JoshuaZ comments on How can we get more and better LW contrarians? - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Wei_Dai 18 April 2012 10:01PM

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Comment author: timtyler 20 April 2012 01:44:31AM *  1 point [-]

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.

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.

Comment author: orthonormal 20 April 2012 02:11:40AM 3 points [-]

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.)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 20 April 2012 02:31:32AM 1 point [-]

We don't know exactly how narrow are the bottlenecks we've survived already.

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.

Comment author: siodine 20 April 2012 02:39:50AM 1 point [-]