Maybe the most dangerous idea is that Steve Harvey treats all families with the same level of enthusiasm.
(Joking. And I like Steve Harvey.)
This is the one I find frightening and suspect climate change is what’s going to to it, at least for us.
Quite possibly but I don’t see how that’s frightening. Better to realize that than the hubris of assuming we already do – like the 1890 suggestion to shut the patent office because everything useful had been thought of.
Knowledge is fractal. The more you understand the more you realize what you don’t know yet. John M. Ford said the universe is a puzzle and God says, "Oh. You understand that now? Here’s another puzzle for you to solve.
I’d lump that in with “The fight against global warming is lost”. It’s dangerous because the idea itself encourages not doing anything to prevent something that could be completely preventable.
Additionally it is 100% not needed to explain Fermi’s “paradox” because there is absolutely nothing paradoxical about Drakes Equation, its is completely possible to choose utterly reasonable values for some of the variables that produce a number that is less than or equal to one, without introducing any other terms or filters.
I apparently don’t have enough caffeine in me to understand what in the hell is going on there.
So you’re nearly half way to being an anarchist! Huzzah!
The image of the Basilisk looks like Trogdor.
In any case, the Wikipedia article points also at others that noticed that Roko’s Basilisk idea was already Burminated dismissed.
Anyone who claims to understand quantum theory is either lying or crazy - Richard Feynman
I do wonder if, on a long enough timeline, advances in machine intelligence, exocortexes, bioengineering, etc. will create people who can understand the true nature of reality. But I doubt we can figure it out with these 3 pound brains that evolved by natural selection.
I always liked the idea that God and Heaven are real but the form it will take will be completely horrific to our rational independent human minds.
As I understand it, it’s kind of like Terminator 2. Except that instead of sending Terminators back in time to kill John and Sarah Conner to prevent its destruction, Skynet sends them back in time to tell Miles Dyson “work HARDER dummy!”
My understanding is that he’s not saying that the scientific view is unable to account for the existence of the practice of retribution, rather that the scientific view shows the practice of retribution to be morally unjustified.
I guess the dangerous idea lurking behind that, is that if we accept that humans are entirely biological, individual persons cannot be moral agents due to the lack of a soul.
That’s not how I interpret it, I think he’s saying the scientific view is unable to account for the existence of the practice of retribution, which makes a bit of sense. What evolutionary advatage is there in developing revenge behavior? There is no gain to the organism doing the retaliating.
But that doesn’t make it unexplainable by scientific means, it just means we need a new way of modelling the behavior (in fact it seems likely there is a game theory explanation)
You could be right, but my reading of Dawkins is that he uses the words “retribution” and “retaliation” distinctly. He tends to associate “retribution” with religion and “retaliation” with game theory as you allude to.
“Retribution” is the eternal fiery pit being unjustifiably inflicted as a consequence of actions which were the consequence of circumstance (including individual biology) rather than being the consequence of the application of a soul’s free agency (however defined).
Then again, I’m not a Dawkins-o-phile, so I could be mis-remembering.
So actually reading the linked article you are right. He’s taking about the scientific validity of societal retribution against wrong doers (as in punishment for the sake of punishment in and of itself, not as a deterrent or means of preventing criminals from commiting crimes by incarcerating them.) And the specifically stating that retribution like that is not justified from a scientific rational point of view.
That seems a patently obvious statement of fact, not some dark dangerous forbidden knowledge.
Roko’s Basilisk is inane. It’s just Pascal’s Wager, but with the added unsupported assumption that God is evil.
Almost. All that’s added is that a rational but good being might still choose to engage in evil if it means bringing about more good later. Which is exactly the same explanation Christians give for why God gives children terminal cancer.
The greatest source of misunderstanding in science, especially the ‘softer’ sciences such as sociology and economics, is the failure to grasp and internalize the lessons we have learned from complexity theory, probably becaue accepting those lessons would result in a loss of power for powerful people:
- You can’t understand the economy or social systems by drilling down into them and using reductionism. The deeper you drill, the more opaque the system becomes.
- Models do not predict the future of complex systems. The future is unknown, and the path of a complex system can be dominated by ‘unknown unknowns’.
- There is no ‘brighter future’ that can be worked towards by forcing change on the system. Progressivism is based on this, and it’s wrong. Pushing for ‘progressive change’ just imposes a shock to the culture, and how the culture responds to that shock may result in a worse outcome than the status quo. Complex systems are unpredictable, and trying to push them in a certain direction results in unintended consequences and not the result you wanted.
- Tuned models are useful for examing how a system behaves. As a method for predicting the future direction of that system, they are useless.
- Central planning and control of human systems is just as bad an idea as central planners deciding the right ratio of predators to prey in an ecosystem, and for the same reasons. You have no hope of getting it right, and the consequences of a major shock to an ecosystem are unpredictable and potentially severe.
- Businesses that use top-down hierarchical management models and keep silos of information tend to get crushed by businesses that use flatter management structures and allow change to be suggested and driven from the bottom.
All the evidence we have, the results of every prediction about the economy and attempted interventions in the economy, say that all the above is true. And yet, we keep ignoring the lessons. And we’ll keep hearing the word ‘unexpectedly’ in the news when discussing what we thought would happen as compared to what did.
Democracy is unsustainable and self-defeating.
Here’s two of the ones from above:
Birth control is self-defeating, since the children of large families have large families themselves…
People of lower intelligence have more kids, lowering the intelligence of the species.
I understand why people believe these two things. They both seem to follow from a certain sort of quick reasoning. The problem is that they aren’t true if you actually look up the statistics on both of them. The increase in the world population is slowing down… It appears that the population will hit a peak in around 2080 and will decrease after that point. Similarly, it appears that the average intelligence has been slowly increasing in many countries for many decades. Look up the term “Flynn effect” if you don’t know about this.
Both of the statements above assumed that children always follow the habits of their parents. This doesn’t seem to be true. In general, people are having less children than their parents. In general, people are becoming more intelligent because they have more training in intelligent habits and better education.
Another statement that would seem to be true is the following.
More religious parents have more children, so the population of the world is becoming more religious.
Again, though this seem to follow from quick reasoning, the statistics show that it isn’t true. The people of the world are slowly becoming less religious. The problem again is that children don’t always follow the habits of their parents.
Please understand that I am not saying that any of the supposed trends or the real trends are better. I am not saying that the trends that statistics show are happening will continue forever. That would be forecasting, and forecasting is incredibly difficult.
Good political leadership is hard to find because only genuine narcissists and the self-important can handle the processes involved in becoming elected.
Evil is merely the absence of conscience. The two main things which propagate it are the desire not to get involved and the desire to avoid conflict.
Most of your decisions are made before you try to justify them, which is done in reverse more often than you might admit.
There is relatively little genetic basis to many mental illnesses, which are more epigenetic and depend more immensely on the first few years of life, environment, relationships and resources.
No one really has a great handle on everything that is going on. Least of all those most confident.
A hundred years from now, people will be shocked by the things we currently prioritize and how confident we were about things clearly wrong.
Human ingenuity is a remarkable thing and we will work out a solution to many of the problems we now think are impossible to solve. However, the solutions will require more sacrifice and less selfishness than many would like.
No one will go broke underestimating people’s tastes and preferences; as always.
Depends on the timescale you’re looking on. Human evolution is slow, mostly because we take a really long time before we reproduce. If widespread availability of birth control does have any effect on human evolution, we won’t start seeing it for at least a millennium. And it reliable birth control hasn’t been around for nearly that long.