HungryTurtle comments on Can the Chain Still Hold You? - Less Wrong

108 Post author: lukeprog 13 January 2012 01:28AM

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Comment author: HungryTurtle 10 February 2012 02:46:37AM *  1 point [-]

Luke, I sympathize with wanting to motivate people that change is possible, but i feel that in your essay you are not promoting the need of a specific change, but change for the sake of change.

In the list of your analogies you discuss how recently humans have become strong enough to render itself extinct.

The human species was always too weak to render itself extinct. Until we discovered the nuclear chain reaction and manufactured thousands of atomic bombs.

To me this is a strong case for why if anything we should show some restraint in the chains we tug on. There is no logic behind the idea that a higher acceleration of change ("progress") would be in anyway beneficial to human survival. In fact, given the fact that evolutionary fitness deals with adapting to a specific environment, forcibly implementing exponentially potent change seems idiotic. Your ending sentence "just get up and walk away to a place you've never seen before" is very poetic, but it over romanticizes aimless wandering and is not realistic at all. Species leave an environment as an act of desperation when they cannot survive where they are. I realize that among Western elites aimless traveling is quite popular, but such behavior is a byproduct of an external environment of extreme privilege. For the majority of humans and the majority of species on our planet the luxury of being powerful enough to transplant yourself into "a place you have never seen before" simply does not exist.