Some counterpoints:
Behavioural modernity without common cause like language, and without any definite characteristics that wer
Well, we know pretty well that even when societies were in very close contact, they rarely adopted each other's technology if it wasn't already similar to what they've been doing.
Agriculture probably initially expanded because farmers pressed north through the continent, not because hunter-gatherers adopted the practice on their own, Scandinavian scientists say.
If in this close contact scenario agriculture didn't spread, it's a huge stretch to expect very low level contact to make it happen.
All theories of emergence of agriculture I'm aware of pretend it happened just once, which is totally wrong.
Is these any even vaguely plausible theory explaining how different populations, in very different climates, with pretty much no contact with each other, didn't develop anything like agriculture for very long time, and then in happened multiple times nearly simultaneously?
Any explanation involving "selection effects" is wrong, since these populations were not in any kind of significant genetic contact with each other for a very long time before that happened (and such explanations for culture are pretty much always wrong as a rule - it's second coming of "scientific racism").
How does that reinforce Robin's model? It goes against it if anything. Imagine if humans, dolphins, bats, bears, and penguins nearly simultaneously developed language on separate continents. It would be a major unexplained WTF.
You can start here, but Wikipedia has pretty bad coverage of that.
Agriculture developed very far from regions most affected by glaciation, and in very diverse climates, so any climatic common cause is pretty dubious.
It seems rather easy to mess with the inputs T. Weather conditions or continental drifts could confine pre-agricultural humans to hunting essentially indefinitely
This is sort of amazing, but after a couple million years of hunting and gathering humans developed agriculture independently within a few thousand years in multiple locations (the count is at least 7, possibly more).
This really doesn't have a good explanation, it's too ridiculous to be a coincidence, and there's nothing remotely like a plausible common cause.
There's a very plausible common cause. Humans likely developed the traits that allowed them to easily invent agriculture during the last glacial period. The glacial period ended 10 000 years ago, so that's when the climate became amenable to agriculture.
But in a field like AI prediction, where experts lack feed back for their pronouncements, we should expect them to perform poorly, and for biases to dominate their thinking.
And that's pretty much the key sentence.
There is little difference between experts and non-experts.
Except there's no such thing as AGI expert.
This is far more sensible judgement of Kurzweil's prediction than OP's.
Your judgment on all of these is ridiculously positive. Just about everything you claim as true or partly true seems to be mostly false to totally false to me.
... and then it becomes incomputable in both theory perfectly (even given unbounded resources) and in practice via any kind of realistic approximation.
It's a dead end. The only interesting thing about it is realizing why precisely it is a dead end.
Bushmen lived in contact with pastoralist and then agricultural societies nearby for millennia. The idea that they represent some kind of pre-contact human nature is baseless.
"Industrialized" or not isn't relevant.
People make all kinds of stuff about how humans supposedly lived in "natural state" with absolute certainty, and we know just about nothing abut it, other than some extremely dubious extrapolations.
A fairly safe extrapolation is that human were always able to live in very diverse environments, so even if we somehow find one unpolluted sample somehow (by time travel most likely...), it will give us zero knowledge of "typical" Paleolithic humans.
The label has also been used on countless modern and fairly recent historical societies which ...
Dear everyone, please stop talking about "hunter gatherers". We have precisely zero samples of any real Paleolithic societies unaffected by extensive contact with Neolithic cultures.
It's not at all obvious if they really believed it. People say stuff they don't believe all the time.
I probably have very different sense what's moral and what isn't from the author (who claims to be American liberal), but I agree with pretty much everything the author says about meta-morality.
That's a difficult question to answer since amount of Internet use correlated with age, wealth, education level, location, language used, employment status, and a lot of things which might have very big impact on people's happiness.
I could give the cached answer that "if it didn't make them happier they wouldn't be using Internet", but there are obvious problems with this line of reasoning.
I actually know various chans quite well, and they all pretend to be those totally ridiculous everything goes places, but when you actually look at them >90% of threads are perfectly reasonable discussions of perfectly ordinary subjects. Especially outside /b/. This generated far more interest on 4chan than all gore threads put together.
Total number of hours per lifetime people in every literally utopia ever printed spend watching videos of kittens doing cute things: 0.
Total number of hours per lifetime people in any real utopia would want to spend watching videos of kittens doing cute things: 100s or more.
Anecdotal evidence: Have you seen internet?
More seriously, Internet shows a lot about what people truly like, since there's so much choice, and it's not constrained by issues like practicality and prices. Notice total lack of interest in realistic violence and gore and anything more tha...
More seriously, Internet shows a lot about what people truly like, since there's so much choice, and it's not constrained by issues like practicality and prices. Notice total lack of interest in realistic violence and gore and anything more than one standard deviation outside of sexual norms of the society, and none of these due to lack of availability.
Eh? Total lack of interest? Have you ever been on 4chan? Realistic violence threads crop up regularly over there, and it's notorious for catering to almost any kind of sexual deviance the average person c...
