Big Ideas
A place to explore the implications of broad, far-reaching, perhaps wild and crazy notions that insert themselves into your imagination and somehow won’t go away.
Date: June 9, 2015
Categories: The Universe
Friday, 26 April 2024
Life, the universe, pies, hot-pink bunnies, world domination, and everything
A place to explore the implications of broad, far-reaching, perhaps wild and crazy notions that insert themselves into your imagination and somehow won’t go away.
Date: June 9, 2015
Categories: The Universe
This new thread (“Big Ideas”) was inspired by a science-fiction story I read a few years ago. I don’t remember the title or the author, just the basic idea. The hero stumbles onto a group of ordinary-looking people who have inherited a mutation that gives them an unusually long time horizon. Ordinarily, people prefer to get good things immediately instead of later — a trait that economists call “discounted utility.” The subtle mutants in the story, however, made no distinction between benefits now and benefits later, even those planned for people who haven’t been born yet.
In the story, the mutation didn’t make them superintelligent, but it did make them super-altruistic. For example, one of them could plan his or her entire life (major in college, choice of spouse, etc.) around solving environmental problems. And because the mutation was hereditary, the people were related and worked together as extended families over generations — basically to save the world.
So here’s the Big Idea: Suppose such nearly selfless people with long time horizons really existed and were strongly motivated to benefit future generations. What would they do, individually or together? What would they study? How would they organize their lives?
(People who have seen “Tomorrowland” will recognize this as a more-sophisticated riff on that movie’s premise. It’s also related to the “effective altruism” movement, which some of you have mentioned on the blog.)
Having known a couple of effective altruists and sat in on their debates, I would say that the lack of superintelligence is going to be a stumbling block. The biggest issue they have is predicting what they should expend their efforts on for the greatest net benefit to everyone.
I imagine a lot of these mutants would go into pure science at the start, to get as much information as possible about how to keep humans and human civilization intact — with a handful going into high-income professions to fund the rest of the family — until they’d gathered enough of a knowledge base to really start battling climate change or infectious disease. And perhaps a few families would decide that the chief threats to humanity were moral, not environmental or technological, and devote their considerable resources to starting political movements, or religions, or schools of philosophy. Some might also amass enormous amounts of resources, preparing to leap into action once the others had figured out the best course. (Of course, it would probably not be that simple in the end…)
I’m diverging a little from the prompt here, but I can’t help thinking that long time horizons don’t necessarily guarantee altruism (except to the extent that the continued flourishing of human civilization guarantees the well-being of your descendants more than almost anything else you could prioritize). Someone might think, “all right, you lot figure out how to keep everyone healthy and happy — I’ll stick with you as long as it serves my goal, which is that my thousand great-great-great-grandchildren end up ruling the planet.”
Always trying to make the plot more interesting!
What can I say? I’m a sucker for a God-Emperor archetype.
It’s an interesting question: If you can’t foresee the future better than other people do, what’s the use in caring more about it than they do? And if the future does seem more real and urgent to a certain subset of human beings, does that just mean that those people have (in this case, a genetic predisposition for) unusually vivid imaginations?
Even assuming that the trait were meaningful and useful, there would still be huge practical challenges to hatching the sort of beneficent conspiracy the story described. For example, if you happened to be a solitary “non-discounter,” you’d have to (1) recognize that trait in yourself, (2) posit that some other people do share it, and (3) find them. Of course, with a hereditary trait, you’d be likely to find some among your close relatives, assuming you were on good enough terms with them to talk about such things.
Hm… Next, I suppose I suppose I would want to work out the genetics of the trait, find as many other “carriers” as possible (maybe through gene-testing services), and work out a plan for preserving the the trait or even expanding its incidence in future generations. The result could be something like the foundation that maintains the long-lived Howard Families in Robert Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children and its sequels.
Then, with the infrastructure in place, there would be the question of what exactly to do…
Heh, superintelligence. I’m not sure if the folks you know are interested in it, but there’s a subset of effective altruism that’s concerned with existential risks, one of which is powerful AI (that may or may not have goals aligned with human civilisation).
An alternative to wanting their descendants to be powerful – if someone was hopeful about biological life extension or uploading brains to computers or suchlike (hey, this is a sci-fi context) they could then want a world their future self would want to live.
