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Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

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Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#321

Post by delecti »

hashkb wrote: post #318
delecti wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the parent comment was downvoted because it's not really contributing anything besides pessimism. As for us, I don't doubt the likelihood of a serious mass extinction, including possibly a severe drop in human population, but I can't see it being so severe as to cause an existential threat to us. No other species on this planet has had the ability to change the environment to suit it, or the ease of mobility…

We need the pessimism. Irrational exuberance clearly doesn't work.

I have never seen anything remotely resembling exuberance around climate change. Everything I've seen is either pessimism or denial.

Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#322

Post by JALTU »

e40 wrote: post #315
aeturnum wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think your view is skewed I suspect it's more that we have different definitions of how widely a feeling of alarm should spread before saying this. I agree the absolute number of people who are worried about the problem is small. I guess I think about it in terms of "what proportion of the population that would be directly involved in solving this problem"? I would suspect that is close to 100%. Anyone involved i…

I think there's a correlation between the age of politicians and how much they care, and we have far too many old politicians. (I'm old, btw.) We need more young people to get involved and get into positions of power. They have a vested interested in seeing solutions implemented, rather than the current crop who know they'll be dead when the real shit hits the fan and they're just letting things stay as is, because t…

Related to this age observation, I happened to be listening to a recording of Anand Giridharadas speaking in Seattle about how technocratic, engineering-oriented, "rational" mindsets (like most of the people here, like the people who work at tech-influenced foundations) very often do not understand or apparently don't consider the power component of their policy or solution efforts. Net net, more young people in power and more understanding of the power dynamics in society might go a lot farther in getting the "right thing" done.

To e40's point, sadly, when Anand asked the audience how many would be willing to commit to getting involved in the then upcoming election, it was a small minority despite generous applause at other points in his talk about effecting societal change. And this was for local changes in taxation if I recall correctly. I'm guessing they were mostly "old" and have their life's effort to lose in the latter halves of their expected lives.

This is where technical solutions seeking wide societal traction need a helping hand from that other side of our brains that relate to stories, myths, meaning, and purpose.

Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#323

Post by luckyandroid »

xwolfi wrote: post #160
luckyandroid wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Chains of Suspicion" assumes civilizations cannot communicate, yet the dark forest hypothesis assume civilizations can destroy each other > If you can physically interact, you can communicate I think you misunderstood what they meant by "communicate". They don't mean "reach with a message", they mean "engage in back and forth communication with both sides understanding the conversation". We're still struggling to…

But we're not struggling to talk to dolphins, they're struggling to materialize Shakespeare. We understand their structures and concerns more than they understand ours, and we observe them when they're still in the original soup. ALl this to say: if they were rising up, we'd probably be able to create a bidirectional connection. We can only make sense "nuking them all to death", like you say in america to mean "defen…

> Civilizations worth nuking will always have a way to understand each other

Again, we cannot talk to dolphins. Closest we’ve got is teaching monkeys sign language - and to be fair, that’s pretty good, but we’re also very similar to them. My reason for the dolphin analogy is that they’re an intelligent species here on earth that have incredibly different physiology and behavioural patterns to us. We can’t assume that any other ‘intelligent’ species in the universe we find will be similar enough to us where we can figure out rudimentary sign language with them, we have to assume the worst, in this case trying to communicate with an entirely foreign species.

Also the phrase ‘’the dolphin, so far, accept American hegemony - there’s no purpose to nuking them’’ is the funniest thing I’ve read in a while, lol.

Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#324

Post by hnbad »

NiceWayToDoIT wrote: post #157
hnbad wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing humans. Up to the point where you hope their leaders aren't corruptible. The problem with humans mostly comes down to centralization. We're an extremely cooperative species until we're put in an environment that promotes competition and punishes cooperation. Centralization of power is one such environment. And it's very hard to undo at this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs Corruption is not just leaders it is a network of beneficiaries, like a snake with thousand heads, and regardless how many you cut new will grow. And we do not know how to get out of that mold. And democracy in uneducated society simply does not work. And we do not have it. All governments are aristocracies. News media displays of "busting" corruption is just "bread in circ…

> All governments are aristocracies.

All states are. Not all systems of government are states.

> media manipulations of wide populous

The media is owned by the same "aristocracy" that controls the state.

