Rich and Strange Aeons

One common response in these discussions is "but there are so many assumptions". This annoys me. As I see it, the whole *point* is to make those assumptions explicit and facilitate talking about them. And then people cycle through various objections as if they're refuting the paradox, rather than proposing various solutions.

Semi-formal statement:

Given the fact of a huge and old universe,
and assuming that we are "normal" and thus life, intelligence, and spacefaring industry are common,
and [assuming that such would be detectable
OR assuming that interstellar transport of something that can propagate is possible, with even more detectable results]
then where the hell is everyone?

"Paradox" isn't a particularly good name for it, but it's traditional. But the conclusion of some natural (to many) assumptions is a result at odds with observation, hence sort of "paradox", and discussion. Which of course consists of give and take dispute over various assumptions. "Why do you assume detection is possible?" "Because..." And more assumptions, on *both*, or *all*, sides. It's not clear to me who has to make the strongest assumptions; after all, someone saying travel isn't possible is ruling out *every* combination of propulsion, AI, stasis, mini-tech, longevity, etc., and every form of replication (including bio-heavy ones), while the pro-propagation view just needs one viable way to spread. Life (or replicators) is like water, and the universe prone to leakiness.

Similarly if we posit stealthy civilizations, we ultimately need all of them to be stealthy, in all modalities, including radio deliberate and leaky, thermal emissions, artificial lights, gamma or neutrino emissions, stellar occlusions, probe debris, etc. (Not that we've looked thoroughly at all of these; everything could change tomorrow with some new signal discovery.)

I guess I'm complaining about tone. If you dispute some assumption, you're not proving Fermi was bunk, you're participating in the discussion as intended.

* Next-gen OLPC, two touchscreens joined like a book, holdable in either orientation. This would be awesome.
* How doodling lets you pay attention
* Old comments on Vinge's Singularity. Bostrom and Hanson in particular still seem good.
* Argument from evil as type of and response to argument from design
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmicism
* Republic of Vermont
* Real zeppelins did over 100 km/hour.
* Mars scorecard
* Doctor Who AMV


* Dipping into libertarian thought again reminded me of something: government is great at providing public goods, which is one reason I swung to social democratic, but good government -- especially good democratic government -- is itself a public good, with voters being rationally ignorant and apathetic. Bit of an internal contradiction there, which doesn't seem easily resolvable. Of course, competitive markets have their own contradiction, in that everyone involved wants to become less subject to competition.
* Table of private, public, common and club goods. I hadn't seen the second two categories before.
* Assurance contracts, and particularly the dominant assurance contract; possible way of funding public goods effectively, without recourse to a government. This is the cool side of libertarianism, where they try to think of ways to do things in the market, rather than just asserting markets are always better. Applications. I think there's still a free rider problem, in that if I think it very likely a good will get funded, I don't have much reason to sign the contract. But maybe it'd still be useful.
* Old David Friedman essay on Ronald Coase winning the Nobel Prize
* How de Beers created demand for diamonds. Also wikipedia and book.

* Doctors excommunicated for giving a 9yo an abortion to save her life. Also. The Church had tried to stop the abortion with a lawsuit, even though it's a 9yo with twins and they'd all die.
* GOP: Health care is a privilege, oh no class warfare
* Bobby Jindal, secret Muslim. Stay class, GOP!
* Don't Ask, Don't Tell supposedly backed at the time by bad-faith arguments by military leaders, and suppression of evidence.
* Licoln Chafee was a cool Republican. Why wasn't he on a list of progressive Senators I saw? Oh right, because he lost his re-election, then left the GOP.
* Private health insurance at work
* Former Republican: GOP is dedicated to sabotaging the American future

* UK hacking into computers without a warrant and tracking Internet use.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2007/1865021.htm

Cosmides, along with her huband John Tooby, is one of the big US researchers in evolutionary psychology. Her take is basically a mix of "to what extent do our devices already makes us 'transhuman'?" and "what are the consequences of meddling with the emotional modules that produce social behavior?"

