385 karma · joined February 28, 2022
Almost all interesting tech we're playing with lately does not fall in this category... and there's nothing we can do about it, that's the evolution of tech.
When interstellar-spaceships will be built, they'll practically be equivalent to "planet destroying nukes" and pretty sure accidents will happen (eg. fully scortching a planet inhabited by a few billions). AI if something ~human-level gets capable of a stretch of exponential self-improvement will be similar, but that will probably be the end of bio-humans and nothing we can do about it so no need to worry (just focus on making sure important human knowledge gets passed on to our non-human descendants).
Only way to mitigate this is to DISPERSE (establish colonies on multiple planets) and MULTIPLY (so that an accident with eg. a 99% lethality thing still leaves enough humans around to maintain a technological civilization preserving the knowledge of our ancestors). We're a bloody virus, so better embrace our nature and start to act like an effective one. There's genocide in our pasts, and there's likely exponentially more genocide in our future, we need to be resilient and accept (mass) death as part of our techno-evolution...
In all seriousness, IQ is an important component of intelligence, mainly "fluid intelligence" that correlates well to learning speed in science and technology field, so for anyone that needs to do lots of learning/unlearning and career/domain hopping like we're all going to do more and more in the future it matters a hell of a lot!
I a world where someone could pick a job/domain and stick to it for life, IQ would matter but less... but it's not the world we're living in, everything is accelerating and our kids are likely to go through quite a few career changes / professional re-conversions etc.
Why would it be "dangerous"? It should be almost completely common sense. Sure, the conclusion is not a comfortable realization for rich industrial countries that have completely poisoned themselves and really don't want to pay the bill for any sort of large scale investigation (factory by factory, soil patch by soil patch, each commonly used construction material etc.) and massive decontamination measures that would have to come after...
Anyway, people will make tradeoffs, and they'll likely choose to live in places with better paid jobs... but they're damn well entitled to ask for an extra 25% on that already large enticing salary if it comes with +X% probability of terrible illness and lower life expectancy!
probably it's more like sharing "the COST of maintaining and upgrading it" :)) ...EU Army funds would probably be better spend on tech for urban/guerrila warfare + next gen UAVs, eg. stuff you'd actually end up using in a real war!
Heck Russia would probably have the military capability to actually win this war cleanly and quickly of they didn't have to invest billions in their strategic weapons that will (hopefully) never be used. If the current world leaders are competent, they are probably only pretending to properly maintain and upgrade strategic WMDs while covertly diverting the funds to other secret operations... If WMDs are actually used, we've all lost anyways, so it probably only makes sense to keep a huuuuuge stash of the cheapest + most destructive and suffering-maximizing stuff around (I imagine some hellish bio thing) for pure revenge end-game.
I totally agree on this. This is why it saddens me that in the current set of overlapping information wars we're living in, "biodiversity loss" was also weaponized and used like another red herring to distract people in many fights.
Take pesticides and herbicides for example - it's 100% percent clear that they are a huge cause of biodiversity loss. But practically all the opponents of pesticides are also against artificial fertilizers and against GMOs that when used properly actually have a much lower impact on wildlife, and in many areas of the world they are absolutely necessary to prevent famine. (Also, why aren't we actively developing GMOs that work with less pesticides and herbicides instead of the current abominable idea of developing plants resistent to higher doses of these chemicals? It's like we have a tool but we're using it all wrong to screw ourselves with it... maybe we need to have more state-funded GMO research instead of having it all in private sector with skewed incentives.)
Now, when people are made to choose between "full bio agriculture" (no pesticides at all AND no artificial fertilizers) and "classical agriculture", it's obvious the odds are stacked against full-bio, and any discussion on better limiting and regulating use of pesticides is avoided. Also, nobody even raises the issue that going full-bio would mean lower yields, ergo larger swaths of lands would need to be used for agriculture, so less land for wildlife and potentially more loss of biodiversity.
And when people argue against hydro lowering biodiversity, we rarely discuss how its alternatives would also impact biodiversity probably even more.
To make it clear, I'm not against focusing on biodiversity, I'm against it's current "weaponization" and use as a red-herring together with climate-change in a "mixed eco-activist save-the-planet-from-humans + CO2 is the devil" discourse that prevents any meaningful and results oriented discussion...
> Fortunately, nuclear is a perfectly good alternative.
Then let's solve the political and economical problems that make it unfeasible in most places. Let's build 100% non-military nuclear programs that are safe + cost-effective.
That's like saying "even in the absence of lead poisoning, your child could still be retarded".
> You could live in a bubble
...they point is we do live in "a bubble", it's called Earth, and we can work to make this a cleaner and less toxic bubble.
