turchin comments on Open thread, Oct. 10 - Oct. 16, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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There is 5 times more members in the group "Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT)" (9800) in Facebook than in the group "Existential risks" (1880). What we should conclude from it?
Nothing. I don't think facebook membership counts are a good measurement.
Or possibly they are accurate measurements of the rates of Facebook use among these two groups. Maybe it's a good thing if people who are concerned about existential risk do serious things about it instead of participating in a Facebook group.
The success of a Facebook group depends a lot on how it get's promoted and whether there are a few people who care about creating content for it.
Is the 'success' of a group its number of members, regardless of actual activity?
I don't think I would need to define it that way for the above comment to be coherent.
Of course not. Then you meant simply the success of the goals of the group's creators?
I think my sentence is true with both definitions of
success.Link: http://www.vhemt.org/
It's very likely much bigger then 9800. It is also very balanced and laid back in its views and methods. I'd think that contributes.
I looked into some of the most obvious objections. Some have reasonable answers (why not just kill yourself?), some others are based on a (to me) crazy assumption: that the original state of the biosphere pre-humans somehow is more valuable than the collective experience of the human race.
To which I don't just disagree, but think it's a logic error, since values exist only in the mind of those who can compute it, whatever it is.
grumble grumble...
Look, I'm not pro-"Kill All Humans", but I don't think that last step is correct.
Bob can prefer that the human race die off and the earth spin uninhabited forever. It makes him evil, but there's no "logic error" in that, any more than there is in Al's preference that humanity spread out throughout the stars. They both envision future states and take actions that they believe will cause those states.