We Are Not Saved

The hygiene hypothesis holds that by missing out on the normal infections of youth leaves the immune system with nothing to do, and as a consequence later in life it over-reacts to normally benign things like peanuts. What if the same thing is happening psychologically? What if an absence of certain forms of trauma and stress when young lead people to overreact to things later in life which aren't particularly traumatic. In discussing this I bring in the writing of Brene Brown who points out that we're the most addicted, medicated, in debt, overweight adult cohort in history. Given how objectively untraumatic modern life is, why would that be?

I open by discussing, in great detail, a car accident my son was recently in. (Don't worry, he's okay.) I noticed that the story the other driver was telling had some inconsistencies. I'm suspicious because he has an incentive to lie, and from there I turn to a discussion of incentives more generally and bring in the recent hate crime hoax involving Jussie Smollett. And ask the more general question, are we focused too much on what people should do, and not enough what they might do, particularly if the incentive to do so is great enough.

There's been more and more attention paid to the size and power of tech giants, and whether that size and power means they should be treated as a monopoly and subject to anti-trust scrutiny. In this episode I combine that discussion with the recent efforts of a Gizmodo reporter to cut these tech giants (Specifically Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google and Microsoft) out of her life. She claimed it was "impossible" to cut out Amazon. Does this revelation strengthen the case of those who claim Amazon is a monopoly. One would think it would but how many people truly realize how ubiquitous Amazon and the rest truly are?

The challenges we face today are vastly different than challenges we faced historically. Accordingly the tools we have built to deal with historical challenges may not be up to dealing with more modern ones. And of course this all assumes that the tools are in good repair and still working the way they should, but anyone looking at the present scene might be forced to conclude that they are not. That political conventions and compromise are things of the past, perhaps right at the point where we need them the most.

I've gone a long time since I started this podcast and it may be difficult to know where to start at this point so I decided to take a break to reground things. If you've been listening for a long time most of this will be familiar to you, but if somehow you just stumbled on things, this is a great place to start.

Technology allows us to optimize around very narrow criteria. If we turn that optimization ability towards changing society. We can end up emphasizing one potential future, based around a narrow set of values over other potential futures with other values. Conceivably abandoning many long standing values regardless of how useful they are. This is analogous to the transit systems of many large cities, in particular the Bay Area, where all the lines stay together for awhile and it doesn't matter what value you emphasize, but introduce technology and suddenly optimizing one value over another results in radically different results.

Last week I compared life to a video game. A video game where the number of players continues to increase, meaning that our collective knowledge of how best to play the game should also be increasing, except that at the same time the version of game we’re playing is also changing. As an aside I also mentioned that it’s becoming harder to know if we’re winning. This week I’d like to take that thought and expand upon it. What does it mean to be winning the video game? Or, to go a step further why are we even playing the game?

If humans gradually figure out how best to live, then we should give a lot of weight to what has already been figured out over the years. But what if we end up with more humans? Do the behaviors of a billion current people count more than a million historical people? At first glance the answer is an obvious yes, but what if we add in the complication that current conditions are rapidly changing? Is it possible that behavior can't keep up? In this episode we examine the question and compare years of experience vs. human experienced years.

It's the beginning of the year and time to do the annual revisiting of my predictions. Not much has changed in 2018, so I spend much of the episode examining some of the current trends. In particular I think the rise of populism in Europe and America is going to make things interesting for the foreseeable future.

For your holiday listening enjoyment I have assembled five stories, nay parables to bring enlightenment and edification during these otherwise dark and gloomy months. You may not always agree with the moral, but you will find some (generally me) doing something dumb in all of them. Enjoy!

Last month wildfires ravaged California, including the inappropriately named Camp Fire which killed 86. Many people want to blame the fires on global warming and the changing climate, while other's think it could be solved to more logging. More likely it's due to fire suppression efforts which have allowed deadwood to accumulate, meaning that when fires do come they are much more destructive. Suppressing fires is not the only place where we're trying to bend nature to our will, and the question I pose in this episode is whether there are other areas where we're accumulating metaphorical deadwood, and risk stockpiling fuel for a conflagration much greater than we expect.

In "The Coddling of the American Mind" Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt discuss the new culture of safety that has developed on campuses around the country, and argue that children and students need challenges and stress and even suffering in their life to develop properly. If we grant their premise, how do we decide how much suffering to introduce? And how do we convince people to accept more suffering into their life? How do we determine the right level of suffering?

Milan M. Ćirković's book The Great Silence is a fantastic exploration of the philosophy and importance of Fermi's Paradox. I spend the first half of this episode doing a review of the book and the second half discussing how my own explanation of the paradox fits in to Ćirković's framework.

Every time we develop a new technology, we take a risk. Some technologies are dangerous and it may be that sometime in the future we will develop a technology which will mean the end of humanity. In a recent paper Bostrom makes this point by using the analogy of drawing balls from an urn. Progress means drawing balls from the urn, and as a result means running this risk.  This is unfortunate because for many people also think growth and progress are the best ways for creating the world we want. Among them, Tyler Cowen who recently published the book Stubborn Attachments. In this episode I compare and contrast these two views. Perhaps we can have growth and avoid bad technology, but as far as we can tell, no one ever has...

I had a discussion with a friend recently who claimed that I other similarly dispassionate blogs (read rationalists) were providing intellectual cover for bad people, in particular men's rights activists and militant incels. I look into that claim, and ultimately find it to be... Listen to the podcast for the dramatic reveal! 

In the 90s there were two theories for the future. Fukuyama's "End of History" and Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations". Now that more than two decades has passed it seems obvious that Huntington was the more prescient. But even Huntington may have insufficiently accounted for the effects of technology on civilizations, particularly it's power to divide civilizations internally, something which is present on everyone's mind as we think about the results of the most recent election. Most people understate the importance of religion, Huntington does not, and this makes things even more complicated.

A recent book asks, "What's Wrong with China?" Well perhaps a lot, but for the purposes of this podcast I'm just looking at how very different China is from the US or the West, far different than most people think. Particularly those people who expect China to smoothly transition to something indistinguishable from a modern western democracy. 

On June 1, 2009 Air France Flight 447 crashed into the mid-atlantic killing all 228 people aboard. In this episode I look at how it happened and whether it provides any larger lessons on the limits of privacy and technology and for the political crisis we're currently facing.

There are a lot of ways to spend our time, money and attention, and all three are limited. How do we decide what to spend them on, how do we decide what to worry about? This is the topic I examine on this episode, using global warming/climate change as one of the big examples. I approach this question with several frameworks in mind including the framework of effective altruism.

Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth is a book about a future where brain emulation becomes commonplace, by Robin Hanson. The future Hanson describes is a mixed bag, and I look at what that says about other transhumanist visions of the future, along with, of course, the very real possibility that none of those visions will come to pass. A position which Hanson’s book also supports though with much less detail. But this position, both because of it’s immediacy and it’s long term downside, is where, I feel, we should be spending the bulk of our attention.