posted on July 26, 2021 02:11 PM by
u/MetisPresent
65
u/solastsummer48 pointsat 1627322383.000000
You, foolish: we should stop smoking.
Me, wise beyond measure: We need to keep smoking cigarettes because
cigarettes make us wealthy and if we’re wealthy enough we can afford
good cancer treatments.
Has he never heard the “ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”
saying?
We need to enrich the tobacco companies so they can fund a cure. Maybe you would have figured that out if you weren't busy strawmanning rationalists /s
This feels a bit like Deepak Chopra, or Scott Adams in those days
before it was obvious that he was a nutbar. It’s that “the
universe has a purpose, and that purpose is to make me rich” fusion of
New Age self-affirmation with unabashed greed. You’ve got “the Earth”,
quasi-personified into a unified being, and thirst for dollars. The Gaia
Hypothesis meets the Efficient Market.
/me sitting on mountains of gold. Ha, this will protect me from
asteroid strikes and other unknown problems. (This is the old ‘thinking
like a state’ problem all over again (e: the focus on something which
can be measured but isnt the actual important part bit)).
Jokes aside, who is this guy? how does he fit into the Rationalist
sphere?
> how does he fit into the Rationalist sphere?
I think they are like a parallel to the rationalists.
Deutsch is their Yudkowsky and ToK Teacher is the main disciple of the cult of Deutsch.
Prior to the cult of Deutsch, this strain of "rationalists" known as the "critical rationalists" have followed Popper in a similar delusional way as you'd find any Less Wrong disciple.
Anyway, their behavior is nearly indistinguishable from the LW rationalist, except worse.
They disdain expertise. They think that unless you agree with their main guy then you're just being irrational in some fundamental way, the tenants are very similar including the certainty that the many-worlds interpretation is the only possible one. They end up flirting with fascists, racists, and neo-reactionaries in much the same way.
Their main departure is that just as the LW's are convinced AI will bring about our doom, the Deutschians are equally convinced in the opposite direction. In fact, they have absolutely no care about any existential threats, and some of them are straight-up climate change deniers. Their rationale is just the usual raving libertarian type, "the markets will solve everything." Except they couch it in terms of "Popperian epistemology." So that's how you get to the solution to climate change (if they even admit there's a problem in the first place) is to pollute faster and faster.
The business [western] culture of money informs us why.
Those very sharp American capitalists upon noticing that 32 countries
banned paraquat, tripled its use here in the US [2011-2017] so the US
gets the 10s of 1,000s of new cases of Parkinson’s disease. Isn’t that
precious ?
How unfortunate then that capitalism is predicated upon the existence of a large, permanent underclass, to the extent that it cannot exist without one.
I'm not sure which hypothesis you're referring to, but there is no population problem on this planet. There are more than enough resources for everyone to live comfortably. The problem is the distribution.
> I'm not sure which hypothesis you're referring to, but there is no population problem on this planet. There are more than enough resources for everyone to live comfortably. The problem is the distribution.
Of course, and this all has absolutely no consequences for all of the other living things on this planet.
Like, I get the point you're making, and I'm sure whoever was making those deleted comments doesn't care about the rest of the biosphere (except where it personally inconveniences him), but I really do hate how that line kind of handwaves environmental problems.
That line doesn't handwave anything, it dismisses certain categories of "solution" on moral grounds.
You know, the thing we're supposed to be afraid that superintelligent AI's wont be able to do.
How is pretending there is no problem the same as dismissing one type of solution?
The west is going to have to take a *drastic* cut in standards of living in order to keep sustainably existing, covering your ears and loudly yelling "population isnt an issue we have more than enough resources" is absolutely handwaving that
>How is pretending there is no problem the same as dismissing one type of solution?
My point exactly.
Dismissing euthenasia doesn't mean we can't treat a broken back, we have plenty of other options on the table.
Not for any definition of "comfortably" that a westerner could fathom
Which is like, fine, but at least acknowledge that much instead of pretending we could keep anything remotely resembling our current lifestyle
I've heard a lot of people say this, as if it was a fact. I've never seen anyone even try to prove it. And I don't believe it for one second. No one who's seen graphs of global wealth inequality would believe it either.
Now, if you're talking about modern suburbs filled with massive mcmansions, then you might have a leg to stand on. But first off, that kind of community is already unsustainable -- both environmentally and economically; towns have been going broke due to that style of planning for decades now. And secondly, most people wouldn't want that kind of lifestyle anyways. It's alienating and dysfunctional. North America seems to be the only place on earth that hasn't figured that out yet.