I know perfectly well that cancer is a natural component of aging. And I also know that advances in anti-aging and regenerative medicine will make it possible to live longer and for this very reason cancer will be MORE of problem in the future and for future generations. Heck if modern medicine could enable my children to reach a theoretical max age of 250 years, I don't want them to only achieve let's say 50% of that achievable lifespan-increase because we've left them a "poisoned bubble" to live in.
It's amazing how little people want to pay attention to the environment and justify this by arguments of "but wrong thing X could still happen in regardless of environment" (ignoring that its probability would be 20% lower in a different environment). And when we do, we focus on fuzzy global properties of the environment that are hard to predict and have uncertain effects (eg. "global average temperature") instead of all the toxic stuff that can be easily traced and measured and where reduction would have impacts (measurable if people would be able to spend the money and relax some "ethical" rules to properly measure them...).
...but their name and their most used description doesn't help either: first words you read are "climate change" and "biodiversity loss". No organization can focus on everything, and if they've chosen to focus on that, then from my pov. they're not focusing on what I care about most: engineering and sustaining environments (natural or artificial or hybrid...) that maximize HUMAN health & lifespan in economically sustainable ways.
Start with "it's complex" and "some people are just more susceptible" and you have a great platform for arguing against eg. banning lead-additived gasoline.
Then add the shifting away of blame from industry and corporations to individuals, sprinkle some "focus on what you can do" (eg. the "ban plastic straws" type useless token-gesture) or "it's that little things" and you get exactly the kinds of stuff industry is currently gaslighting us with, distracting us from high-impact but profit-lowering big measures that could be implemented instead!
Nuanced thinking can be weaponized against you just as well as black-and-white oversimplification...
That's... extremely totalitarian :) ...but legally forcing employers to allow remote work X days a week for jobs where it makes sense + solid investment in public transit would make wonders.
I'd dare to say that a not-so-phisically-active moderate-smoker living in a less polluted environment has way lower cancer risk than a bio-vegan athlete buddhist monk living in a polluted industrial hellhole.
I'd wish we lived in a world where we could actually address chemical, air-particulate +/- microplastics pollution seriously, and stuff like PFOAs that are still used round, without having it be totally overshadowed and drowned in noise by the "fight climate change" crowd or the "extinction rebellion" nutcases.
...like in, I'd rather have a petrol/gas plant to replace a local COAL power plant FAST, than a nuclear alternative that would take 20 years to get funding and have the delayed-as-usual building process finalized. And I'd rather have all the hydro and windpower we can built asap, and we can figure out later if we really care about the western-golden-lyre-bird or whatever going extinct because of dams or windmills. In the end, tbh, I've come to terms with a +5/7 C deg global warming (100y timeframe) happening, but not with me or loved ones dying 20 years earlier of cancer because of chemical and particulate air pollution or god-knows-what from the latest untested and unidentified pan or sportswear coating!
I don't see anything wrong with Russia's goals per se... only in how they choose to pursue them: everybody was playing an economic and psychological game for the `minds & wallets` of Ukrainians, and Russia got mad because they were loosing and strolled in with tanks...
Russia is like that kid on the playground that always got mad when he lost at a game and went violent on everyone smashing the toys and swinging fists around...
The only thing this turn is that the unruly kid actually did get cheated on (wrt. the promises to limit NATO expansion after '89), so you can't just tell him to put down... you'd need to appease him with something to make up for it. But Europe has the (understandable) "never appease expansionist tyrants again" stance, so we're stuck in this bloody mess...
And on the EU/Russia/US thing, I think the "goal" should be of "maximizing the possibilities for future actions", no actual goal in particular should be pursued.
And mindset wise, I think we should try and rid ourselves of this quasi-hyper-rationalist analysis-paralysis inducing mindset where one needs to answer a zillion questions before being allowed to do anything... Sometimes where you have high uncertainty in all directions the best thing to do is just ACT as long as you can guess around the overall direction of action, and let some of the consequences handle themselves. Action will generate more information, and hopefully that information will de-balance the probabilities and future decisions will be obvious once some of the fog clears. If you just "sit and think" entropy just increases around you, things fall apart more and more, the information you get is even more murkier and require even more analysis and discussion and negotiation and you just get paralyzed and decompose...
Now the EU Army being a non-nuclear entity would make anyone using nuclear army against them "the villain" and onward one could easily justify using "all means" (there's stuff there I'd say even nastier than nuclear...) against them, so a "moral" deterrent could work fine in practice (since everyone knows you're technologically capable of developing the really nasty stuff if anything motivates you to...).
Europe's past history of war and military technology is what allowed it to advance faster up to the point of industrial revolution and then to colonize most of the world...