I’m of the opinion that the Butterfly Effect is the altruist’s only real hope. I think that anyone who goes out looking only to “change the world” will probably just wind up frustrated, disillusioned, and cynical, however large their reserves of inner optimism. The fact is, a single person can’t change the world. Not directly. They can only change what’s around them.
Speaking personally, I’m not the kind of person that wants to fix some problem that I see in the world–some people are, but I’m not. I’m more of a person who wants to help other people do that. Because of this I’m more interested in ethical and moral issues as opposed to, say, scientific or medical advancements directly. By that I mean that I feel more driven to encourage moral, spiritual health than physical, financial, or environmental health.
What does this mean in practice? Basically, outward advice and example, inward discipline and sacrifice. Because “no one gives what he doesn’t have”, I cannot do anything to help someone else be “good” or selfless or patient or what have you unless I myself have that quality, and so self-improvement, self-criticism, and humility are the foundation. It builds on itself, too; the more I realize my own faults, the more easily I overlook or make excuses for the faults I see in others. I know from personal experience how shaky and easily swayed is human nature. Even the strongest of us are easily overcome by certain things. The weak ones like me are overcome by pretty much everything that crosses our path. So you stand up, brush the dirt off, and keep going.
What is my goal, then, my long term Big Idea? Well, if, over the course of my life, I cause someone else to do what I’ve tried to do, then I would consider my life well-spent. If two people do it, then theoretically all our problems would be solved in just a couple generations–and since I know that won’t happen, I keep my expectations low. Worst case scenario, I spent my few years on earth striving to be the best human I can be, and I don’t think that’s a waste of time. If something I do makes someone stop and examine their life for a second, then it’s been worth it. Anything else that happens is out of my hands.
Hey, what’s the big idea?
I’m just typing here, nothing planned out.
There’s so much going on in the world right now. So much killing, so much hate. Spreading extremism. Everyone hates everyone, it seems like, and people are making money stirring up that hatred even more. Moral relativism has overthrown everything, so it’s every man for himself, every man deciding for himself what his good and evil are. And what happens? No one’s good and evil line up with anyone else’s good and evil, and so everyone in the world becomes an enemy. We live in the most information-rich and ignorance-rich time in history. People just don’t care. They want to feel, feel strongly, and not think. Thinking takes too long. It’s uncomfortable. Unfamiliar perspectives are dangerous. Where does that lead? Deepening divisions–get caught on one line of thought and follow it further and further and further down until you’ve completely lost sight of anything else. The internet will do the messy thinking for you, so you just need to read the headlines, share them on Facebook, and you’ve completed your duty as an active citizen. Who wrote that headline? Who’s paying them? Doesn’t matter. It made me angry, so it must be valuable.
Why? Why is anger so addictive? When did it become the currency of thought? What does it profit anyone? Anger blinds you, makes you clumsy, turns you in towards yourself. Anger makes thinking things through difficult–and when life is so comfortable, “difficult” translates to “impossible”. Find a scapegoat and lynch him, that’s the way to do it. The police are ruining our society. The Muslims are ruining our society. Liberals are ruining it, conservatives are ruining it, Trump is, Hillary is, Christians are, atheists are. Everything is clear cut, I’m right, they’re wrong, so we just need to erase them and everything will be fixed. Right?
What can I do? This snowball is as big as the globe already, what can I possibly do to stop it? What can I say? Where can I go? What can I do?
“And she taught me to relight, relight, and relight again.” I don’t see how I could have any effect. But I know that doing nothing is wrong. It’s the problem. So I’ll do something, and to hell with the results. That’s not for me to decide. But what do I do?
“What then should we do?” Questions don’t come much bigger than that one. Any answers, MBers? It’s your future, after all.
Not a solution so much as some musing contributions:
The frightening (and weirdly reassuring) thing I’ve learned recently is that things don’t really move as much as we expect them to. Hatred has proven itself to be something of an immutable force. It seems to wax and wane over time, but the reality is that it remains as permanent as the attitude of social declinism that accompanies it. This is not to suggest we should embrace apathy, instead it’s a bit of a call to separate threats from the magnifying effects of a frantic media or an angry spectator proclaiming, “this is the worst it’s ever been.” Just as no artwork is truly novel, neither is any instance of extremism, dogmatism, or sensationalism. History can provide the right model. The next step is going back to find it.