Both this post and the one linked seem to be both about fictional utopias for literature, and actual optimal future utopias. These are completely unrelated issues the same way good fictional international conflict resolution is WW3, and good real world international conflict resolution is months of WTO negotiations over details of some boring legal document between 120+ countries.
Well, then I'm puzzled why you didn't reply to these misguided assertions.
Sadly there are many blind spots here where groupthink rules, and people will just happily downvote anybody who has a different opinion. They are not worth replying to. I see the downvote brigade found this thread as well.
Well, then I'm puzzled why you didn't reply to these misguided assertions.
In any case, the paper you cite may well be correct point-by-point, but on the whole, it's a lawyerly argument that tries to overwhelm and misguide the readers by amassing a pile of hand-picked one-way evidence that will dazzle them and make them lose sight of the overall balance of evidence. As I wrote in that earlier comment thread in response to similar points:
...As for heritability studies, you are certainly right that there is a lot of shoddy work, and by necessity they make a w
You're too lazy, no shortcuts this time.
Caplan's claim doesn't depend on this line of argumentation, but if it was true (which it's not) it would make his point extremely strongly. Weaker claim that normal parenting styles don't affect outcomes much, because the rest of environment (and genes) together have much greater impact is perfectly defensible.
As we know from natural experiment of Dutch famine of 1944 mother's health is extremely important. This brief event had significant effects on two generations.
Caplan's arguments are totally wrong, it doesn't make his thesis wrong. I'd expect his thesis to be very likely to be at least mostly correct.
The way I see it all heredity studies (adoption, twins etc.) are pretty much universally worthless due to ridiculously wrong methodology (see this for details).
It is trivially observable that populations change drastically in every conceivable way without any genetic change, including along every single behavioral axis claimed to be "highly hereditary" (and the same even applies to many physical features like height, but not others like skin or eye color). Heredity studies are entirely incompatible with this macro reality, regardless of their (un...
Caplan is drastically overinterpretting evidence for heredity of features, and his main thesis relies on them far too much.
Solar panel prices are on long term downward trend, but in the short term they were very far from smooth over the last few years, having very rapid increases and decreases as demand and production capacity mismatched both ways.
This issue isn't specific to solar panels, all commodities from oil to metals to food to RAM chips had massive price swings over the last few years.
There's no long term problem since we can make solar panels from just about anything - materials like silicon are available in essentially infinite quantities (manufacturing capacity is the issue, not raw materials), and for thin film you need small amounts of materials.
I actually have some sympathy for your position that Prisoner's Dilemma is useful to study, but Newcomb's Paradox isn't. The way I would put it is, as the problems we study increase in abstraction from real world problems, there's the benefit of isolating particular difficulties and insights, and making it easier to make theoretical progress, but also the danger that the problems we pay attention to are no longer relevant to the actual problems we face. (See another recent comment of mine making a similar point.)
Given that we have little more than intuiti...
Prisoner's Dilemma relies on causality, Newcomb's Paradox is anti-causality.
The contents of Newcomb's boxes are caused by the kind of agent you are -- which are (effectively by definition of what 'kind of agent' means) mapped directly to what decision you will take.
Newcomb's paradox can only be called anti-causality only in some confused anti-compatibilist sense in which determinism is opposed to free will and therefore "the kind of agent you are" must be opposed to "the decisions you make" -- instead of absolutely correlating to them.
In what way is Newcomb's Problem "anti-causality"?
If you don't like the superpowerful predictor, it works for human agents as well. Imagine you need to buy something but don't have cash on you, so you tell the shopkeeper you'll pay him tomorrow. If he thinks you're telling the truth, he'll give you the item now and let you come back tomorrow. If not, you lose a day's worth of use, and so some utility.
So your best bet (if you're selfish) is to tell him you'll pay tomorrow, take the item, and never come back. But what if you're a bad liar? Then you...
Philosophy contains some useful parts, but it also contains massive amounts of bullshit. Starting let's say here.
Decision theory is studied very seriously by mathematicians and others, and they don't care at all for Newcomb's Paradox.
Not counting philosophers, where's this academic interest in Newcomb's paradox?
Why are we not counting philosophers? Isn't that like saying, "Not counting physicists, where's this supposed interest in gravity?"
Err, this would also predict no academic interest in Newcomb's Problem, and that isn't so.
The diagram comes from Wikipedia (tineye says this) but it seems they recently started merging and reshuffling content in all energy-related articles, so I can no longer find it there.
That's total energy available of course, not any 5 year projection.
Wikipedia didn't get hundreds of millions of visitors until after it got so big.
I know it's hard to believe, but when we started in 2001, it was a very tiny very obscure website people were commonly making fun of, and we were excited with any coverage we could get (and getting omg slashdotted - that was like news of the month).
No, humans living in very poor countries or in remote past also always tried to have at least basic understanding of neighbouring tribe's language. It's hard to come with hard data but modern nation states might probably be about the only large monolingual societies in history, other than small and very isolated places.
