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This post is a link post that links to the TheWaywardAxolotl. I figured that more people would read the essay if the text was displayed directly on LessWrong, so I copied the text from the blog post and pasted it into the LessWrong post. The author has said that he doesn't mind people doing this as long as they include a link back to his blog. I'm sure I'm not the only one on this forum who shares content that I didn't write myself. It's pretty normal to do that on social media.
There's no way for anyone to know that you didn't write the essay unless they already know that your username isn't an alias of the writer.
My user profile has a link to zerocontradictions.net, which is clearly my website. That URL is shown when anybody hovers over my username on this site. This link post links to the TheWaywardAxolotl, which is clearly a different website. The username on that blog is also displayed as "Blithering Genius", not "Zero Contradictions". There is nothing on Blithering Genius's blog to suggest that I own it, so it's weird that Purple fire is jumping to the assumption that I wrote the essay.
making the normal assumption that the only person whose username is attached to the post is who "I" refers to.
Yes, that's how the essay appears on TheWaywardAxolotl, which is clearly not my blog. It's also how it appears on this LessWrong post, since I copied the text into the post. "I" and "we" are used throughout the essay, so it's not easy to edit out the first-person language. But since you insist, I edited the post to include a disclaimer at the top that I didn't write the essay and I'll do that in the future as well.
let alone that you don't endorse it
I agree with the essay, but I'm also open-minded, so I shared it to see what other people would say about it, because it's possible that some people have knowledge and thoughts that I hadn't thought about. I think that purple fire made some interesting criticisms which might be right, so I told him/her that he/she should post them on the author's blog if he/she wants the author to read them.
Purple fire accused me of having an arrogant tone and he/she is assuming that I'm the one who wrote the essay. Neither of those assumptions are true, and I was simply pointing that out.
There's nothing wrong with posting an essay to see what other people think about it. I never claimed to be an expert on economics.
you adopted such an arrogant tone
I didn't write this post. I'm just sharing it. If you want the author to read your comments, then you should post them on his blog.
Thanks for commenting. However, he also wrote in the same paragraph:
There are no written records of it, but I'm pretty sure that's what happened, or something like that.
He wrote "or something like that", so I think that allows some variation of two (main) groups fighting each other in a war. He gave his reasoning for why individuals would team into larger groups in the previous paragraph, but I will agree that it's mostly speculative how many warring groups there were. Regardless, I'm convinced that the island's environmental degradation and population collapse were both most likely caused by overpopulation.
This seems like a story that's unsupported by any evidence, and no better than fiction.
Not at all. It's just a description of the island's population over time, followed by a logical conclusion of what most likely happened when the ecosystem becomes overpopulated. Without sufficient famine, disease, or predation to cull the population back below the carrying capacity, and without new crops, technologies, or resources to satisfy the population, the inevitable outcome is conflict over resources. Which sentences are "unsupported" in your opinion?
The ecocide hypothesis is not a minority position either. There is criticism against it, but we also know that there's a strong and general humanist academic bias to oppose it in general.
It wouldn't really be "each against all", but "small (usually family) coalitions against some of the other small-ish coalitions".
I think this is pedantic, but I understand what you meant. Parents would compete against other parents to feed their starving children, and siblings may compete against their siblings to some extent and others for care and resources. Coalitions could form to attack other coalitions, but the possibility of defection or betrayal effectively turns the competition for survival into each against all.
He's referring to biological value, as it's defined in: "What is value?". Biological value is not the same as the type of value that you're thinking of. It's distinct from the other types of value. Biological value claims are truth claims, unlike other types of value claims. A claim about biological value, such as "cutting down the tree is bad for the tree" or "overdosing on fentanyl is bad for you" is a truth judgment, not a value judgment. I could want to cut down the tree, and still understand that it is bad for the tree to be cut down.
Not only weren't organisms created to reproduce.
Organisms are designed to reproduce. If organisms weren't designed to reproduce, then they won't reproduce, they will have no descendants, and organisms will stop existing altogether.
Organisms just do what they do. They exist because certain structures tend to reproduce themselves, and those structures can occur naturally.
Yes, exactly.
It's dangerous to do even that.
No, it isn't. It's impossible to describe biology without using normative language, since biology is intrinsically teleological. I don't understand why this is a stumbling block. We always use normative language when talking about biology. Normative language is often used descriptively, as in "this soil is good/optimal for pine trees". Or "smoking is bad for one's health and fertility". Disease is "dis"-"ease". Disorder is "dis"-"order". There is no way to talk about biology without using normative terms.
