Open thread, July 28 - August 3, 2014

polymathwannabe

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one.

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

Well I don't like the dragon parable either. It's overlong, a bit condescending and ignores the core problem that anti-aging research has done a pretty poor job of showing concrete achievements, even if it's right that it's under-prioritized. I was not a fan of yours exactly because I think the parable elides the most important parts of the actual topic. Even if a direct discussion would be flamey, it's not better to discuss a poor proxy. I'm not trying to pick on you, I just think you tried to define the problem with some premises that were well worth dispute.

There are all sorts of other bad analogies out there though: "If canada launched missiles at the US, how would it respond?", even though the US hasn't turned Canada into a prison-state over the course of 50 years, is one on the news a lot right now.

Parables about the danger of nuclear weapons that ignore the fact that this danger was successfully handled (there was something on here using it as an analogy for AI).

Also, when parables are kind-of-but-not-really trying to be coy about what they're actually about is a bit annoying, leading to stilted writing (but that's the least of my issues).

EY also has a lot of dubious parables, but tackling those is a subject for a bigger post.

And of course there's the whole genre of parables where two fictional interlocutors are arguing, the strawman 'loses' the argument, and that's supposed to convince us of something. I think LW manages to avoid overt versions of this.

In the realm of politics (both Red/Blue and further-from-mainstream) people often apply "argument by utopia", which suffers similar issues in that it attempts to prematurely define convenient facts and use a narrative to elide gritty, worthwhile details of an issue.

I feel like the dragon parable correctly shows, if anything, negative progress being made towards dealing with the dragon, until suddenly, it is dealt with. I suppose one difference is that the anti-dragon projectile seems so much more achievable and imaginable than a cure for aging.

11fubarobfusco12y

Hmm. I suppose I thought the point of "Dragon Tyrant" was not to narrowly advocate for the anti-aging research program; but rather to get people to take seriously the "naïve" idea that death is bad. Or, more specifically, to say that even though ① defeating death seems like an insurmountable goal because death has always been around, and ② there are people advocating on a wide variety of grounds against attempting to defeat death, it is nonetheless reasonable and desirable to consider. "Dragon Tyrant" uses the technique, common to sociology and "soft" science fiction (e.g. Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams), of making the familiar strange — taking something that we are so accustomed to that it is unquestioned, and portraying it as alien.

18ChristianKl12y

The danger wasn't successfully handled for a lot of values of "successful". The fact that you survive playing Russian roulette doesn't show that you successfully handled danger. Once a nuclear bomb nearly exploded in the US where 3 of 4 safety feature of the bomb failed. If I remember right it would have needed 3 of 3 people in the Russian submarine in the Cuban missle crisis to lunch a nuclear weapon and 2 of them wanted to lunch it. There are various lost nuclear weapons.