There's no reason on earth why every single person now living can't have a good, comfortable, clean, happy, "first world" lifestyle in high-density walkable neighbourhoods. It would be easy to make this happen if wealth and resources weren't being hoarded.
Not just resources being hoarded, but our stage of capitalism is very inefficient in some ways, it loves to destroy items which seems to be not directly sold on the market (food, clothing, [televisions](https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-21/amazon-destroying-millions-of-items-of-unsold-stock-in-one-of-its-uk-warehouses-every-year-itv-news-investigation-finds)) instead of giving those away. It is all such a waste.
The reason is that the lifestyle you talk about has been enabled by the use of fossil fuels for the tiny span of the past ~100 years, and at no other point in human history. Fossil fuels will no longer be used at scale within another short span of time.
Yes, but that's only half of it. People being cloistered away in fortresses set far back from the street in areas with no businesses, no town square, nowhere to go on foot, having to drive every single place they go, leads to a total breakdown of community -- which is exactly what we've been seeing. Which is every bit as unsustainable as the fossil fuel situation.
Maybe? I don't really care. If the problem is distribution (and it is), then the solution is redistribution.
The idea that removing people from the population would increase the wealth of the remaining population is so repellent to me that I will not address it. Hypothetically or otherwise.
> The idea that removing people from the population would increase the wealth of the remaining population is so repellent to me that I will not address it. Hypothetically or otherwise.
Now hold on partner, the Anthropocene Extinction Event has made a tiny fraction of humans fabulously rich, so that but on humans will totally work!
Except we (as in humanity) already have enough wealth that if we distributed it more equitably the most vulnerable and underprivileged would be vastly better off. And the major wealth “generators” (although in actuality they are the capital owners and the social and legal structure of society allows them to leverage that capital to profit off labor) are also the biggest polluters. So he doesn’t actually have a point.
The poorer countries have worse air because the richer ones outsource cheaper and more polluting production along to them, in addition to extracting natural resources (and thus further damaging the environment) from them, because the global economy serves the interest of the capital-owning class. Anti capitalism is a necessary component to improving sustainability.
We do this with coal, coal usages in the west is pretty clean, because we filter out the coal we dig up in good and bad quality and ship the bad shit out of the west and the good shit in.
"Got rid of"? "Nullified"? jesus I'm glad you're not necessarily advising this but I would be much more glad if you stayed away from ecofascism altogether. It's not "food for thought", it's monstrous.
I thought he was saying if we focus on money money money and polluting some technical advance akin to the singularity or a Star Trek RPG will happen and we know Star Trek can solve any problem with a tricorder and replicator, so why worry?
People probably aren’t aware of his definition of wealth. It’s not
dollars in a Swiss bank account, it’s more like the sum of our
productive and technological capacity. Anyone who thinks we’re going to
“reduce reuse recycle” our way out of climate change is detached. Our
only hope is technological innovation and the economic power to deploy
clean tech. See “The Beginning of Infinity” for more info.
> People probably aren’t aware of his definition of wealth
That is a smart redefinition. (I hope you are aware of my definition of smart).
> Anyone who thinks we’re going to “reduce reuse recycle” our way out of climate change is detached.
Well good that environmentalists don't think you can then. Recycling is for something else. (The reduce part is true of course, if we reduced our co2 exhaust to zero right now, we would stay at the current(ish) level of climate change (modulo runaway systems), so in the 80s the reduce co2 people were right).
Yes if we reduced our CO2 exhaust to 0, we would stop climate change, as well as all of civilization and kill billions. Please look at this chart and tell me how likely cutting our consumption at all, much less to 0, seems.
Only path forward is to increase energy consumption while increasing clean energy sources to near 100%.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
If we reduce our co2 exhaust we would kill billions so our way forward is to reduce our co2 exhaust to zero by going clean energy, what are you on about?
You are doing a very weird thing where you assume im reducing co2 by killing everybody and you are reducing co2 by accelerationism. Both are bullshit assumptions.
Nice chart.
Ok if we agree CO2 reduction must be through clean technology and that cutting global energy consumption is hopeless (and undesirable) then there is no disagreement. Cheers.
That isn't what I said, and that isn't what you said.
I don't think cutting consumption is undesirable (and I do think increasing the consumption is), nor do I think there is one single fix.
