Pursuant to the discussions at the last big thread, I am making a quick post with my assessments of how realistic various “transhumanist” spheres of technology are.
Automation
Has been, is, and will continue to happen – and will affect lower-IQ occupations sooner. Since it takes IQ to design and maintain the robots, this will further privilege cognitively gifted nations (see Our Biorealistic Future). Inequality will also soar. Eventually, some kind of universal basic income will be probably be necessary to avoid a cyberpunk dystopia. Well, we are sort of drifting there anyway, but at least a dystopia without the widespread poverty.
Radical IQ Augmentation
This involves several methods:
- Embryo selection for IQ: Razib Khan/Charles Murray estimate: 3-5 years (in 2016). Of course regulatory requirements will probably take a long-ass time to get sorted out (e.g., the infamous FDA), so add another 5-10 years. Though this will probably be much quicker in “offshore” style areas with fewer regulations. Calculations of possible IQ gains from a 2014 paper by Carl Shulman and Nick Bostrom (current practice is to select from 10 embryos). See gwern on practical costs/benefits for individuals.
- Embryo editing for IQ (e.g. via GWAS/CRISPR): For instance, this Twitter user (a prominent psychometrician IRL) points out the method is unreliable and produces a lot of errors – big problem since there’s hundreds of genes affecting intelligence! OTOH, CRISPR is improving fast. Mike Johnson, who has studied the trends although doesn’t work in the field, in 2015 predicted that a “dedicated billionaire with scant regard for legalistic regulations could start genetically “spellchecking” their offspring within 5-7 years.”
Using widespread embryo selection for intelligence, a nation where this is widely implemented can go from the level of West Virginia to Massachusetts, or Southern Italy to Northern Italy, within 1-2 generations – nice, but not immediately transformational. This is not the case with CRISPR/GWAS-enabled IQ augmentation; if this starts around 2030, we can have the first augmented generations growing up by 2050, and beginning to transform society from 2060. Due to the “smart fraction” effect, this will have a substantial impact even if 1-2% of the population reproduces does this. Obviously, barring other game-changing scenarios such as superintelligence, the first countries to implement this will gain an ultra-competitive advantage.
Even though this isn’t often discussed in transhumanist circles, this is the topic that personally excites me the most, because it is the one technological sphere that is both already visible on the horizon, and will have transformational ramifications.
Incidentally, the commenter Alexander Turok has recently finished (and advertised on the comments to this blog) a book that looks at the ramifications of genetic selection for IQ along the lines of Hanson’s Age of Em.
Superintelligence
According to a paper by Sandberg, median estimate time for the emergence of ems (emulated minds) is 2059; the age of ems will very likely lead to superintelligence within a couple of years anyway. Median prediction for the emergence of “high level machine intelligence” according to various groups of AI experts clusters around 2040-50. This remains in line with Ray Kurzweil’s classic 2045 prediction in The Singularity Is Near.
It is quite impossible to definitively judge the validity of these forecasts, though FWIW I am skeptical about hard take takeoff scenarios (see 1, 2, 3).
With respect to ems, my main concern is that of the “unconscious zombie”. The planetary (and possibly galactic) extinction of consciousness would appear to represent an epochal loss in value – indeed, one indistinguishable from full-scale extinction. I would second Mike Johnson in his belief that it would be very much advisable to solve the consciousness problem before allowing mind uploads to go ahead.
The dangers of superintelligence are well-known. Once we start to approach those technological milestones, it may be prudent to create a UNATCO-style global organization for AI control until, to borrow from Trump, we “can figure out what the hell is going on.”
Biomechatronics
So basically Deus Ex-style neural augments. I (or rather, Bostrom) explained why meaningful brain-machine interfaces will be very hard to implement.
However, if it was to be decided by a global singleton that machine superintelligence is too risky (or if the problem proves too hard in general), then one can certainly see these technologies getting developed in coming centuries, perhaps during the Age of Malthusian Industrialism.
Radical Life Extension
I think this will be a lot harder than Radical IQ Augmentation for a very simple reason.
The natural “range” of human intelligence spans about 7 standard deviations to either side of the Greenwich mean of 100 that prevails in the developed world, of which perhaps 5 can be realized via GWAS plus gene editing. Even today, differences of a few points in average IQ between various regions and countries can already have striking effects on socio-economic development; now imagine that some regions start converging to mean IQs of 175, and you already have a transformation deeper than anything since the Industrial Revolution, if not the appearance of agriculture.
