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DanArmak comments on All hail the Lisbon Treaty! Or is that "hate"? Or just "huh"? - Less Wrong
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Not so good for the people in there. How do you figure that the benefit to scientific research and artistic legacy outweighs the human cost of frequent war?
If you think the science will allow the human race to fend off extinction for longer than if we had stayed at the pre-industrial level it might be justified. It is not a pleasent justification to make.
The idea of science fending off extinction requires some serious justification. At pre-industrial technology levels, none of today's biggest extinction threats would exist (high-tech war, singularity-class technology, climate change, etc.)
Think longer term things such as near super novas, large meteors etc. I rate meteors as a bigger extinction threat than climate change. Even with runaway climate change it still is unlikely to make us extinct .
Think of science as a gamble that can pay off big, if we manage to get off this rock, but might just backfire.
All of this implies you assign significant utility to the indefinite survival of humanity regardless of your personal survival, the survival of any particular persons you know, or your personal legacy and influence on that future.
I assign little utility to this. For instance I'd choose a 50% chance of extinction of humanity, with guaranteed survival of myself and friends in the event humanity survives; over a 20% chance of extinction, with another 50% chance of my death even if humanity survives (which sums to a total 60% chance of my death).
Do you have different preferences here and does that relate to our differences on the war question?
I assign a higher value to the survival of humanity than to my own personal survival/survival of my legacy. So yes we have a value disconnect.
If you value personal survival you should also value science fairly highly, as the longevity research program is a product of that as well, not to mention the basic useful health care.
Anyway we are getting fairly far off-topic. If you want to follow this further we should probably go to the open thread.
Continued here.
Note that we've never needed high tech to extinguish other species.
There are species we probably wouldn't have been able to make extinct without high tech. But we've almost never needed to deliberately make another species extinct at all, so we weren't trying all that hard.
We did do a pretty thorough job on the smallpox virus...
Yes, that's one of the very few exceptions.
For starters, the casaulties are sunk costs. And the long-term gains are plausibly far greater. With several billion people around at any given moment directly thanks to things like the Industrial Revolution, that vastly outweighs the endless little European wars that encouraged it. (How many died in the 30 years' war? 3-11 million? Global population growth adds that much in 5-50 days.)
The problem with arguing that way is that for you, living now, the wars were a good thing insofar as they enabled your higher tech level and quality of life today. But if you lived in Europe during the Thirty Years' War, you would have certainly preferred to have peace even if it meant no Industrial Revolution later on.
For broadly similar reasons, wars now which might involve you are bad for you, even if they're good for your future self under the assumption you survive the war.
You seem to be shifting gears; I've explained exactly how the gains outweigh the costs of the wars - what the few people at the time preferred is irrelevant except as a few pebbles on one side of the scale, and I don't know why you're belaboring the point. It's nothing new to say that the optimal long-term course of action may be suboptimal in the short-term.
I read your original comment to mean you also thought wars today were good (i.e. for us, who live today) because they advance science.
To be clearer then: Wars today are different from wars then. The positive effects of conflicting states is clear enough from history, but lately the side-effects have started to reach into the unacceptable range. Ideally, Europe and Asia would be filled with active jostling competing states so we get the benefits of whatever Renaissance or Industrial Revolution or 100 Schools of Thought would happen in our era, but with enough of an international structure to prevent actual military operations (and particularly use of nukes or worse); the EU seems to me to have gone well beyond the salutary conflict-prevention point, and into stifling-Imperial-China territory.