March 2007 Wired article. Starts with a guy who wore a feelSpace belt of vibrating pads, the pad closest to north vibrating. He got to the point of even dreaming with a constant sense of direction. Then talks about older news (to me), of vision for the blind -- first rods on someone's back, then electrodes on the tongue. Use of electrodes or vibrators to give a better sense of balance, for those with vertigo, or for pilots, where visual cues aren't all that good. What would be really impressive is if anyone conveyed a sense of color through tactile interfaces...

* Essay on how training affects thinking, and lawyer/politician thinking vs. scientist/engineer thinking. Habit of modeling the world with numbers, vs. habit of suspicion of flexible numbers and concern with manipulating poeple's perception of and reactions to the world.

* Someone walked out with a communion wafer; some Catholic outraged, calling it a hate crime, or holding the body Christ hostage, or death threats.

* Berlusconi wants a wafer despite being divorced and remarried.
* Disco dwarves
* Calls in Israel to punish the families of terrorists.
* Really expensive day care at Google
* Chris Hitchens experiences waterboarding, agrees that it constitutes torture.
* How we stand up for our torture pals in Eastern Europe.

http://www.tnr.com/story.html?id=d8731cf4-e87b-4d88-b7e7-f5059cd0bfbd

Long essay, but good, on bio-conservatives/theocons, Leon Kass et al, and the bankrupt idea of "human dignity".

Of course, institutional affiliation does not entail partiality, but, with three-quarters of the invited contributors having religious entanglements, one gets a sense that the fix is in. A deeper look confirms it.

Conspicuous by their absence are several fields of expertise that one might have thought would have something to offer any discussion of dignity and biomedicine. None of the contributors is a life scientist--or a psychologist, an anthropologist, a sociologist, or a historian.

Despite these exclusions, the volume finds room for seven essays that align their arguments with Judeo-Christian doctrine. We read passages that assume the divine authorship of the Bible, that accept the literal truth of the miracles narrated in Genesis (such as the notion that the biblical patriarchs lived up to 900 years),

[Kass] came to prominence in the 1970s with his moralistic condemnation of in vitro fertilization, then popularly known as "test-tube babies." As soon as the procedure became feasible, the country swiftly left Kass behind, and, for most people today, it is an ethical no-brainer. That did not stop Kass from subsequently assailing a broad swath of other medical practices as ethically troubling, including organ transplants, autopsies, contraception, antidepressants, even the dissection of cadavers.

"Would professional tennis players really enjoy playing 25 percent more games of tennis?" And, as empirical evidence that "mortality makes life matter," he notes that the Greek gods lived "shallow and frivolous lives"--an example of his disconcerting habit of treating fiction as fact. (Kass cites Brave New World five times in his Dignity essay.)

Kass has a problem not just with longevity and health but with the modern conception of freedom. There is a "mortal danger," he writes, in the notion "that a person has a right over his body, a right that allows him to do whatever he wants to do with it." He is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties.

For two decades, a group of intellectual activists, many of whom had jumped from the radical left to the radical right, has urged that we rethink the Enlightenment roots of the American social order. The recognition of a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the mandate of government to secure these rights are too tepid, they argue, for a morally worthy society.

That's what's advising President Bush on bioethics issues... hey Jordan, ever have qualms about supporting the Republicans and trusting them to guard our values?

edit: In updating the Wikipedia page on transhumanism, I found linkies. The Ruth Macklin essay Pinker mentions, and the Human Dignity report. The first link also has lots of responses to her essay, most indignant, a few noting the disconnect between medical practice respecting the dignity of a particular patient and banning various techniques like cloning or IVF because they "affront human dignity" in some nebulous sense, with Macklin having had the latter in mind and the comment defending the former.

edit the second: discussion of commission members and contributors

Over on rpg.net there's a Traveller thread going on which has included a bunch of transhumanist debate, of sorts. Some people saying the tech assumptions of Traveller are ridiculously retro and out of date, and others sniping at the transhumanism trend, full of fantasy and wish-fulfillment, no more realistic than Traveller and already dying to be replaced by the Mundane SF trend. Which strikes me as nutty.

( Friendslist mercy cut )

Along the way, I had a couple of posts about Bujold and transhumanism. And a brief note on how we're living transhumanism -- or what would be the build up to it if it's going to happen.