In contrast, the oldest humans only live to 125 years or so. A society where the average person lives to 110 will not be radically different from a society where he or she lives to 85 (the longest-lived societies today). Much deeper, perhaps trans-species genetic tinkering (e.g. drawing from whales or naked mole rats) will be required, and/or a much deeper understanding of ageing pathways or at least how to keep them repaired, as in Aubrey de Grey’s SENS program. Aubrey believes we will achieve mouse rejuvenation by the early-mid 2020s, but as he himself pointed out in his book Ending Aging, mouse models are not obviously extensible to human ones.
In a 2017 Reddit AMA, breaking a long tradition of not giving any quantitative predictions, Aubrey de Grey estimated that a 25 year old man has an 80% chance of reaching “longevity escape velocity.” So perhaps call this around 2050?
Space Colonies
I don’t see this panning out for economic reasons; maintaining a base on the open ocean or Antarctica is trivial relative to a Mars base or a Venusian cloud city, to say nothing of the stupendous challenges involved in interstellar exploration.
If we really want to make self-sustaining space colonies at least theoretically feasible – that is, to satisfy Musk’s vision of a second home away from home to increase the chances of humanity’s survival if some unprecedented disaster was to wipe out life on Earth – then we need radical measures. First, we need to send the atomophobes to concentration camps, as Thorfinnsson energetically recommends. Then we need to start work on nuclear pulse propulsion – the only feasible method of sending huge masses of material into space with technology that has been available since the 1960s.
But I don’t see this happening, and frankly I don’t see anything really exciting happening in space on timescales shorter than centuries. The only potentially profitable business enterprise seems to be in mining asteroids for minerals that are extremely rare on our own planet.
Other Techs
Seasteading – sorry to disappoint the libertarians, but I don’t see the economics of this ever working out.
Artificial Wombs should be feasible in a decade. Probably not going to be widely implemented for social/legal reasons.
Cryptocurrency will continue growing in prominence, but I do not see them ever having transformational effects. Reasons why.
Nuclear Fusion is always 20-50 years away. I assume this will remain the case.
Nanotechnology, in Drexler’s sense of self-assembling nanites, remains a pipe dream so far as I know (happily, same goes for the “grey goo” extinction scenario).
Concluding Thoughts
I support virtually all of these initiatives, though with some strong reservations on ems/superintelligence.
First, because they’re really cool.
Second, because if they can happen, they will happen anyway, and national obscurantists (typically leftists or religious fundamentalists) dragging back progress will only doom their own countries to irrelevancy.
And it is then the ultra-competitive countries that did follow through on them that will set the rules anyway: “Victory needs no explanation, defeat allows none.”
Third, because if there is are no great breakthroughs, the Frito Effect will carry the world into a dysgenic miasma of technological stagnation that will last for many centuries, until the new Malthusian conditions recreate elite intelligences. There will be a lot of suffering for no discernible gain.
PS. Before the usual sovoks come crawling out of the woodwork telling me to crawl back to Silicon Valley, I would like to point out that transhumanism was of course invented in the Russian Empire.
Anybody who uses the word CRISPR disqualifies themselves. We had genome editing methods before it, arguably more expensive, but as accurate and specific as CRISPR. But because there is no single hypertension, breast cancer, or intelligence gene, you can shove that CRISPR up your more intelligent orifices.
Why should “sovoks” hate transhumanism?
Soviet Union was transhumanist project of great transformation of humanity, from deformed hairless ape to true new socialist man. You could say that things went wrong when Lysenkoists prevailed over Darwinist eugenicists, but can you expect brute mustachioed Caucasian understand science?
Once you take things to your own hands, I am certain you will manage much better. 🙂
That’s silly, though. Splicing in a gene that increases expression of neural growth factor, for example, which does exist will improve the intelligence of the subject slightly. That alone will accomplish something. The fact that something is polygenic doesn’t mean that its immune from alteration.