In the US and other capitalist countries the aristocracy mostly consists of billionaires and a few political "clans" (usually with ties to "old money"). In the USSR the aristocracy was the Bolshevik intelligentsia and former capitalists that formed the bureaucracy. The problem isn't inherent to humanity, it's inherent to centralized systems.

The video you linked actually supports this somewhat: a ruler can't rule alone, they need a staff of advisors and delegates to carry out the ruler's orders. But this is only a problem if you try to have a ruler, or a committee of rulers.

The usual counter-argument is that decentralized systems don't work at scale. You can have small communities decide things with direct democracy but clearly that doesn't scale because it's harder to reach consensus the larger the group becomes. To address this I would invite you to read into Democratic Confederalism or watch Anark's aptly-titled video "after the revolution"[0] that explores a very similar anarchist/mutualist governance structure.

In most of these scenarios the answer to "direct democracy doesn't scale" is a delegate system and it's easy to mistake this for the same representative democracy we're used to but the important difference is that the delegation is not only proportional but voluntary and consent can be withdrawn, either generally or on individual votes. NonCompete's video[1] has some poorly aged off-hand comments about how technology might help with this but he gives a good explanation of how such a delegate system can work. CGP Grey actually also has videos on alternative voting systems[2][3] making such a system feasible.

The main difference with these systems is that they're decentralized in the sense that power is granted explicitly and voluntarily, i.e. it can be withdrawn at a moment's notice, making it impossible to hold on to it over technicalities (like receiving a minority share of the votes but then joining a coalition government that appoints your party leader as chancellor and then passes an Enabling Act to disempower the senate like in 1933). At first glance this may sound like sovereign citizens rejecting arrest by exclaiming "I do not consent" but the important difference is that a delegate's vote is only worth as much as the number of people backing them.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMoTWFZjoYA

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yuok9TQfpo

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE

Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#325

Post by heavenlyblue »

hnbad wrote: post #112
myrmidon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think there is a "real" (>1% over the next century) risk for humanity to wipe itself out, or just that the hostile-alien risk is way beyond negligible in comparison? Because all current climate doom-erism notwithstanding-- humanity extinction seems impossible to achieve to me via climate change or nuclear war; rogue autonomous self-replicating systems might be a danger, but are too far beyound current tech to…

We don't need to go extinct. Our global economy is very fragile, relatively speaking and it's not at all clear we could sustain the economy necessary to perform space exploration if bad things happen. To avoid an extended argument about all the ways in which climate change will screw things up, let's focus on nuclear war: a nuclear war between, say, India and China would not only wipe out huge swaths of the human pop…

> The US has only seen a death of around 0.2% of its population due to COVID and is already facing labor shortages in retail.

Pretty certain these two metrics are absolutely unrelated, given the fact that people who would have died were probably quite old in the first place.

Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#326

Post by hashkb »

delecti wrote: post #321
hashkb wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need the pessimism. Irrational exuberance clearly doesn't work.

I have never seen anything remotely resembling exuberance around climate change. Everything I've seen is either pessimism or denial.

I'm talking about much more than climate change. Failure to cooperate, anti-intellectualism, and innate hatred of each other (among other flaws) are what will sink us.

Re: Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” XVI: What Is the “Dark Forest” Hypothesis?

#327

Post by NiceWayToDoIT »

hnbad wrote: post #324
NiceWayToDoIT wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs Corruption is not just leaders it is a network of beneficiaries, like a snake with thousand heads, and regardless how many you cut new will grow. And we do not know how to get out of that mold. And democracy in uneducated society simply does not work. And we do not have it. All governments are aristocracies. News media displays of "busting" corruption is just "bread in circ…

> All governments are aristocracies. All states are. Not all systems of government are states. > media manipulations of wide populous The media is owned by the same "aristocracy" that controls the state. In the US and other capitalist countries the aristocracy mostly consists of billionaires and a few political "clans" (usually with ties to "old money"). In the USSR the aristocracy was the Bolshevik intelligentsia an…

Thank you for reply, I meant to say that abstraction of all currently existing political systems is aristocracy, democracies/communism/socialism what ever else label we are using is just aristocracy in disguise. Representative democracy is not democracy, as you pointed and I do agree, problem is centralization. You have gave me few valuable insights so I will try to explore more about the topic.
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