Aesthetic Materialism

    Jacob Coxon said that he thinks there's a 10% chance that AI will kill all humans. My vibes-based guess is that that's a little high.  Moreover, I think there are different kinds of doom scenarios, with different probabilities.  Here they are:  I think there's a >85% chance that AI will cause massive unemployment of humans.  And this will cause massive disruption to the economy, and society in general, and change the class system forever.  How it changes is largely a political question - what matters is who is in control - the billionaires, or the workers? I think there's a >50% chance that a large number of people will become deeply dependent on AI, that we will become mentally lazy, etc.. I think there's an 8% chance that all humans will become "dog-like".  (Though it does seem likely that some humans will become "dog-like" - maybe some already are.) I think there's a 5% chance that AI will deliberately cause a mass-human death e...

My personal guess as to the solution of the Fermi "paradox" (not really a paradox) is fairly boring: 1. Space travel is virtually impossible.  This is really the main reason.  The Tsolkovsky Rocket Equation is a harsh taskmaster.  This shows how hard it is to get out of a planet's gravity well: you need to burn fuel to launch yourself.  But the more fuel you have, the heavier your craft is, thus the more fuel you need.  The expansion is logarithmic, and it implies that the expense of even lifting a small number of people into orbit is enormous.  And then, once you're up there, out of the atmosphere, beyond the magnetosphere, then you have real problems: space is trying to kill you.  The radiation up there is extremely unhealthy.  And the faster your spaceship moves, the more problems you have.  If your ship can move close to the speed of light, then, relativistically, there will be particles whizzing into the front of your ship at close to t...

  There's something really nice about people who remain passionately steadfast in their devotion to a religion that has largely discredited and abandoned.  In a way, that's when true faith begins.  I want to comfort and encourage such a person - Linus in the pumpkin patch. That's how I feel about logical positivism. 

Jung and Lacan are more similar than either of their followers would like to admit. Jung said "God enters through the wound."  That's Lacan in a nutshell.

  When we describe people as "reasonable" or "logical," these are usually regarded as synonyms.  And in many contexts, this is probably true.  But in my experience, in certain contexts, logical people can be quite different from reasonable people - almost opposites. By "reasonable," here, I mean something like what Aristotle called the "golden mean," which is perhaps comparable to Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, called the "middle path" - that is, remaining moderate and not going too far in either extreme.  "Moderation in all things," as the saying goes.  It means being open to hearing ideas or criticism from any source, without prejudicially rejecting them or automatically dogmatically adopting them, and always being ready to change your mind.  In short, it means holding onto one's own beliefs "at arm's length," as it were.  It means being nuanced in one's picture of the world and recognizing that realit...