Yes, this. The problem with the world is that people are inherently people, just like we’ve always been and we always will be. And it’s also worth noting that it feels nowadays like there’s more hatred in the world just because it’s so much easier to hear about it. Which can be a good thing of course, but it’s also often really unhelpful. C.S. Lewis, in a 1946 (!) letter: “It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the words of charity we really can do to those we know).”
Woah, that fits perfectly. Preach it, Clive.
God old Clive. And of course he didn’t know a thing about the rapid diffusion of news, did he, not compared to what we have today.
The essential problem I’ve been grappling with: Take an action, pick a side, and you risk unintended consequences. But stay centrist and consider all sides, and you don’t accomplish anything. Important thing is to consider other perspectives instead of isolating yourself in a bubble of people like yourself.
Are you me? This is how I feel, too.
I agree that 2016 has been a pretty terrible year so far. It feels like one of those years that’ll crop up in future history books heralding something terrible. But I don’t think it’s all that bleak.
Re: Varying moralities: Personally, I find the idea of one unified vision of morality absolutely terrifying. Sure, it would be great if “my side” won, but what if the unified morality ends up being ISIS? Perhaps I’m jaded, but I can’t see people collectively agreeing on all moral questions outside some kind of Big Brother dystopian system.
Re: People with different moral opinions are enemies: I do think most people are smart enough to differentiate between a point of view and a person. For example, I have a rather violent gut reaction to pretty much anything anti-choice. That doesn’t make people espousing those views my enemies.
Re: People don’t care, don’t want to think, … : I do think that this generation is more open-minded than most in many ways- racism, sexist, LGBT+ rights etc. That doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of close-minded idiots out there, but there always have been and there always will be.
But now we get to what I really wanted to talk about: anger!
As you obviously have observed based on these long years of blog interaction, I’m an angry person. I used to deny it, fight it, fight with other people because of it, slip into a meta-tunnel of being mad at myself for being mad at myself and so on. This in particular would often draw the ire of my mom, who felt that this was somehow opposed to kindness, femininity and goodness. Meanwhile, I’ve come around to the position that some people are angry, a lot, and can’t be “cured” or magically “de-angered”. Being “hot-headed” doesn’t make people morally inferior, at least not in my book. Anger demands to be felt. Let them vent, let them rant, let them rave. Once they’re calm, speak to them again. Hopefully, you can change their mind then.
((And sometimes you can’t, and then you’re screwed.))
I also think that the internet is an abominable barometer of society since it seems to lend itself to confirmation bias so terribly well. I only ever get posts supporting liberal parties even though I know, statistically speaking, someone near me has got to be voting conservative. Imho the “smart” people on social media are often rather silent, but they do vote.
I think it’s really important for people to be constantly questioning and arguing over laws and morals. Why do we have this rule? Is it still relevant? What benefits and drawbacks does it have? Can we do better? I’m automatically distrustful of anybody who shuts down conversations with “if you believe this you’re a bigot, conformist sheep, edgy teenager, bleeding-heart hippie, religious nut, godless heathen, (insert party) moron, or what have you” and refuses to discuss the matter any further.
Yesterday afternoon I was feeling really down, about a lot of things—like, about how slowly I write and how people probably don’t like me and how little feedback I get on things I post on my blog, silly things—and I was lying around reading and feeling sorry for myself, and I had this realization: “I’m not very important.” Not that I don’t matter, but that I’m not important. I’m not important, there’s no pressure on me from the universe, I have no obligation to be super productive and super popular. I can be a good and useful part of the world while also being small and unnoticed, or only noticed by a few people who love me, and that’s fine. My self-pity isn’t important or interesting, my self-hatred isn’t important or interesting, and all that’s left is to get on with the work I can do.
Naomi Shihab Nye wrote a poem called “Famous,” and the last two stanzas go: “I want to be famous to shuffling men / who smile while crossing streets, / sticky children in grocery lines, / famous as the one who smiled back. // I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, / or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, / but because it never forgot what it could do.” That’s how I’ve been feeling lately, and it feels like a good place to be, and I think it’s a way of thinking that’s applicable to conversations about changing/saving the world. Some of us should be buttonholes and pulleys, good and necessary and unspectacular.