Accelerating Future

Robin Hanson has a very provocative post up, “Galaxy Calc Shows Aliens”:

What makes a planet a good host for life? That is, what does a planet need for life to originate there and then evolve to something at the human level? Astronomers today say a planet at least needs a star that 1) lasts long enough, 2) has enough heavy elements, and 3) is not too often hit by nearby supernovae or gamma ray bursts. Using such criteria, several astronomers (mentioned below) have tried to calculate “galactic habitable zones,” i.e., galactic distributions of good-for-life planets, in both space and time. Such calculations are far more important than I had realized – they can help say how common are aliens! Let me explain.

Like many of Robin’s arguments, this one can take a bit of time to understand. Don’t come to any conclusions until you’ve read the entire post and thought about it for a few minutes.

I can say that this argument has caused me to update substantially in the direction that there may actually be aliens in this galaxy. For over a decade I’ve thought this possibility was extremely unlikely. Now I’m not so sure.

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Sorry, there is some superfluous footage from the prior talk and intro beforehand. The actual talk begins around 2:00.

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Would Terence be a Bayesian today? I’m curious about that.

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“…the Great Artisan mandated that this creature who would receive nothing proper to himself shall have joint possession of whatever nature had been given to any other creature. He made man a creature of indeterminate and indifferent nature, and, placing him in the middle of the world, said to him “Adam, we give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that is yours alone. According to your desires and judgment, you will have and possess whatever place to live, whatever form, and whatever functions you yourself choose. All other things have a limited and fixed nature prescribed and bounded by our laws. You, with no limit or no bound, may choose for yourself the limits and bounds of your nature. We have placed you at the world’s center so that you may survey everything else in the world. We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose. To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.”

— Oration on the Dignity of Man, Giovanni Pico (1486)

H/t PlusUltraTech

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You are a Receiver from jason silva on Vimeo.

From here.

Jason Silva will be speaking at Singularity Summit in October.

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Luke Muehlhauser, a contributor at Less Wrong and the Singularity Institute’s newest Visiting Fellow, is off to a strong start with his new metaethics sequence. Here are the first two posts:

Heading Toward: No-Nonsense Metaethics
What is Metaethics?

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In a recent post (December) I made on Anonymous, commenter “mightygoose” said:

i would agree with matt, having delved into various IRC channels and metaphorically walked among anonymous,i would say that they are fully aware that they have no head, no leadership, and while you can lambast their efforts as temporary nuisance, couldnt the same be said for any form of protest (UK students for example) and the effective running of government.

I responded:

They are dependent on tools and infrastructure provided by a small, elite group. If it weren’t for this infrastructure, 99% of them wouldn’t even have a clue about how to even launch a DDoS attack.

A week ago in the Financial Times:

However, a senior US member of Anonymous, using the online nickname Owen and evidently living in New York (Xetra: A0DKRK – news) , appears to be one of those targeted in recent legal investigations, according to online communications uncovered by a private security researcher.

A co-founder of Anonymous, who uses the nickname Q after the character in James Bond, has been seeking replacements for Owen and others who have had to curtail activities, said researcher Aaron Barr, head of security services firm HBGary Federal.

Mr Barr said Q and other key figures lived in California and that the hierarchy was fairly clear, with other senior members in the UK, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Australia.

Of a few hundred participants in operations, only about 30 are steadily active, with 10 people who “are the most senior and co-ordinate and manage most of the decisions”, Mr Barr told the Financial Times. That team works together in private internet relay chat sessions, through e-mail and in Facebook groups. Mr Barr said he had collected information on the core leaders, including many of their real names, and that they could be arrested if law enforcement had the same data.

Many other investigators have also been monitoring the public internet chats of Anonymous, and agree that a few seasoned veterans of the group appear to be steering much of its actions.

Yes… just like I already said in December. There may be many participants in Anonymous that would like to believe that they have no leadership, no head, but the fact is that any sustained and effective effort of any kind requires leadership.

It’s funny how some people like to portray Anonymous as some all-wise decentralized collective, but like I said, if /b/ were shut down, they would all scatter like a bunch of ants. Anonymous has the weakness that it isn’t unified by any coherent philosophy. This is not any kind of intellectual group. In contrast, groups like Transhumanism, Bayesianism, and Atheism are bound together by central figures, ideas, texts, and physical meetings.

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Talking to Phil, Stephen, and PJ on FastForward Radio last night, I made a point that I make often in person but I don’t think I’ve ever said on my blog.

The point is a reaction to accusations of doomsaying. People say, “you’re so negative, contemplating catastrophic scenarios and apocalypse!” My response is that rather than being indicative of me being pessimistic or depressed, it is actually evidence that I am a happy person. Because I have a high happiness set point, I am enabled to consider negative scenarios without suffering personal depression or momentary sadness. I am immune from the reactive flinching away that most people have when they consider nuclear war or robots destroying all humans. Well, not entirely immune, but certainly more immune than most, and acclimation is part of it.

Because of my high happiness set point, there are greater volumes of idea space that I can comfortably navigate. Try it. Can you consider nuclear war in an entirely objective way, thinking about scientific facts and evidence, rather than fixating on the emotional human impact? For me and some of my friends, nuclear war can be brought up at a casual conversation, without gloominess, simply because it’s interesting to work through the probabilities involved. We can be sad and humanistic/emotional about it too, but we have the option to be analytical as well. Others don’t have a choice. More choices is good in this situation.

