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E Pur Si Muove

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: E Pur Si Muove

#681

Post by alien_at_work »

cjbprime wrote: post #232
alien_at_work wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I haven't censored anyone or shut down any argument by saying this You haven't shut down any argument by saying "anyone who works on this is a bad person"? Seriously? I happen to think the exact opposite: life extension is probably one of the most noble things we could possibly be working on. Imagine if Einstein were still alive. We never learn from history, maybe because the people who lived it are all dead now. Bu…

It is fine that you think the opposite and I'd be happy to keep talking about it. You're probably overestimating how much it means (to me) for me to regard someone as unethical. I don't see how I can stop extrapolating from "action X is unethical because the expected consequences look like bad ones" to "this person who dearly wants to bring about action X is behaving unethically". I simply don't see them as being mea…

First of all, it's not you specifically. On a forum it never is. When we post here we represent a certain portion of the population. And things like censorship have proven to be very dangerous so we have to be careful.

In your second paragraph you've deviated from what I'm talking about (perhaps I was responding to the wrong person? EDIT: I didn't). "Person X is behaving unethically" is perfectly fine. "This person is an unethical person because they engage in action X" is where I draw the line (asuming action X is controversial and not very clearly evil like first degree murder) because it assigns a trait to someone by which they will be judged by their peers.

EDIT: Actually no:

>people dedicating their lives to it today are unethical people.

You said that. So your revised statement is moving the goal posts.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#682

Post by ironjunkie »

staunch wrote: post #56

This problem will resolve itself because there are brave people willing to weather the controversy caused by thinking in public. Long unedited podcasts are turning out to be the best platform, with people like Sam Harris, Dan Carlin, and even Joe Rogan becoming the most important public intellectuals alive today. All three have financial and editorial independence. They reach millions of people on a weekly basis. Car…

still. Even if you are wealthy, Fighting this is very taxing for your life. you are constantly under attack by every other person that wants to feel like they are bringing progress to society by agreeing to the latest PC trend from SF.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#683

Post by alien_at_work »

SnacksOnAPlane wrote: post #217
BenchRouter wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that life extension is dangerous and wrong and therefore people dedicating their lives to it today are unethical people. > I haven't shut down any argument by saying this You're being naive if you think that saying this doesn't end any hope of a reasonable discussion.

How so? Stating your thoughts with conviction ends any hope of a reasonable discussion? Maybe if you're afraid of confrontation. For me it's an invitation to debate.

You find labelling people is in invitation to a debate? So if you find yourself in a position where you desperately need a job but upper management says "I think people of race X are " you would take that as an invitiation to a debate? Saying a person is unethical is labelling them. That's what I object to, not debate or confrontation.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#684

Post by ironjunkie »

dan_mctree wrote: post #234
rb808 wrote: post #5

Next time he's in China maybe he should think about donating some money to a local union and see how free the speech is there. I'm no fan of the Bay Area but comparing to China freedom of speech is a bit weird.

The SF type of free speech is just of a very different kind. In China the wrong political ideas can cause you trouble with the government and potentially in jail. In SF the wrong ideas or words can lead to rejection from your social circle and loss of your career. To a lot of people the latter is just as scary, if not scarier than facing a hostile government. A year in jail doesn't sound as bad to some as becoming a…

very well articulated response and I recognize myself in it 100%.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#685

Post by a_bonobo »

a_bonobo wrote: post #653
marme wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is exactly the case. Try saying "taiwan is an independent country" in beijing and see how well that statement is received

Even Justin Bieber is banned because 'he has engaged in a series of bad behaviours, both in his social life and during a previous performance in China, which caused discontent among the public', and he isn't even politically active or anything. China's public sphere is highly controlled. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/21/justin-bieber-...

Or this, just showed up on my Twitter stream:

>A Chinese man has been jailed for a year for stamping on a portrait of Mongol ruler Genghis Khan, after being found guilty of inciting ethnic hatred.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42364214?ocid=socialflow_...