In modern Africa it's entirely normal for people to speak 3+ languages. (not necessarily to a very high standard, just to get by)
Evidence that this works better than other methods being...
Seriously, with such a huge number of people trying to learn a second language (like 90% of all humans) we should have some proper studies by now.
Can you pretty, pretty please tell me where this graph gets its information from? I've seen similar graphs that basically permute the cubes' labels. It would also be wonderful to unpack what they mean by "solar" since the raw amount of sunlight power hitting the Earth's surface is a very different amount than the energy we can actually harness as an engineering feat over the next, say, five years (due to materials needed to build solar panels, efficiency of solar panels, etc.).
And just to reiterate, I'm really not arguing here. I'm honestly confu...
Strong orthogonality hypothesis is definitely wrong - not being openly hostile to most other agents has enormous instrumental advantage. That's what's holding modern human societies together - agents like humans, corporations, states etc. - have mostly managed to keep their hostility low. Those that are particularly belligerent (and historical median has been far more belligerent towards strangers than all but the most extreme cases today) don't do well by instrumental standards at all.
Of course you can make a complicated argument why it doesn't matter (so...
Everything you say is ahistorical nonsense, transatlantic trade on a massive was happening back in 19th century, so wood import from the New World (or Scandinavia, or any other place) could have easily happened. Energy density of charcoal and of coal are very similar, so one could just as easily be imported as the other.
Or industries could have been located closer to major sources of wood, the same way they were located closer to major sources of coal. This was entirely possible.
The disease killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans per year during the closing years of the 18th century
So? 400,000 people a year is what % of total mortality?
As recently as 1967, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 15 million people contracted the disease and that two million died in that year.
In an important way diseases don't kill people, poverty, hunger, and lack of sanitation kills people. The deaths were almost all happening in the poorest, and the most abused parts of the world - India and Africa.
Wood ran out because forests weren't properly managed, not because photosynthesis is somehow insufficiently fast at growing forest - and in any case there are countless agricultural alternative energy sources like ethanol from sugar cane.
In 1990 3.5 billion m^3 of wood were harvested. With density of about 0.9kg/cubic meter, and energy of about 15 MJ/kg, that's about 47 trillion MJ (if we burned it all, which we're not going to).
All coal produced in 1905 was about 0.9 billion tons, or about 20 trillion MJ.
Which part of "Europe" are you talking about? Western peripheries of Roman Empire got somewhat backwards, and that was after massive demographic collapse of late Antiquity, the rest of Europe didn't really change all that drastically, or even progressed quite a lot.
This argument is only convincing to people who never bothered to look at timeline of historical events in technology. No country had any significant amount of coal mining before let's say UK in 1790-ish and forwards, and even there it was primarily to replace wood and charcoal.
Technologies we managed to build by then were absolutely amazing. Until 1870 the majority of locomotives in the USA operated on wood, canal transport was as important as railroads and was even less dependent on dense fuels, so transportation was perfectly fine.
That reasoning is just extremely unconvincing, essentially 100% wrong and backwards.
Renewable energy available annually is many orders of magnitude greater than all fossil fuels we're using, and it has been used as primary source of energy for almost the entire history up to industrial revolution. Biomass for everything, animal muscle power, wind and gravity for water transport, charcoal for melting etc. were used successfully at massive scale before anybody even thought of oil or gas or made much use of coal.
Other than energy, most other resources - like...
The thing is countries would not really be poorer. Properly treated HIV isn't much worse than smoking (I mean the part before lung cancer) or diabetes for most of people's lives. Countries differ a lot on these already, without any apparent drastic differences in economic outcomes.
By the time people are already very old they might live a few years less, but they're not really terribly productive at that point anyway.
That's already old data by standards of modern progress of medicine, and groups that tend to get HIV are highly non-random and are typically engaged in other risky activities like unprotected promiscuous sex and intravenous drug use, and are poorer and blacker than average, so their baseline life expectancy is already much lower than population average.
Smallpox wasn't that bad if you look at statistics, and spanish flu happened at a time when humans have been murdering each other at unprecedented rate and normal society was either suspended or collapsed altogether everywhere.
Usually the chance of getting infected is inversely correlated with severity of symptoms (by laws of epidemiology), and nastiness is inversely correlated with broad range (by laws of biology), so you have diseases that are really extreme by any one criterion, but they tend to be really weak by some other criterion.
And in any case we're getting amazingly better at this.
There's no particular reason to believe this is going to make global thermonuclear war any less likely. Russia and United States aren't particularly likely to start a global thermonuclear warfare anytime soon, and in longer perspective any major developed country, if it wanted, could build nuclear arsenals sufficient to make a continent uninhabitable within a few years.
There's also this argument that mutually assured destruction was somehow stabilizing and preventing nuclear warfare - the only use of nuclear weapons so far happened when the other side had ...
Your argument depends on choosing what's "central" or "archetypal" example, and that's completely arbitrary, since this doesn't seem to mean "most common" or anything else objective.
It really falls apart on that.