This is a very old and very tired argument that attacks essentially none of the relevant issues in any of the actual scholarship, which is par for the course in people who purport some economic knowledge without any training: it’s a bloggers argument
David Deutsch is a crank, he wrote a few popular books that took the traditional line of going further and further with a few half-decent philosophical ideas to the point that he was well out of his wheelhouse
Frankly, it’s insulting that you drop that citation as if it’s a great revelation because that book was a bestseller of which many people will *already be aware*
How much of a crank Deutsch is, is difficult to assess.
On the one hand, he was the father of Quantum Computation and proved the Church-Turing thesis. On the other hand, he thinks animals are unconscious robots.
Very cranky when he talks about philosophy, psychology, sociology, and history.
I am perfectly willing to accede to his expertise in physics and quantum computation, but his assessment of other fields is absolutely embarrassing. In particular, in *my* field of expertise, such as it is, his assessment of falsifiability in philosophy of science is lower than last year undergraduate
I don't doubt it.
For some reason, his fans are all convinced that he is a world-class philosopher that solved epistemology. All on his own, with some inspiration from Popper.
I first came across Deutsch when I went to war on /r/SamHarris (which was also my first time on reddit, I am since banned and I can’t be fucked to make an alt)
There were/are a few people on there who were in my time there very into Deutsch. I quickly came to the conclusion, as with many other topics in philosophy, that they really felt they had learned something and were deeply unwilling to let go of it; moreover they were encouraged in this willed semi-ignorance by the general culture there, which told them - or reinforced in them the belief - that anybody professing scholarly values of argument and counter-argument and expertise, was a charlatan.
This is ironic, because in spite of the fact that Deutsch himself is essentially a crank, he does adhere to those values and (somewhat) deservedly gets a few plaudits for it.
>they really felt they had learned something and were deeply unwilling to let go of it; moreover they were encouraged in this willed semi-ignorance by the general culture there, which told them - or reinforced in them the belief - that anybody professing scholarly values of argument and counter-argument and expertise, was a charlatan.
Ya. There's a bunch of them over at /r/philosophyofscience - repeating the same Deutsch talking points.
Deutsch fans are even more insufferable than Harris fans. Almost as insufferable as Rand fans.
Brett Hall considers Sam Harris "one of the best living philosophers" and Deutsch the greatest living philosopher and is a Rand fan. Dude checks all the boxes.
Deutsch, D., 1985, “Quantum Theory, the Church-Turing Principle and the Universal Quantum Computer”, Proceedings of the Royal Society (Series A), 400: 97–117.
That's his proof. Do you know of a rebuttal? I don't.
You, foolish: we should stop smoking.
Me, wise beyond measure: We need to keep smoking cigarettes because cigarettes make us wealthy and if we’re wealthy enough we can afford good cancer treatments.
Has he never heard the “ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” saying?
wat
This feels a bit like Deepak Chopra, or Scott Adams in those days before it was obvious that he was a nutbar. It’s that “the universe has a purpose, and that purpose is to make me rich” fusion of New Age self-affirmation with unabashed greed. You’ve got “the Earth”, quasi-personified into a unified being, and thirst for dollars. The Gaia Hypothesis meets the Efficient Market.
/me sitting on mountains of gold. Ha, this will protect me from asteroid strikes and other unknown problems. (This is the old ‘thinking like a state’ problem all over again (e: the focus on something which can be measured but isnt the actual important part bit)).
Jokes aside, who is this guy? how does he fit into the Rationalist sphere?
Libertarians these days sound more and more like fundamentalist Christians. They don’t even bother with arguments anymore.
The business [western] culture of money informs us why.
Those very sharp American capitalists upon noticing that 32 countries banned paraquat, tripled its use here in the US [2011-2017] so the US gets the 10s of 1,000s of new cases of Parkinson’s disease. Isn’t that precious ?
[deleted]
[deleted]
People probably aren’t aware of his definition of wealth. It’s not dollars in a Swiss bank account, it’s more like the sum of our productive and technological capacity. Anyone who thinks we’re going to “reduce reuse recycle” our way out of climate change is detached. Our only hope is technological innovation and the economic power to deploy clean tech. See “The Beginning of Infinity” for more info.
Bit of a late follow up post, but this current affairs article might relevant to the whole ‘tech will save us’ thing.
Contains a fun sneer about ‘theory induced blindness’