Evolution selects forms based on their effects. Thus, the effects explain the form. But it's not just the effects. Certain effects, which might not even be probable, explain the form. Those effects are the telos. The telos explains the form.
You have to be careful to remember that the word "purpose" there is a metaphor.
I really don't understand what your issue is. He said "biological purpose", not purpose in general. The author understands that biological purpose is not the same thing as subjective purpose. These two types of purpose are clearly different concepts, and I see no conceptual mess. There is no ambiguity here.
You misunderstand that paragraph. I'm friends with the author, and he doesn't believe in objective morality, nor does he believe that it's "morally correct" to reproduce. Replicating a genome implies reproduction (unless it's the genome is being artificially created through cloning), but reproduction doesn't necessarily imply replicating a genome. For example, if you reproduce with someone who has very different genetics (i.e. someone from a different race), then half of the offspring's genome would be quite different from your genome, compared to if you reproduced with someone from the same race as you.
He does believe that organism's biological purpose is to reproduce, but that doesn't mean that he believes that organisms should reproduce. It's up to the organism whether it reproduces or not. As he said at the beginning of the paragraph: "I do not believe there is a correct number of children to have". From that statement, it's implied that he doesn't think it's "incorrect" to have no children at all, so I don't understand why you concluded that he thinks that it's "morally correct" to reproduce.
"An organism's biological purpose is simply to reproduce" is a truth claim, not a value claim. The only value claim that he stated in that paragraph was "I do not believe there is a correct number of children to have".
1Could you please explain why "biological purpose" points to a conceptual mess?
Was there anything in particular that you specifically disagree with Van Allen on, either in my summary or the first (free) chapter of his book? I shared the link that you sent me with him on Discord, and he told me that he's seen it before. He also said that the link that you sent still doesn't specify the structure in enough detail, as far as he can see, and that it doesn't really matter.
Like, I noticed that O'Neill proposed: 1. retrieving the cylinder materials from the Moon and 2. setting up either a Rotary Pellet Launcher or a Transport Linear Accelerator for retrieving materials from the Moon to make the construction cheaper. I agree that he didn't address this possibility in the book, but I don't fully understand your criticism regarding the steel structure math.
You might be more knowledgeable on this topic than I am, so I'm also wondering if you know of any sources where O'Neill gave a more specific description of what he was thinking about? For example, I'm trying to figure out what O'Neill proposed for the thickness of the original cylinder hull. I can't find it on Wikipedia or in the link that you sent me, and I think this is a huge deal because the exact dimension of the hull thickness can greatly change the amount of materials that are required for building the cylinder.
If you think that "humans will be living on Mars and O'Neill cylinders 30 years from now", then you probably haven't tried to calculate whether that's actually economically feasible and whether it's practical to get to Mars and live there:
And that's only the cost to put an O'Neil Cylinder in Low-Earth Orbit. If we had to send an O'Neil Cylinder to Mars (or something that's comparable for sustaining human life), then the costs for space travel get exponentially worse than that due to the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation.
For more information, I recommend reading Futurist Fantasies by T. K. Van Allen. The book packs an impressive amount of information into just 100 pages.
It is true. You can't make more land. Humans still must obey the laws of physics, whether we like it or not. Both the Moon and Mars are absolutely horrible places for any human to live, so humanity has nothing to gain from trying to live outside the Earth.
Now, I already showed my calculations for why I believe it's far too expensive to try that. I didn't even go over all the physical challenges that would make it virtually impossible. My judgment is that space colonization won't be possible for several decades, possibly longer, and probably never. It will probably take many people and many LessWrongers a while to reach similar conclusions.
In the 1960s, people thought that Humanity would've achieved the technological advancements in 2001: A Space Odyssey two decades ago, and that still hasn't happen by now. People need to recognize that technological process has clearly slowed down, and we've nearly reached its limits.
Another misconception that's worth clarifying is that the value of land matters more than the supply of land. There's obvious reasons why lots in Manhattan are worth more than acres in the Sahara Desert.
No, that's a huge oversimplification, and it's much more complicated than that. Any society would have to wait at least a few decades to transition to Georgism, but then the benefits will become progressive and compounding. I recommend reading Georgism Crash Course for a concise introduction.
Because we live in reality, not a sci-fi fantasy world where humans are invincible.
Even if humans could live on Mars, why would anyone want to live on Mars when you can live on Earth instead? Even Antarctica is a thousand times better than Mars. I will never understand why people fantasize about colonizing Mars when humans haven't even colonized Antarctica.