I read the paper; it hasn’t made me take EMs more seriously. We’ve been able to do a complete emulation of a flatworm, but still not capable of replicating its behavior. There’s clearly a lot of gaps of knowledge in this, enough that I am willing to question if mechanical emulation of the brain is possible, and at what energy cost; the writer talked about energy cost briefly, but essentially handwaves it. With redshift found in the brain now, its entirely possible that there are indeed quantum interactions; with the brain evidently being affected by extra-cranial factors, it seems viable to question if it is possible to emulate the brain without emulating the entire body.
Its all very much wild speculation – maybe hard science fiction – but that’s about it.
I am skeptical of ems myself and for the same reasons, but this redshift thing is new to me.
Google search finds this: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/31/8753
Reading the abstract, I get Penrose vibes. Would be fascinating if that widely panned theory actually had something to it!
If the consciousness connection is true, it would make replicating consciousness in ems (or machine intelligence) much harder – making premature transition to that stage of development an actual existential risk, even if the ems were to perfectly replicate the behavior of their biological forebears.
I don’t know anything about this area of “emulated minds”.
But relation of computation and consciousness is quite irrelevant in a fundamental way.
When we say even that a machine is “computing” – it’s not really computing (even in the most primitive way). It’s just dumb electronic circuit, producing in stable way shapes which we can interpret as logic. Only distinction between computers, and any wind up mechanical toy, is that we ourselves are interpreting it symbolically (as if it were actually computing) .
This was probably understood more by people in the past, when there were still mechanical calculators.
“Emulated mind” will be actually just a “simulated mind”. It will only be mind, to extent we are looking at it and interpreting its patterns, as being those of a mind (but this always requires a real mind to be observing it, whereas consciousness is the observer).
Tricking ourselves in this way can go very far. Anna Karenina does not exist inside the book, when you close the books pages. It’s only some paper printed with symbols in a certain pattern, and yet this ordinary object we can interpret as its own world, populated with people more “real” than anyone we meet in real life.
“Emulated mind” will have not more consciousness of its own, than printed symbols do on your copy of Anna Karenina. But at the same time, that does not mean it will not be something extremely fascinating to us and with a lot of practical applications.
How consciousness works cannot be a problem of computer science, but at best of physics – probably understanding what produces consciousness, is a long way from our current knowledge.
Am I not clear enough? Human genome editing was possible since the nineties. There are similarly delirious articles in NYT, circa 2008, about zinc fingers curing AIDS, cancer, and probably global warming as well.
I am pretty sure that the risks do not warrant the benefit. Can you guarantee that mega-intelligence won’t turn out to be some sort of Rahm Emmanuel-style of mega-Jewish mega-autism? You can’t test that in rats. This is why it won’t happen, even a solid candidate gene would exist.
But that candidate gene doesnot exist.
And I repeat my main point: we already had the means. Merely typing ‘CRISPR’ gives you away as one who learns about DNA engineering solely from NYT. At that point, a sane person should skip the paragraph.
Adding up to my earlier point about study of biochem from NYT: does anyone know how would GWAS do anything to the genome?
Dream: transhumanist full brain emulation, infinite expansion into space, Sword Art Online
Reality: deepfakes of your high school classmates phishing you to click on them to steal your crytocurrency
You seem both very passionate about this.
There actually are “candidate genes” already, but I think your other points are more worth addressing. The risk/reward would be actually pretty muted all in all, since yeah, it probably would be pretty easy to trigger outright insanity if we mess with neurochemical expression too much but it actually seems that a lot of the switches have really muted effects. So rather than “superintelligence”, I think its quite possible to edit for minor, but real benefits.
If the brain was so fragile that any edits caused vast destruction, well, we wouldn’t probably exist as humans. There’s a heck of lot of hormonal and artificial impacts on the brain these days. Heaven knows how much psychoactive stuff gets through our blood-brain barrier. We’ve mostly managed to not be freaking nutcases in spite of that.
Testing in rats will be difficult, however, there are closer human analogues such as monkeys, and since clones of them exist now, that actually allows pretty good experimental and control groups
Not sure why you’re so fanatical about CRISPR being a sign of a low-information reader. Its a lot more practical/cheaper than previous methods, so its not surprising that its considered a big deal.
embryo editing for IQ?
You bring up cost factors in some of your other categories, but not here? You’re talking about a world that still strongly embraces a culture that includes abortion. But even these ‘rights’ and the related costs are being viewed more and more as services that could be removed. Although the idea has more merit than abortion, I can foresee the SJW’s demand that any such benefits be accessible to all in society. Taxes are already spiraling out of control – who’s going to pay the bill?
