All of TannyTalk's Comments + Replies

Yes, I think fast progress is dangerous, because human beings are limited in how quickly they can adapt to change.  Fast progress is dangerous because it further empowers violent men's ability to crash the entire system.

The future of this civilization will be decided by our relationship with knowledge.  Just as animals have to adapt to a changing environment or die, our relationship with knowledge has to adapt to a changing environment too.

Currently we're operating from a "more is better" relationship with knowledge philosophy left over from the 19th century.  That philosophy made sense in the long era of knowledge scarcity, an era we no longer live in.   Today we live in a time when knowledge is exploding in every direction at an accelerating rate,  a... (read more)

Do we want to have media that contributes to a better future?   Do we want to fuel content grounded in reason, logic, and common sense?

Focus on nuclear weapons.   

There is no other factor within human control that can so quickly and so decisively end our hopes for a better future.  The vast majority of other subjects being discussed in "constructive journalism" are really mostly a dangerous distraction from that which will decide our future.

Happily, we seem to be emerging from climate change denial, and now pretty much the entire popula... (read more)

The population of Florida is now 7 times larger than it was when I was born in the early 50s.   A thousand people move here every day.   Florida is still a place of incredible beauty...

https://www.tannytalk.com/s/nature

...but in 50 years it will likely look a lot like New Jersey.   I'm happy to report that I will be dead then, and won't have to witness the destruction of one of the most wonderful places on Earth.

Well, nobody claimed that poor countries are safe and secure.  The claim is that high technology countries are not safe and secure, and that speeding up the knowledge explosion will make them ever less safe and secure. 

Trying to understand the dynamics of progress is great.  If we are assuming without questioning that speeding up the knowledge explosion should obviously be our goal, then we have not yet understood the dynamics of progress.  

What we are witnessing is an engineering failure of historic proportions.  That is, we are f... (read more)

Cowen writes...

"For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up."

Can you please explain why the goal should be to speed up the knowledge explosion?  

We already have thousands of massive hydrogen bombs aimed down our own throats, an ever present existential threat that we typically consider too boring to bother discussing, perhaps because we haven't the slightest clue how to rid ourselves of these weapons.    And so, we're ... (read more)

Yes, culture can improve, and has.   Is our morality more effective?   That's a tricky one.  

Consider that we have thousands of massive hydrogen bombs aimed down our own throats, and we generally find this ever present existential threat too boring to bother discussing.   It seems we have a ways to go yet in achieving effective morality.

I think we're basically agreeing that culture can both improve and deteriorate.   The history of modern Germany perhaps offers one example of that.  High culture, to primitive barbarism, and then back to high culture.

Hi Roger, I agree with comments.   Yes, there has been important progress within the content of thought.   But because that kind of morality is just ideas, it's not permanent or durable.  It can change quickly based on particular local circumstances.  It is of course nonetheless an important project to keep working on.  

Here's an example which may add to what we're exploring.

To my knowledge, every ideology ever invented has inevitably subdivided in to competing internal factions.  The universality of this experience suggests t... (read more)

I liked this quote from the Edge article...

"With more powerful technologies such as nuclear weapons, synthetic biology and future strong artificial intelligence, however, learning from mistakes is not a desirable strategy: we want to develop our wisdom in advance so that we can get things right the first time, because that might be the only time we’ll have."

It reassures me to find others writing on this subject, and making this point specifically.   The issue of scale changes the progress equation in fundamental ways, erasing the room for error we've ... (read more)

"While it is easy to be pessimistic if you compare today to utopia, a much better perspective is to look at yesterday and see how far we’ve come in our journey to lift everyone from poverty."

It's easy to be pessimistic if we do the rational thing, and look at where we're going next.

There is exactly no chance that we can keep nuclear weapons around forever and never use them.  We don't have the slightest idea of how to get rid of these weapons.  And so we've decided to stop thinking about it.

Consider the man who has a loaded gun in his mouth, and ... (read more)

I dunno.  To me, Thiel sounds like just another "expert" stuck in the 19th century.   That mindset made perfect sense in the long era of knowledge scarcity.  But we no longer live in that old era, but in a new era characterized by knowledge exploding in every direction.  People like Thiel don't seem to grasp that we can't just take a philosophy from one era and slap it down on a very different era, and expect everything to continue working.

Superabundance can be erased in literally 30 minutes.  A well established fact that we know intellectually, but seem completely incapable of facing emotionally.   And so we just ignore it, and cling blindly to the hero stories of the 19th century.

He describes his substack this way....

"Discovering, creating, and inventing a better world through technological innovation, economic growth, and pro-progress culture."

As a first impression, doesn't sound promising.  More 19th century philosophy.    But all I know is that one sentence so, will strive for an open mind.

You write, "Again, maybe it's the pathological contrarian in me, but I have to call bullshit on all of this—moral progress does exist, man’s nature has changed and can change again"

It depends on what time frame we're discussing.  Certainly the human body and mind can continue to evolve as it always has.   But neither have changed meaningfully for thousands of years, and are unlikely to do so for a long time to come.

Man's nature is that we are made of thought psychologically.  The content of thought changes all the time, but the nature of tho... (read more)

Wow, there's a lot to chew on here.

rogersbacon wrote,  "...there is something grand, something beautiful and glorious, dare I say holy, in the act of passing knowledge on to the next generation".

The problem for progress seems to be...

KNOWLEDGE:  It's easy to pass on knowledge and build upon it generation after generation.

WISDOM:  It's much harder to pass on wisdom.  We try, and succeed to some limited degree, but given that wisdom is largely a function of life experience, it almost has to be rebuilt from the ground up in each individual... (read more)

If science is slowing down, that sounds like exactly what should be happening, so I hear this as good news.  

QUESTION:  Do we believe that human beings can successfully manage ever more, ever greater powers, delivered at an ever accelerating rate, without limit?  

If we answer no, then we can be happy that the "ever accelerating rate" factor may be subsiding.  

What seems to be missing from so much discussion of science is the understanding that human beings are a limiting factor on what can be successfully accomplished in the way of prog... (read more)