People with an average or low happiness set-point are unfortunately handicapped. They can’t think about negative possibilities without feeling sad. Thus, that portion of the memetic state space is blocked off to them. Poor schmucks.

Ironically, their inability to rationally confront existential risks increases the probability that we will all experience a disaster. Unfortunate, because their actions will cause others to suffer.

A corollary of this effect is that when existential risks are brought up at all, it tends to be in a humorous context, because most people are too fragile to consider it in a non-humorous context.

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Here:

THINGS PEOPLE SAY

‘Do what your heart tells you’ means ‘stop making up excuses and do what my heart tells you’. ‘Clearly’ means ‘so unclearly I don’t want to explain it’. ‘We’ means different things to those with different political leanings, which helps them disagree.

Aphorisms tend to be cynical because only knowledge you don’t want to believe is short and easily verifiable enough to be an aphorism. People are more inclined to praise long, poorly written writing than short well written ones because it is easier for the former to cheat quality heuristics. Thinking is more fun than reading because it is more like ‘chasing’ than ‘searching‘. It’s interesting that reading isn’t better suited to chasing.

Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought is full of other interesting thoughts about language, a few of which I wrote about. I’m still curious about why we use poorly veiled language so much. Potential veiled meanings are abundant because it is hard to get rid of connotations.

There’s a lot to digest.

Long, poorly written writing… Ayn Rand?

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Michael Vassar at Singularity Summit 2010 — The Darwinian Method from Singularity Institute on Vimeo.

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See the summary here, download it at the little box towards the lower right. Title: “Anthropic Reasoning in the Great Filter”.

A major part of this effort is asking the questions, “what are different possible reference classes for anthropics/Doomsday Argument and what do they imply?”, and “can we agree on updating our probabilities for being close to the Great Filter (whatever is responsible for the Fermi Paradox) if we aren’t absolutely certain what reference class we’re in?”

Read this first.

My current position is that it’s extremely unlikely that life would develop to our stage because we live in a simple universe where even the evolution of consciousness is a miracle, but if it never happened, we’d never be around to observe it, so we happen to find ourselves in a universe where it did happen — but just barely. Because there are many more simple universes (without life) than those with it (assuming whatever process generates universes in the multiverse generates more simple universes than complex ones), we should assume to find ourselves in one of the most abundant universes (we’re typical, after all), we just happen to find ourselves in a universe that is common enough that it’s simple, but complex (and consciousness-biased) enough that at least one conscious species evolved in it.

Is the universe really as simple as all that? Max Tegmark has published a paper arguing that the universe may in fact contain close to zero information.

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I just ran into “liberal eugenics” on Wikipedia:

Liberal eugenics is an ideology which advocates the use of reproductive and genetic technologies where the choice of the goals of enhancing human characteristics and capacities is left to the individual preferences of consumers, rather than the ideological priorities of a government authority.

The term “liberal eugenics” does not necessarily indicate that its proponents are social liberals in the modern sense or that they are non-classist and non-racist. Rather, the term is used to refer to any ideology of eugenics which is inspired by an underlying liberal theory but also to differentiate it from the authoritarian or totalitarian eugenic programs of the first half of the 20th century, which were associated with coercive methods to decrease the frequency of certain human hereditary traits passed on to the next generation. The most controversial aspect of those programs was the use of “negative” eugenics laws which allowed government agencies to sterilize individuals alleged to have undesirable genes.

Historically, eugenics is often broken into the categories of positive (encouraging reproduction in the designated “fit”) and negative (discouraging reproduction in the designated “unfit”). Many positive eugenic programs were advocated and pursued during the early 20th century, but the negative programs were responsible for the compulsory sterilization of hundreds of thousands of persons in many countries, and were contained in much of the rhetoric of Nazi eugenic policies of racial hygiene and genocide.

Liberal eugenics is conceived to be mostly “positive”, relying more on reprogenetics than on selective breeding charts to achieve its aims. It seeks to both minimize congenital disorder and enhance capacity, traditional eugenic goals. It is intended to be under the control of the parents exercising their procreative liberty while guided by the principle of procreative beneficence, though the substantial governmental and corporate infrastructure required for reprogenetics may limit or steer their actual choices.

Because of its reliance on new reprogenetic technologies, liberal eugenics is often referred to as “new eugenics”, “neo-eugenics” or “techno-eugenics”. However, these terms may be misleading since current or future collectivist, authoritarian, and totalitarian eugenic programs do or could also rely on these new biotechnologies.

Eugenicist Major General Frederick Osborn laid the intellectual groundwork for liberal eugenics as early as the 1930s when he was the director of the Carnegie Institution for Science. Osborn argued that the public would never accept eugenics under militarized directives; rather, time must be allowed for “eugenic consciousness” to develop in the population. Accordingly, eugenic consciousness did not have to be aggressively and intentionally micro-manufactured; instead, it would develop as an emergent property as capitalist economy increased in complexity.

Osborn argued that all that was needed was to simply wait until a specific set of social structures (a consumer economy and the nuclear family) developed to a point of dominance within capitalist culture. Once these structures matured, people would act eugenically without a second thought. Eugenic activity, instead of being an immediately identifiable, repugnant activity, would become one of the invisible taken-for-granted activities of everyday life (much like getting a vaccination).

It seems like “liberal eugenics” is so much on its way to becoming an invisible taken-for-granted part of life that even giving it a specific name is unnecessary. “My right to have children without genetic disorders” is a name for the genetic screening we have today. Though some may disagree on the definition of a disorder, many disorders are unambiguous.

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