Radical life extension?
What overall good would this serve society? Obviously you’re not talking about a vibrant or productive 100 yer old. Going from 85 to 110 adds another 25 years of of social welfare payments. Other than a few eccentric intellectuals or artists, who will be interested in working after 85 (actually 55)? Many older workers today in industrial countries are already patchworks of medical maintenance programs living on pain killers, opioids and various anti-depressants -they want out, but can’t afford to retire.
I predict the opposite. Upper middle class Westerners will furiously denounce IQ boosting treatments or even the idea that intelligence is biological in public while in private they’ll get their kids boosted.
This is the way it already works with eg. Down’s syndrome which can be tested during pregnancy. Upper middle class liberals are the first to denounce bigotry against the disabled but they’re also the first to abort a Down’s syndrome baby. The women who give birth to Down’s syndrome babies in the West are not SJWs, they’re fundamentalist Christians.
Those leftists who are less about signaling and more about controlling people’s lives of course won’t just demand that eugenics will be available to everyone, they’ll demand that it be imposed on the whole population – those Christian bigots better stop giving birth to stupid babies. Given their moral premises they’re already stuck with the choice of either denying biological differences or supporting a ruthless state enforced eugenics program.
Those denying intelligence differences now will be the first ones demanding state-subsidized intelligence-boosting genetic treatments. The hypocrisy is maddening.
[Median prediction for the emergence of “high level machine intelligence” according to various groups of AI experts clusters around 2040-50]
15 years away in 1970, 30 years away now. Progress!
[transhumanism was of course invented in the Russian Empire]
Like another great idea, bolshevism.
This post will be fun to laugh at in the future, if it survives.
Most of the things you mentioned are indeed good things that do not fall within the strict definition of transhumanism, which is the final stage of liberalism where humanity itself is optional (after gender, nationality and everything else has become optional).
You may be surprised. It may turn out that the push for transhumanism is driven precisely by religious fundamentalists and leftists.
Here is an interesting quote from the Gnostic gospel of Thomas:
“and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom.”
And another one:
“”If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty.””
GWAS is a quantitative analysis. The DNA come from various sources such as the cheek cells in the syliva which will normally swallowed and destroy in the stomach, and will not do anything to the general genome.
From this your understanding of such matters can be estimated and the relevance of your comments on CRISPR be considered.
Shouldn’t artificial intelligence make humanity obsolete? Leaving the moral issues aside, who will bother with “embryo editing” when the likely result is the same unemployable human being? Extending life doesn’t make much economic sense, since human work performance tends to degrade as the body ages.
Human body is rather fragile and inflexible platform. It doesn’t lend itself naturally to major “upgrades”. Devising a new platform, ideally suited for its task, would be the more practical solution in most situations. So instead of human colonies on Mars, we could have drones mining asteroids in space. Their shape and form will be optimised to maximise their productivity. They can be safely scrapped, when they become obsolete, without any moral discussions involved.
Actually, I’m surprised we haven’t dispensed with human spaceflight by now. There seems to be some sentimental value behind it. What kind of “scientific experiments” astronauts at ISS perform, that cannot be done by machines at this point?
Instead of cities, we can have mines. Instead of apples we can have oranges. Wat.
You want humanity to stay confined to Earth forever?
Organics are actually really efficient and like in my earlier comment, its possible that we might not be able to replicate flexible intelligence anytime soon. Maybe if there’s some sort of bio-bot someday?
Actually, it was invented by religious obscurantists thousands of years ago. In in its Orthodox Christian form, transhumanism is called theosis, and is incomparably more ambitious.
But nowadays you are some kind of Nazi if you want to do a proper study to see if certain sacred abnormalities might have an environmental cause.
While I fully agree that “it was invented by religious obscurantists thousands of years ago” (what I quoted from the gnostic texts are direct references and descriptions of transhumanism imo), the Orthodox Christian idea of theosis has nothing to do with transhumanism, unless you think that God is some supercomputer. Which may be possible, a Bolzmann brain from a previous universe creating this one, but even then there are a lot of options for the nature of said Bolzmann brain. It has to be similar to our computers, and similarly alien to human consciousness, for the comparison between theosis and transhumanism to hold.
