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timtyler comments on How can we get more and better LW contrarians? - Less Wrong
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That doesn't sound great! Was I right? If you think there's a case where I should have updated - but didn't - perhaps it can be revisited? Of course, I don't mean to put pressure on you to trawl through my comments - but it would be nice for me to know if you have any specific cases in mind.
I couldn't find them in a quick search, but the gist of the argument that got me frustrated was a cluster of arguments that you've stated a lot but never written up at length. Let me summarize roughly:
All new technological developments are just continuations of evolution; there are no relevant differences between evolution of genes, memes, corporations, etc; and therefore the Singularity couldn't be an existential crisis, just a faster continuation of evolution.
(Apologies if I've mangled it.) It seemed to me that every time a relevant topic was mentioned, back in the days of the Sequences, you merely stated one of these opinions rather than argued for it. But again, it's difficult for me to recognize good arguments when I disagree with their conclusions.
Hmm. Thanks. I did write a whole book about that one - I think.
Your objection also makes me think of this material:
Even with regular evolution there can still be existence "failures" - for particular species.
Also, I do think one of these is coming: http://alife.co.uk/essays/memetic_takeover/
...leading to this: http://alife.co.uk/essays/engineered_future/ - apparently a future where humans as we know them play a pretty insignificant role.
I do think that the trend towards increased destructive power needs to be considered in the light of the simultaneous trend towards greater levels of cooperation, moral behaviour, and peacefulness.
What's the current state of memetics in science (universities, journals, and so on)? I thought it turned out to be a dead end.
Susan Blackmore recently described the current state of memetics as a science as being "pathetic".
A few pages on the general topic:
What we do have is a lot of modern work on "cultural evolution". It's not quite the same - but it's close, and it has many of the basics down.
Statistically, memetics may not be doing too well - but memes are going crazy - through the roof. It bodes well for the subject, I think.
Nice, I was impressed by the video and your page on the criticisms of memetics. But I think you'd be more agreeable to more prejudicial people (i.e., most everyone) if you made some stylistic changes; would you care to see some criticisms?
Any feedback you care to offer would be more than welcome.
Ah— you have written it up at great length, just not in Less Wrong posts.
I think you claim too strong a predictive power for the patterns you see, but that's a discussion for a different thread. (One particular objection: the fact that evolution has gotten us here contains a fair bit of anthropic bias. We don't know exactly how narrow are the bottlenecks we've survived already.)
User:timtyler himself has brought up the dinosaurs' semi-extinction, for example, which was a local decrease in "moral progress" even if it might have been globally necessary or whatever.
Well, I don't want to appear to endorse the thesis that you associated me with - but it appears that while we don't know much about the past exactly, we do have some idea about past risks to our own existence. We can look at the distribution of smaller risks among our ancestors, and gather data from a range of other species. What Joshua Zelinsky said about genetic data is also a guide to recent bottleneck narrowness.
Occam's razor also weighs against some anthropic scenarios that imply a high risk to our existence. The idea that we have luckily escaped 1000 asteroid strikes by chance has to compete with the explanation that these asteroids were never out there in the first place. The higher the supposed risk, the bigger the number of "lucky misses" that are needed - and the lower the chances are of that being the correct explanation.
Not that the past is necessarily a good guide - but rather we can account for anthropic effects quite well.
We can estimate this for a lot of the major bottlenecks. For example, we can look at how likely other intelligent species are to survive and in what contexts. We have a fair bit of data for that. We also now have detailed genetic data so we can look at historical genetic bottlenecks in the technical sense for humans and for other species.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans