry.

>Yes of course correlated disasters are a concern, even when efforts are made to prepare against them. But its just not remotely obvious that competition makes them worse, or that all civilizations are reliably and completely destroyed by big disasters, so much so that we should prefer to start a big nuclear war now that destroys civilization but leaves a few people alive. Surely if we believed his theory a better solution would be to break the world into a dozen mostly isolated regions.

>>20007859
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/stupider-than-you-realize.html

>>19898577
His collapse theory is retarded.

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/01/kaczynskis-collapse-theory.html

>>19851265
>Scott Alexander
You might also like Robin Hanson if you like Scott Alexander.

https://www.overcomingbias.com/

>>19781643
>hasn't been disproven by anyone
His collapse theory is retarded.

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/01/kaczynskis-collapse-theory.html

>>19731783
>Some complained that I didn’t include a question on consciousness in my list of big questions. My reason is that I can’t see how we will ever know more than we do now. There’s nothing to learn:

>Zombies are supposedly just like real people in having the same physical brains, which arose the through the same causal history. The only difference is that while real people really “feel”, zombies do not. But since this state of “feeling” is presumed to have zero causal influence on behavior, zombies act exactly like real people, including being passionate and articulate about claiming they are not zombies. People who think they can conceive of such zombies see a “hard question” regarding which physical systems that claim to feel and otherwise act as if they feel actually do feel. (And which other systems feel as well.)

>The one point I want to make is: if zombies are conceivable, then none of us will ever have any more relevant info than we do now about which systems actually feel. Which is pretty much zero info! You will never have any info about whether you ever really felt in the past, or will ever feel in the future. No one part of your brain ever gets any info from any other part of your brain about whether it really feels.

>These claims all follow from our very standard and well-established info theory. We get info about things by interacting with them, so that our states become correlated with the states of those things. But by assumption this hypothesized extra “feeling” state never interacts with anything. The actual reason why you feel compelled to assert very confidently that you really do feel has no causal connection with whether you actually do really feel. (More)

>Your brain is made out of quite ordinary physical materials, driven by ordinary physical processes that we understand very well at near-atomic levels of organization. It is only processes at higher levels of organization that we haven’t traced out in detail. We will eventually be able to trace in great detail and at all levels the causes of what makes you, or an em, or any variation on either, inclined to passionately claim, and believe, that you really do feel. And that will let us predict well what changes to you, or anything, might induce you, or it, to claim or believe something different.

>But if you insist that none of that can possibly verify that you, or an em, actually do feel, then it can’t add any info on that issue. Yes, maybe you have intuitions inside you that often tell you if you think something that you see in front of you really feels. But such intuitions are already available to you now. Just imagine various things you might see, note your intuitions about each, compare those to others’ intuitions, and then draw your conclusions about consciousness. After all, we already have a pretty good idea of all the things we will eventually be able to see.

Refute this.

>>19686411
Relevant:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/this-is-the-dream-time.html

>So what will these distant descendants think of their ancestors? They will find much in common with our distant hunting ancestors, who also continued for ages at near subsistence level in a vast fragmented world with slow growth amid rare slow contact with strange distant cultures. While those ancestors were quite ignorant about their world, and immersed in a vast wild nature instead of a vast space of people, their behavior was still pretty well adapted to the world they lived in. While they suffered many misconceptions, those illusions rarely made them much worse off; their behavior was usually adaptive.

>When our distant descendants think about our era, however, differences will loom larger. Yes they will see that we were more like them in knowing more things, and in having less contact with a wild nature. But our brief period of very rapid growth and discovery and our globally integrated economy and culture will be quite foreign to them. Yet even these differences will pale relative to one huge difference: our lives are far more dominated by consequential delusions: wildly false beliefs and non-adaptive values that matter. While our descendants may explore delusion-dominated virtual realities, they will well understand that such things cannot be real, and don’t much influence history. In contrast, we live in the brief but important “dreamtime” when delusions drove history. Our descendants will remember our era as the one where the human capacity to sincerely believe crazy non-adaptive things, and act on those beliefs, was dialed to the max.

>>19669614
The Elephant in the Brain

>>19641227