Planetary colonies like Musk’s are false progress, space habitats are true progress.
That’s not gonna happen either. I thought you said you opposed such nonsense?
I am only opposed to planetary space colonies.
The modern Russian Orthodox Church is strongly against transhumanism, probably more so than any other major world religion apart from Islam: https://medium.com/open-longevity-eng/patriarch-kirill-preaches-against-transhumanism-e6e1e9d16ef8
Though FGM is just fine and dandy (according to the learned Vsevolod Chaplin).
That is indeed quite a change from a century ago, when Orthodox theologians played a large role in creating Russian cosmism.
OTOH, the Russian Orthodox Church a century ago wasn’t run by Chekists and cigarette smugglers.
I was a bit surprised by the negative comments about space colonisation in the other thread.
The way I see it there are three possibilities:
It succeeds and we reap the benefits.
It doesn’t succeed and we gain secondary technological knowledge.
It becomes a beautiful vanity project and takes away money that would have been wasted anyway.
I was being glib, but if you take “transhuman” literally, I would think it should simply mean fundamentally transcending human limitations as we know them, and has nothing a priori to do
with artificial intelligence. Ultimately an artificial super-intelligence would still be subject to the laws of thermodynamics, which is one way that these sci-fi scenarios are less ambitious than theosis.
I was being partly glib and partly serious, but there are two separate issues here: one is the current official position of the Russian Orthodox Church about some particular social issues, which may be more or less poorly informed and subject to change, and the other is the fundamental conception of human and divine nature in Orthodox theology. While embryo selection is simply a no-go from the view point of the latter, I see no reason to oppose gene-editing (say via viral vectors)
in people born the old-fashioned way. It’s not fundamentally different from an organ transplant, and in the long-run might turn out to be less risky.
You are of course right though that if selecting embryos for various desirable traits does become feasible, then if those who don’t do it for whatever reason become endogamous, they will become untermenschen and will have to build their own separate societies, like the Amish. I can imagine, though, that there will be a transition period when there is mixing between those who have been selected and those who have not, and some equilibrium will occur once all gains have been had from embryo selection.
I’d be interested in any references you can provide for pre-revolutionary theologians and Russian cosmism.
When we went for the first ultra-sound with my daughter, we were offered to do a test for Down syndrome. I wasn’t against the test as such, but we had to make a decision on the spot, and there was not sufficient information to make an informed decision. Being Christian bigots, there wasn’t much to be gained, since we weren’t going to abort the baby anyway. But “no thank you” was not sufficient to decline the offer, and we had to refuse it multiple times.
Yes to atomic power, atomic spaceships and even atomic trains and planes.
Yes to radical life extension and stopping or significantly slowing down aging.
Yes to Sub-Turing AIs/expert systems
Yes to space colonization, rotating habitats, solar system colonization, stellasers, Dyson spheres, colonizing the Oort cloud once we have fusion, interstellar colonization, intergalactic colonization, moving nearby galaxies together with Shkadov thrusters so that humanity’s descendants have as much matter and energy available as possible once the other galaxies recede beyond the event horizon due to the Universe expansion.
No to “mind uploading”.
No to “strong AIs” that 1. won’t have a soul and 2. will be incredibly powerful without us hoping to understand how they even work.
We are already unable to understand how current AI systems (image recognition, etc) actually work. We know how machine learning works, but not how the end result works and thinks.
Some carbon fascism would be good.
The thinking that we need to create a strong AI in order to unleash technological wonders is flawed – we already live in a society that is far beyond the capabilities of a single human brain, no matter how intelligent, to create. And we already have the technology to do fantastic things, like project Orion for example, but not just that.
Humanity has a lot of work to do on itself, a lot of room for improvement even with no gene editing or technology at all – before we turn to some golem created without understanding in order to solve our problems for us.
do you feel like she is still able to lead a fulfilling life despite her disability?
I will pray for you and your kid, although I’m sure you guys are doing fine.
I am against any effort to radically alter the human body and transhumanists and cyborg advocates should be assasinated.
I don’t see how your opinion differs that much from mine? You call them ‘leftists’ and I call them SJW’s, but they’re all basically one and the same. And we both agree that they’ll be the ones promoting these techniques. I was only questioning where the funds were going to come from to implement such medical treatments?
