TitaniumDragon

Art is part of everything, so yes.

Photoshop allows artists to practice and produce works vastly more rapidly, correct errors quite easily, and otherwise do a ton of things they couldn't do before. Other such programs can do many of the same things.

More artists, plus better tools, plus faster production of art, plus better understanding of the technology of art, probably means that the best piece of art ever made was made in the last few decades.

Indeed, it is possible that more art will be produced in the first few decades of this century than were produced by all of humankind for the first several thousand years of our existence.

The real flaw here is that counting arguments is a poor way to make decisions.

"They don't have the ability to make said meteor strikes" is enough on its own to falsify the hypothesis unless you have evidence to the contrary.

As Einstein said about "100 Authors Against Einstein", if he was wrong, they would have only needed one.

It isn't a problem to judge things from different time periods; the Model-T might have been a decent car in 1910, but it is a lemon today.

New things are better than old things. I'd wager that the best EVERYTHING has been produced within the last few decades.

If you're judging "Which is better, X or Y," and X is much older than Y, it is very likely Y is better.

The idea of natural selection is remarkably awesome and has applications even outside of biology, which is part of what makes it such a great idea.

It isn't literally that for every single person, but assuming you don't have a mutation in your chronobiological genes it is pretty close to that.

People with mutations in various regulatory genes end up with significantly different sleep-wake cycles. The reason that our bodies reset ourselves under sunlight is probably to help correct for our clocks being "off" by a bit; indeed, it is probably very difficult to hit exactly 24 hours via evolution. But 24:11 plus correction lets it be off by a bit without causing a problem.

Good enough is probably b... (read more)

The more conflict avoidant the agents in an area, the more there is to gain from being an agent that seeks conflict.

This is only true if the conflict avoidance is innate and is not instead a form of reciprocal altruism.

Reciprocal altruism is an ESS where pure altruism is not because you cannot take advantage of it in this way; if you become belligerent, then everyone else turns on you and you lose. Thus, it is never to your advantage to become belligerent.

Opportunistic seizure of capital is to be expected in a war fought for any purpose.

The problem is that asymmetric warfare, which is the best way to win a war, is the worst way to acquire capital. Cruise missiles and drones are excellent for winning without any risk at all, but they're not good for actually keeping the capital you are trying to take intact.

Spying, subversion, and purchasing are far cheaper, safer, and more effective means of capturing capital than violence.

As far as "never" goes - the last time any two "Western" countries were at war was World War II, which was more or less when the "West" ca... (read more)

You are starting from the premise that gray goo scenarios are likely, and trying to rationalize your belief.

Yes, we can be clever and think of humans as green goo - the ultimate in green goo, really. That isn't what we're talking about and you know it - yes, intelligent life can spread out everywhere, that isn't what we're worried about. We're worried about unintelligent things wiping out intelligent things.

The great oxygenation event is not actually an example of a green goo type scenario, though it is an interesting thing to consider - I'm not sure if th... (read more)

That's a pretty weak argument due to the mediocrity principle and the sheer scale of the universe; while we certainly don't know the values for all parts of the Drake Equation, we have a pretty good idea, at this point, that Earth-like planets are probably pretty common, and given that abiogenesis occurred very rapidly on Earth, that is weak evidence that abiogenesis isn't hard in an absolute sense.

Most likely, the Great Filter lies somewhere in the latter half of the equation - complex, multicellular life, intelligent life, civilization, or the rapid dest... (read more)

After reading through all of the comments, I think I may have failed to address your central point here.

Your central point seems to be "a rational agent should take a risk that might result in universal destruction in exchange for increased utility".

The problem here is I'm not sure that this is even a meaningful argument to begin with. Obviously universal destruction is extremely bad, but the problem is that utility probably includes all life NOT being extinguished. Or, in other words, this isn't necessarily a meaningful calculation if we assume ... (read more)

Incidentally, regarding some other things in here:

[quote]They thought that just before World War I. But that's not my final rejection. Evolutionary arguments are a more powerful reason to believe that people will continue to have conflicts. Those that avoid conflict will be out-competed by those that do not.[/quote]

There's actually a pretty good counter-argument to this, namely the fact that capital is vastly easier to destroy than it is to create, and that, thusly, an area which avoids conflict has an enormous advantage over one that doesn't because it... (read more)

Everything else is way further down the totem pole.

People talk about the grey goo scenario, but I actually think that is quite silly because there is already grey goo all over the planet in the form of life. There are absolutely enormous amounts of bacteria and viruses and fungi and everything else all around us, and given the enormous advantage which would be conferred by being a grey goo from an evolutionary standpoint, we would expect the entire planet to have already been covered in the stuff - probably repeatedly. The fact that we see so much diversit... (read more)

I was directed here from FIMFiction.

Because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias we really can't know what the odds are of doing something that ends up wiping out all life on the planet; nothing we have tried thus far has even come close, or even really had the capability of doing so. Even global thermonuclear war, terrible as it would be, wouldn't end all life on Earth, and indeed probably wouldn't even manage to end human civilization (though it would be decidedly unpleasant and hundreds of millions of people would die).

Some people thought ... (read more)

While we are, in the end, meat machines, we are adaptive meat machines, and one of the major advantages of intelligence is the ability to adapt to your environment - which is to say, doing more than executing preexisting adaptations but being able to generate new ones on the fly.

So while adaptation-execution is important, the very fact that we are capable of resisting adaptation-execution means that we are more than adaptation-executors. Indeed, most higher animals are capable of learning, and many are capable of at least basic problem solving.

There is pre... (read more)

I will note that this is one of the fundamental failings of utilitarianism, the "mere addition" paradox. Basically, take a billion people who are miserable, and one million people who are very happy. If you "add up" the happiness of the billion people, they are "happier" on the whole than the million people; therefore, the billion are a better solution to use of natural resources.

The problem is that it always assumes some incorrect things:

1) It assumes all people are equal 2) It assumes that happiness is transitive 3) It assum... (read more)

I think you're wrong about an important point here, actually, which is that not all things are as exciting as other things. Not all things are equally exciting.

Riding a dragon is actually way cooler than hang gliding for any number of reasons. Riding animals is cool in and of itself, but riding a dragon is actually flying, rather than hang gliding, which is "falling with style". You get the benefits of hang-gliding - you can see the landscape, for instance - but you have something which natively can fly beneath you. You need to worry less about c... (read more)

By the way, a benchmark I've found useful in discussing factual matters or matters with a long pre-existing literature is number of citations and hyperlinks per comment. You're still batting a zero.

So that means your comment is worthless, and thus can be safely ignored, given your only "citations" do not support yourself in any way and is merely meant to insult me?

In any case, citations are mostly unimportant. I use google and find various articles to support my stances; you can do the same to support yours, but I don't go REF Fahy et. al. &qu... (read more)

I understood Dunning-Kruger quite well. Dunning-Kruger suggests that, barring outside influence, people will believe themselves to be of above-average ability. Incompetent people will greatly overestimate their capability and understanding, and the ability to judge talent in others was proportional to ability in the skill itself - in other words, people who are incompetent are not only incompetent, but also incapable of judging competence in other people.

Competent people, conversely, overestimate the competence of the incompetent; however, they do have the... (read more)