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#686

Post by alien_at_work »

reverius42 wrote: post #300
BenchRouter wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that life extension is dangerous and wrong and therefore people dedicating their lives to it today are unethical people. > I haven't shut down any argument by saying this You're being naive if you think that saying this doesn't end any hope of a reasonable discussion.

Nobody owes anyone else a "reasonable discussion." One person's reasonable discussion is another person's interminable sea lion. http://wondermark.com/1k62/

No individual owes me that, but this goes far beyond that. You have to keep in mind that any oppinion shared on line represents more than the person expressing it. And it may change the minds of others reading it. If anyone who works on controversial subject X gets a label of unethical that's not just "not owing them a reasonable discussion", you're impacting their life. Potentially ruining it.

Given your stance here, you're perfectly ok with the baker refusing to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple, right? Because the law was effectively the sea lion in your comic.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#687

Post by alien_at_work »

Aaron1011 wrote: post #448
alien_at_work wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well the jail comparison is really far away. People in the west, right now, are going to jail for expressing oppinions. Right now those oppinions are universally seen as bad (e.g. rascism) but does that justify going to jail? >boycott one probably isn't so far but who cares? If people band together to boycott someone they view as unethical that doesn't seem wrong to me. You don't find it bad that a bunch of people,…

> You don't find it bad that a bunch of people, based on their own non-objective oppinion What is an 'objective opinion'? > get to ruin someones business and/or career? Are you saying that it's a bad idea for people to boycott businesses, or that boycotting businesses shouldn't be allowed ? If it's the former, how do you distinguish between 'good' and 'bad' reasons to refrain from purchasing from a business? If it's…

>What is an 'objective opinion'?

Look, things like murder or pedophilia are unabigiously evil. So it's not out of line or particularly dangerous to say that a person who engages in one of those activities or supports/defends those who do is unethical and possibly even evil.

Extending the life of humans? That's not objectively evil. It has not been clearly demonstrated to be a negative on anything. In fact there are plenty of arguments that it could fix a lot of problems we have. So to come out and attach a label to someone who dares work on such a thing, before we even know what it would mean is dangerous. I feel like society, at least a larger portion of it, understood this in the past. Your creating taboos. Things we don't dare talk about or explore because we fear having our lives destroyed by twitter lync mobs and the like.

>Are you saying that it's a bad idea for people to boycott businesses, or that boycotting businesses shouldn't be allowed?

No one should force you to have to shop where you don't want to. But what you actually want to do is knowing as "mobbing" in Europe and it's generally illegal (at least in some countries). The issue is one of power. With twitter flash mobs and so on today, you can quickly destroy someone's life with this kind of behavior. Most people don't mind if what that person is doing is obviously unethical but this thread is applying this to things that are completely unsettled. No one knows what will happen if we extend life because it's never existed before.

>what is comparing someone to the Hitler youth?

I appologize. This was certainly well over the top but please understand the context of what I'm saying: Hitler was able to come to power, in part due to people behaving this way. If you said something critical of Hitler, certain people took offense. They felt Germany had been in a bad way for a long time and this man was doing something about it. Why would you question him unless you wanted to destory Germany? So they started supressing thought. If your paper was critical of the Fuhrer brown shirts would storm in, trash the place and assualt people. As we know, eventually there was no one left to say anything eventually.

I hope you can see the parallel here: people felt their view was sufficient to begin censorship. It wasn't made illegal to question Hitler, it didn't need to be. Society had effectively shut down such behavior on their own.

>As opposed to (objectively?) determining if something is 'objectively unethical'?

Live and let live. There are people out there with different views than you. Some of those views might be down right offensive if you really thought about it. But society has always been this way and until recently we still managed to avoid getting so polarized about it and trying to censor everyone.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#688

Post by alien_at_work »

SamBam wrote: post #596
jstanley wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine to criticise the ethics of the work. Beneficial, in fact. The problem arises when you can't separate the ethics of the work from the ethics of the person doing the work. When "this is a bad idea, maybe you should stop" becomes "you are a bad person".

