Bump for this year's Petrov Day

Everyone's talking about this as if it was a hypothetical, but as far as I can tell it describes pretty accurately how hierarchical human civilizations tend to organize themselves once they hit a certain size. Isn't a divine ruler precisely someone who is more deserving and more able to absorb resources? Aren't the lower orders people who would not appreciate luxuries and indeed have fully internalized such a fact ("Not for the likes of me")

If you skip the equality requirement, it seems history is full of utilitarian societies.

After reading this post I came across this Bruce Lee quote which seemed in synch with the idea:

“I’ve always been buffeted by circumstances because I thought of myself as a human being affected by my outside conditioning. Now I realize that I am the power that commands the feeling of my mind and from which circumstances grow.”

I wonder if empirically and instinctively, Bruce had arrived at the same concept as this post explores.

That is not the most common usage here. See Three Singularity Schools and the LW wiki page.

EDIT: The parent comment does not deserve to be at -4. This is a reasonable thing for an inexperienced commenter to say.

If that were true about the Singularity, then wouldn't it be correct to criticize the people who make predictions about it?

There is no "point beyond which predictions cannot be made". That is a SF fantasy.

Rain, I'm aware of human trafficking and other abuses, which is the reason I said "rather few" instead of "no". But compared to just a few hundred years ago slaves are as rare as hen's teeth.

The allegation that cryonics is pseudoscience reminds me of the allegations that Singularitarianism/Transhumanism are "atheist religion", "the rapture for nerds", etc. That confusion, I think, comes when people see the questions we're investigating — "Could we live forever?", "Could we end suffering?", etc. — and assume that we're answering the questions in a way similar to how religion does... or they don't even think to remember why they believe religion is bad, and they assume that it's the questions rather than the answers. Obviously, the problem with religion isn't the questions it asks, nor their motives for asking those questions; the problem is the way religion acquires answers to those questions. The same applies to seeking eternal life. Eternal life as a goal isn't wishful thinking; it's wishful thinking when people mistakenly believe that the goal is easy or has already been reached ("you can live forever if you believe in Jesus", etc.). Yet it's not surprising that many perfectly intelligent people buy into these memes. They are used to hearing completely bullshit answers to these completely legitimate questions, so they get to the point where the questions themselves set off their bullshit alarms, even in the context of attempting to investigate them within a rigorous scientific/rational framework.

The "singularity == religion" and "cryonics == pseudoscience" memes are comparable to someone in the early 1960s comparing the Apollo program to the story of the Tower of Babel, and then dismissing the program on that basis as a technically infeasible religious fantasy.

"first, do no harm"

It's remarkable that medical traditions predating transplants* already contain an injunction against butchering passers by for spare parts

*I thought this was part of the Hippocratic oath but apparently it's not

People usually seem so intent on thinking up reasons why it might not be so great, that I'm having a really hard time getting a read on what folks think of the core premise.

My life/corner of the world is what I think most people would call very good, but I'd pick the Matrix in a heartbeat. But note that I am taking the Matrix at face value, rather than wondering whether it's a trick of advertising. I can't even begin to imagine myself objecting to a happy, low-stress Matrix.