Europe needs conflict to thrive, but as an European I'd prefer this conflict to be external to Europe. An EU Army would at the same time make internal conflict exceedingly unlikely (no/impotent national armies, all resources dedicated to EU Army), and allow Europe to start re-involving itself productively in external conflicts.
A de-militarized Europe is a castrated Europe, doomed to lag behind and wither away.
Unless capable and able to autonomously decide to use lethal force against anyone threatening you freedom, you're not really free.
Eg. a non-NATO EU army could get more involved in Ukraine, and maybe other wars int the Middle East and Africa to, if it weren't tied down to the big heavy NATO that would always go "but muh, can't do that, because global nuclear war".
...regardless of what the US does or doesn't do. NATO serves a different purpose.
If we ever want to get close to the dream of an European Federation we need to get the Army done. Then maybe some EU equivalent of the FBI (no Interpol doesn't cut it, something with trained men with guns and bugs and all, and EU only).
Even a possible future improvement of the relationships between Europe and Russia is contingent on this: we need to be able to talk with Russia without the US sitting at the table, and to have the option to also act against the interests of the US. Which, frankly, don't really coincide that much with that of Europe anymore.
FFS, even programming language choice is oftern dictated by the ecosystem of already existing libraries nowadays :)
If Russia sponsored this for their imperialist dreams, they should've instead build a Simplified Russian, like you have Simplified Chinese. At least it would be rewarding to read some Dostoevski in something close to the original, and X% of SR learners would also grow up to learn Traditional Russian too...
(Though judging by how things are going, not likely.)
I think this is more like incompatibility between the "central-continental European cultural area" (+ some "balkanic-European c.e." elements for Hungary) and "west-atlantic-postcolonialist-European c.e." and this is very mild and will go away when current politicians trade seats. Hungarian, Polish, Bulgarian, Romanian etc. people can cooperate well amongst themselves and with eg. Germans or Austrians, if nobody is deliberately stirring hate.
Maybe Poland and Hungary could serve as bridge to Russia to solve the worst incompatibility, that between the mindsets of west-atlantic-postcolonialist-europeans and mindsets of russian-europeans. But I would not have much hopes, these two groups are very incompatible... each would probably find it easier to get along with the Chinese or the Americans that with the other. And there's also eastern European countries like eg. Romania that have better closeness / similarity / affinity to west-atlantic-Europe and the US than to the central-European ones and would rather burn themselves than serve as a bridge to Russia... Europe is complicated...
German (continental) European de-facto-leadership + eastern Europe to be the bridge could work in theory though...
The people of Russia and the EU would 100% love this if you were to take away all the propaganda. But this view doesn't seem to be shared by the ruling elites and the US doesn't seem want to want to allow that profits made from "Marshall money" fuel in any way the development of Russia.
And there's also some mindset incompatibility that would need to be resolved first:
Western European countries have actually accelerated their development through fierce competition and even war amongst them... I think this is what in the end lead to the enlightenment and then the industrial revolution. But war was kept in check in a way, it was "war by the rules" sort of with conditions to limit destruction of intellectual and material capital. People died, a lot, but knowledge, tradition and core assets too, were preserved. And "being able to play The Game right" is still a fundamental condition for "joining The West(ern Europe)".
Russia doesn't seem to get how to "be corrupt, but not THAT corrupt" (eg. there's corruption in France and Germany too, but it does NOT undermine the foundations of society - there are soft subtle limits that people learn how to thread around). (+HINT: you can't remove corruption and nepotism 100% without, paradoxically, getting back to 100% corruption and nepotism because you'd need to centralize authoritarian power to fully/absolutely solve corruption. "All or nothing" thinking doesn't work. It's always "pink" or "gray", never red&white or black&white. It's subtleties and mental gymnastics like this that make Western Europe what it is and give its power, this "the hidden soul of Europe" in a way, "discretely weaponizing subtlety and paradox for the purpose of furthering the development of humanity, science and knowledge". And it's stuff you'll not find in any book. It's stuff that people need to figure out by themselves and also let other figure it out by themselves.) Or that "you can only get into a real hot war AFTER you've won at least say ~50% of the `war for peoples' harts`, so that in the event of a victory you can maintain power without having to `break people into submission` by physical or mental violence". Or that there's an unwritten rule between "proportionality of assets and power - you can't hold immense political or military power in your hands if you're not backed by the people holding most assets, and you can't hold assets without having them taken or severely taxed-away if you don't also assume political responsibility and power, even indirectly". And so on and so on and so on...
Russia just doesn't seem to grok the underlying unwritten rules of western civilization...
