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Emile comments on Rationality Quotes: June 2011 - Less Wrong
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Where can I read badass philosophy? (There's some incredulity here. It's sad that the opinion of a domain expert isn't enough to convince me philosophy isn't a rotten field.) Note that I don't doubt that philosophers have said stuff about Gödel, but I want the Gödel-equivalent work.
That would mostly be probability theory, right? That left the philosophy-cradle long ago - or can you show me the modern developments?
Nietzsche is pretty badass in his own way, though he doesn't write the same kind of stuff analytical philosophers write about (it seems to me that it's two different genres that just happen to share a name). It's more about social / intellectual / historical commentary than about science.
It's sort of philosophy crack: intensely pleasurable and satisfying to read, but wrong about 90% of things. (The other 10% consists of brilliant original insights that no other philosopher within a century of him could have seen. On the other hand, it can be difficult to distinguish these from the rest of his corpus.)
I agree, and bought one of these! But he's not doing any work, just saying "Transhumanism will rock, when it's invented sometime after my death!". Sort of a motivational poster.
Nietzsche always struck me as non-transhumanist. Quick google tells me Bostrom agrees with me about this and people seem capable of making long arguments for and against.
Nietzsche is a prime example of a philosopher that pretty much everything I've understood him saying, I've disagreed with. But he is quite badass.
The source is Bostrom's 2004 paper A history of transhumanist thought, page 4. I'll paraphrase the difference he lists:
Yeah, that's his mistake. He points at the right goal, but can't say how to get there. As I said, no real work.
I think that's unfair to Freddy. His Zarathustra puppet goes around telling everyone to do it, but they aren't interested. Obviously he was envisioning individual progress as opposed to inventing tech then distributing it to Muggles, so he thinks that if few people want to put in the effort then few people will get boosted.
I don't understand what Bostrom means by that. AFAICT, Fred is huge on individual liberties.
I fail to see the relevance.
What I got from reading Nietzsche (before I got any exposure to transhumanism) was an extremely pretty way of saying "Striving to improve yourself a lot is awesome". No argument why, no proposed methods, some very sucky assumptions about what it'd be like. Just a cheer, and an invitation for people who share this goal to band together and work on it. Which is what transhumanists have done.
Nietzsche seems to always see the project of self-improvement in opposition to the project of building a functional society out of multiple people who don't kill each other, and the second one always seemed more important to me.
It's hard for me to understand what he's saying because he doesn't engage (much? at all?) with Actually True Morality, that is the utilitarian/"group is just a sum of individuals" paradigm. The question of whether it's OK for the strong to bully the weak almost doesn't seem to interest him.
One man is not a whole lot better than one ape, but a group of men is infinitely superior to a group of apes.
ETA: I often like to think of FAI as not the ultimate transhuman, but the ultimate institution/legal system/moral code.
You might say that Nietzsche takes opposition to the Repugnant Conclusion to an extreme: his philosophy values humanity by the $L^\infty$ norm rather than the $L^1$ norm.
(Assuming that individual value is nonnegative.)
That's an emendation, not the original; in most of his mid-to-late works, he really does mean that the absolute magnitude of a character, without reference to its direction, is of value.
But certainly the people who believe in the $L^1$ norm don't take the absolute value...
No offense to Fred, but he's a bitter loner. Idealistic nerd wants to make the world awesome, runs out and tells everyone, everyone laughs at him, idealistic nerd gives up in disgust and walks away muttering "I'll show them! I'll show them all!".
Also, he thinks this project is really really important, worth declaring war against the rest of the world and killing whoever stands in the way of becoming cooler. (As you say, whether he thinks we can also kill people who don't actively oppose it is unclear.) This is a dangerous idea (see the zillion glorious revolutions that executed critics and plunged happily into dictatorship) - though it is less dangerous when your movement is made of complete individualists. As it happens, becoming superhumans will not require offing any Luddites (though it does require offending them and coercing them by legal means), but I can't confidently say it wouldn't be worth it if it were the only way - even after correcting for historical failures.
By the same token, group rationality is in fact the way to go, but individual rationality does require telling society to take a hike every now and then.
It certaintly shouldn't be a transhuman. Eliezer's preferred metaphor is more like "the ultimate laws of physics", which says quite a bit about how individualistic you and he are.
Nietzsche can't know what the Superman will look like - nobody can. But he provides a great deal of assistance: he is extremely insightful about what people are doing today (well, late 1800s, but still applicable), how that tricks us into behaving and believing in certain ways, and what that means.
But he wrote these insights as poetry. If you wanted an argument spelled out logically or a methodology of scientific inquiry, you picked the wrong philosopher.
I didn't see much transhumanism in Nietzsche, I just like reading him because he has a lot of interesting ideas while living in a quite distant intellectual context.