It's fine in theory to criticise the ethics of the idea alone, but there can be a limit to that. If the CEO of a mining company has the "ingenious, un-PC idea" to increase mining profits by lobbying Congress and donating to sympathetic lawmakers to ease EPA regulations so he can dump mercury directly in the river, my ethical argument against the idea is that it damages the environment and the people in the communitie…

But can't you see the difference here? There is no argument that dumping mercury in a river is good for society, the environment or anything else. It's only "good" for this companies profits and even the real value there is a question given the impact on most people working there.

But extending human life? Maybe it will be bad. Maybe people will keep having children at the same rate and with no one dying anymore the whole planet is completely full of selfish people who don't care about others of the environment. Maybe only the rich will have access, block everyone else from getting it and control the world by simply out living anyone who is in their way.

But what comparable things do we actually see in history? In every country I'm aware of, once basic survival is taken mostly for granted people stop having kids as quickly and often as they can. In fact these days people often wait so long they depend on science to make birth even possible in their advanced age. And most people have, at most, 2 kids.

Imagine if we lived 10k years. Some people might say "well, lets have our kids right now so we can give up 18 years or so now and then have the rest to ourselves" but I suspect most people would say "what's the rush?". Some would even say "why invest 18+ years to extend my legacy to someone I can't control, can only marginally influence for a decade or two? In 10k years they're bound to solve death all-togher. I'll be my own legacy! And if, after 9,900 years they still haven't done it, I can always reproduce then". Imagine not wondering if there was a Troy, we could just ask the people who lived there. In society, we tend to be safe from some tragedy until most people who lived it are dead then we fall in the same trap again. What if they didn't die?

I say all that to say, it is not remotely obvious that extending human life is in the same category of behavior as dumping mercury in the river to make a few bucks so the consequences should not be the same or even similar.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#689

Post by alien_at_work »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #219
slededit wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not clear or obvious that allowing people to live longer is unethical. Resorting inmediately to an ad hominem is not an appropriate form of debate. No individual has a moral obligation to debate ideas. However if debate is shut down with fallacious arguments it limits the ability for the idea to progress. If this happens too often then progress will be slowed. That is the point of this post.

But the argument isn't fallacious and it's not an ad hom... Extending life expectancy will increase human population and harm our environment and that harm to the environment will harm future generations so individuals working towards extending life expectancy are hurting future generations and that's unethical which makes them unethical. You can disagree with the argument but it's not fallacious.

>Extending life expectancy will increase human population

[citation needed]

>harm our environment

[citation needed]

>individuals working towards extending life expectancy are hurting future generations

[citation needed]

We don't know any of those things. You can debate it. Even passionately so, but it's wrong and dangerous to assume your unproven beliefs are facts and label people based on them.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#690

Post by alien_at_work »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #94
jstanley wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having an ethical outlook is a great idea. And it's good to criticise ideas you think are unethical. The point of the post is that just because a person presents an unethical idea doesn't make that person universally unethical. The point is to separate the ideas from the person presenting them, so that people can feel free to present novel ideas without fearing damage to their reputation if the ideas are unpopular.

Fearing damage to your reputation if your ideas are unpopular is literally how society works. Unethical ideas aren't just unethical out of the ether, they usually involve harming someone or some group. Putting those ideas forward should come with risk to yourself because it definitely comes with risks to others.

And yet here we're discussing an idea for which you personally believe that someone or some group will be harmed but it is not certain, some of us would say it's not even likely. Some of us would even say it would be a great benefit to society and have the opposite affect you claim.

But because you believe (perhaps even irrationally) that the idea could harm you give yourself, and anyone who thinks as you do, the right to damage people's reputation. History has shown this to be very dangerous behavior.

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