[ExI] Inevitability of the Singularity (was Re: To Max, re Natasha and Extropy (Kevin Haskell)

[Kelly Anderson]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 10:34 AM, Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl> wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Jul 2011, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 8:45 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> [...]
>>
>> > I have serious issues with people dismissing some potential
>> > two billion loss to starvation and war as no big deal.
>>
>> It isn't so much that it is a small thing, it's just the sort of thing
>> we have solved on a regular basis for many years in the face of many
>> threats. How much did we spend in WWII to solve the Hitler problem? A
>> lot. We had a big problem and we solved it.
>
> This is not the best example, really. Actually it is a half-example, at
> best. US spent a lot on WW2 and I don't deny it. On the other hand, US
> gained much more than they spent.

I know families of dead soldiers and veterans who have suffered years
of PTSD who would likely disagree with that statement, even though
from a purely economic viewpoint, you make an interesting argument.
The post WWII rise in the power of America probably also came from the
fact that our industrial capacity wasn't blown to hell... just a
thought.

> Literally tons of German know-how (and
> some from other countries) had been transported to US, as well as
> thousands of scientists, engineers and other specialists (Operation
> Paperclip).

Indeed, this did mitigate the cost somewhat. I understand that there
are European nations that still owe the US money that we "loaned" them
to fight WWII... at least that's what my high school history teacher
drummed into my head. Of course, if the US defaults on its loans now,
it will make that look like a minor accounting incident.

> Next, impending phantom of Soviet invasion asked for US
> military assistance in Western Europe - this was very good for Western
> Europe and even better for US, IMHO. Last but not least, a great number of
> folks running away from Hitler (and later, even years after the war, from
> living in communism, however good this could have been), mostly educated
> (we've got education thing right in this part of the world, event thou it
> undergoes a lot of downprovement recently). They all went mostly to US
> (including maybe half of my fellow students during first half of the
> 90-ties - all with technical masters degrees).

Gee, you don't think some of those people were attracted by the
freedom and opportunity offered in the United States at the time? This
is a very interesting spin...

Perhaps communism could be good, if it were real communism, and not
dictatorship dressed up. There have been, here and there, small
examples of communist type communities that worked. The Mormons, for
example, early on had a thing called the "United Order", where all
property was held in common by a group of people. It failed utterly
every place it was tried except one, Orderville, UT.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orderville,_Ut

So this is evidence that people who are all poor, who are a small
group, who are desperate, who have strong common belief systems, can
live something like communism successfully. I would assume some of the
Israeli kibitz communities worked too. The Wikipedia article doesn't
mention that disassembling the united order in Orderville just about
tore the community into bits. It was real ugly disassembling things at
the end of the experiment from what locals have told me.

If I can steal an idea of Alistair Cockburn (a local programming guru,
one of the signers of the original Agile Manifesto), any form of
teamwork (waterfall, agile, whatever in programming) will work well
with a good enough team. And nearly any organizational patterns will
fail with a bad enough team. So the fact that communism or pure
democracy or Waterfall style programming was made to work in small
instances is not good evidence that it's a good approach on a larger
scale with more potential bad actors and complicating side effects.

> Now, to make it all clear - I don't blame US for being US. However I think
> there is nasty tendency to constantly rewrite and reinterpret history
> along ideallistic-idyllic lines. I mean, do whatever you do, just make an
> effort and stick to the facts (this can be also called honesty - but
> of course I don't accuse you [Kelly] of not being honest). On the other
> hand, if US folk en masse chooses living in their own dream about the
> world, well, not quite my problem.

I understand very clearly that the winners write the history that is
read by most. So there MUST be a kernel of truth in what you are
saying here. What I would like you to reflect upon though is just HOW
the US BECAME the winner in this case... I would submit that it was
through application of the tenants of freedom. I could be wrong about
that, but I honestly don't think so.

> Overally, what US gained during WW2 has kept them running for at least
> fifty years. Just my holy opinion.

The rise of the US in world power started right around 1898 with the
Spanish American war and big industrial projects like the Panama
Canal. We avoided most of the damage from WWI and WWII (other than a
RELATIVELY small loss of life when compared to our allies), and had
our production capacity increased at the expense of Europe. I don't
think there is a counterargument to this point.

Now, I also believe that Europe is not doing itself any favors in its
rush to socialism over the past few decades, but this is another force
entirely. The work laws in France, for example, are a joke. The tax
rates in much of Europe are catastrophically high.

>> If global warming becomes
>> as big an issue as Hitler's Germany, we will then apply the resources
>> necessary to overcome the problem. By then, however, it may be very
>> late to do anything useful. However, we'll have a lot more
>> intellectual resources to attack the problem than we do now.
>
> I'm too afraid of betting on future history, but I can bet they will make
> a number of Oscar winning films after that (with blood and shit
> censored, so as to not scare away families from the cinemas, or whatever
> they will call those places then).

At least you can envision a future with cinemas... :-)

>> > Extremely unlikely stability. We're up to our ears in alligators for the
>> > foreseeable future.
>>
>> We have enjoyed unusual climatic stability in the last 10,000 years.
>> It is unreasonable to assume that would continue forever in any
>> case...
>>
>> In Risk assessment, you address the risks in order of ((threat
>> potential damage * threat probability) / cost to address). Global
>> warming doesn't come close to the top 20 global risks when you apply
>> this formula. For example, the threat of dirty water is a daily
>> reality in the lives of about a billion people. The cost to fix that
>> problem is approximately 20 billion dollars, world wide. The
>> probability of the problem is 1. So this is a threat we should address
>> immediately, aggressively. Likewise, malaria. See the activities of
>> the the Gates foundation.
>
> Yes, let's hope they do something positive. Even if at the same time they
> evade taxes (don't know if they do), if this ends malaria I can accept it.

If you had your choice between eradicating malaria AND eradicating
polio AND giving fresh water to every man woman and child on earth AND
giving a laptop to every urchin all over the world, OR reducing the
global temperature by 0.002 degrees (an estimate I pulled out of my
ass, but it is some number along those lines) for the same amount of
money... Which would you choose?

-Kelly