Neither does eg. China, but they're not expected to either. Russia keeps wanting to "come and play" with Europe, but they just can't get rules of the game / the dance steps. And sure, the rules are in slow but continuous evolution, but that's the thing, figuring them out and then figuring out how to keep figuring them out and keep playing "the good game".
To conclude: you'd need to solve both (1) US opposition and (2) mindset incompatibility, and I think this is REALLY hard (not impossible though), in order to get Russia and Europe together in any meaningful way!
Damn, we're in a weird timeline here... where russian oligarchs are actually the hope for a better solution :)
But we need to thread carefully here. The other side looks that it might involve non-rational actors. Hopefully they're also incompetent and not very united amongst themselves.
We might be wrong! Even if Putin fails his successor might be even worse, and there's a weird quasi-religion thing jumping from mind to mind across Russia and not only: https://youtu.be/IAVZ3XsqIL4 (the source is biased but can't think of a better one now).
We might be talking to something closer to a cult, and we are generally bad at dealing with these by applying western negotiation and de-escalation techniques (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege). We don't want the nuclear equivalent of the Waco massacre! (Also, historically, the last "nation level cult" we've dealt with resulted in a world war, so there's a grim track record here.
Something is weird here and both sides are playing mind-games - captured Russian soldiers look like they're on acid or something, military tactics seem weird and maybe they're targeted to induce reactions that can drive behaviors more than to secure military objectives... s's not right here, this feels like neither Kosovo nor Iraq nor Syria.
We shouldn't try to out-cult a cult, that's how you get WW3. We need to figure out how to DE-BRAINWASH people and get them to negotiate constructively and FAST!*
Russia might be so messed up that leading it is not desirable and attainable for anyone except quite crazy persons that are at the same time smart + competent enough.
Our current world order seems to have created a "power niche" in Russia that can only be filled by persons at the same time smart, crazy and competent enough! ...and we should also be wary of what kind of personal qualities we select for in people in eg. NATO or Chinese leadership, one could imagine embarking on crazier-than-thou leadership race.
This is scary as f! The rarity of the smart+crazy+competent combo is why we didn't off ourselves so far with nukes or by hacking into being stuff like, dunno, "covid ultra pro+ with prionic-inserts" or other horrible world-ending tech that is getting cheaper and cheaper...
I'd guess that schizoid personality types may be attracted to dense and reference-rich language. And these very same types would be attracted to conspiracy theories due to their desire to belong, just as it's known they're attracted to esotericism.
Overall I think the jargon and in-group signaling is real, but there's more to it, this compression-rich and high-connectivity thinking and communication mode is distinct, doesn't need to be about group signaling etc., and conspiracy theorists and other such groups are just what happens when this mode of thinking goes wrong, it's the pathological variation.
> transmission-poor
You're insulting their communication skill, but some (I'd say possibly many) people actually enjoy reading/listening to this kind of communication. I actually really enjoyed it and found it funny and witty, and satisfying especially because it made me google for ~30sec to find out about Thucydides and Melos to be able to decode "old Melian", and then more to solve the puzzle of the "Piper" - although native Enlish speakers are more familiar with the The Pied Piper of Hamelin I'd guess or at least with the "pay the piper" expression.
I actually find regular low-density conversations excruciatingly boring so tuning the density way up and sprinkling some puzzles in there improves my ability to focus and not tune out as I do in many conversations. It's a form of communications that helps AHDHed-techno-creatives like us follow and enjoy conversation and reading more actually, not transmission-poor but on the contrary more like transmission-enhanced, but probably only for a subset of people with brains wired a particular way. (Now that I think about it, even the sci-fi literature that I enjoy reading, eg. Charlie Stross, Vernor Vinge is a bit like this comment, although way more diluted probably to appeal to a greater audience... and yeah, I guess conspiracy theories are the lower end trash version of "sci-fi appealing to ADHDed-techno-creatives", so it kind of makes sense.)
...come to think about it, I'd pay an arm and leg for access to a news outlet that would summarize latest news in this writing or talking style + a subtle injection of dark humor into it, and I'm probably not the only one! ...I imagine it with a Tom Lehrer background intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAEmhqdLFs :)
I don't know who (s)he is, but I know this "communication style" and it's also my preferred default way of communicating when I don't have to talk with people I don't share much context or to whom I may want to sell/advocate something :|
It's about being dense and DRY while still saying a lot by painting a rich and nuanced context. Sure, it might be more prevalent amongst conspiracy theory people, but it's not a hallmark of them. Professionals like eg. surgeons also use dense jargon + funny-ish allegories and references when talking to each other.
It's basically like writing Perl, or dense Haskell, but for human2human communication... there's a beauty to it :)