You do bring up an interesting point regarding how Christian ethicists will accept these methods in this brave new world? If you click on the last portal ‘invented’ at the end of the piece, you’ll read how the Russian Orthodox church seems to embrace some sort of earlier version of transhumanism called Russian cosmism:
You’ll note, however, that a citation is needed. Perhaps, Karlin can provide us with one?…
You know, maybe Talha is right: you are only pretending to be a thug. Thank you for your concern, but I should have clarified: we declined the test, and it turned out to be irrelevant anyway, since my daughter is healthy and intelligent. The point of my comment was that indeed you are treated like some kind of weirdo if you don’t want to do such a test. In our case, if we were convinced in advance that the test was essentially risk free, then we would have done it to give us more chance to prepare ourselves in case of a child with Down’s.
But I have known a number of families having a child with Down’s, and they do indeed live fulfilling lives. In all the cases I’ve known, such children are kind and affectionate and very much loved by those around them (both family and friends of family). Really, I don’t see any problem at all with having a child with Down’s, so long as you also have some normal children who can make you some grand babies.
By the way, why in the hell is this Mikhail Batin fellow complaining about Patriarch Kirill in Medium? No one outside of the Russian Orthodox Church cares what the Russian Patriarch thinks, not even Orthodox people from other patriarchates.
My comment beginning “I was being partly glib” was supposed to be a reply to AK’s comment beginning “The modern Russian Orthodox Church”.
Organics are not efficient, they are adapted to their environment after millions of years of evolution. Introduce a minor change to the environment and organics break down. Consider all these unfortunate sea animals, eating plastic floating in water, because they mistake it for food. They are not efficient enough to prevent themselves from dying out. That’s just one example of how technological change is putting organics out of business.
Yes. I’m talking about practical, commercial ways to make use of the solar system’s resources as opposed to science fiction fantasy. The costs of keeping human beings alive in space are really astronomic. They are also unnecessary. If we ever get serious about exploring space it will be done by drones/robots. Every type of economic activity will be better performed by robots.
I don’t think he was suggesting using organics instead of drones for mining asteroids.
However, the human brain weighs 1.3 kg, consumes 20 watts of power and has a low estimate of computing ability to be around 38 petaflops. A comparable supercomputer consumes megawatts of power and weighs tons. The high estimate for the computing power of the brain is 1 exaflop, and no exaflop supercomputer is close to being created yet.
Your daughter isn’t Lebanese.
…
Can somebody with Down’s still have children of their own? Would they pass it on to their own child? Are they able to live independently when they grow up?
I do know that my bro told me that when my sister in law was pregnant that they would have aborted the child have the test said it had Downs. He told me they had never discussed it but he just thought that was what they would do. It is pretty fucked up when you think about it but that’s liberals for you, I guess.
Nothing I said is fantasy, up to and including moving whole galaxies, which only takes astronomical timelines and efforts but is otherwise quite low tech.
Costs are only astronomical for political reasons. There is nothing more practical than an Orion spaceship but we’re not using those only because of inadequate social and political development.
And once we have an orbital ring, transporting materials and people to and from Earth will be incredibly cheap and incredibly clean.
That’s just a strange thing to say – having “all eggs in one basket” and stagnant population, instead of colonizing the solar system and other stars.
OT
I know that Orbán isn’t flawless, but for the leader of an EU country the ideological components of his speech is quite interesting.
http://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-minister-viktor-orban-s-speech-at-the-29th-balvanyos-summer-open-university-and-student-camp
It’s not very radical on its own, but the fact that it is being said at such a high level from within the EU is lightening.
But I don’t know how popular the Christian part is – maybe the national part is more popular?
Check the Romanian, Slovak and Ukrainian press to see just how popular Orban’s pronouncements are. Yeah, I’m sure that Bucharest, Bratislava and Kyiv are chomping at the bit to rebuild a Greater Hungary for Orban. 🙂
There’s real tension between the Christian and national elements, given how fanatically pro-open borders most churches today are (just look at how vehemently the Catholic church attacks Salvini in Italy). But I understand why Orban’s emphasizing Christianity, otherwise the accusations of “fascism” against him would probably be even harsher.
But that just means they don’t like Hungarian nationalism, it doesn’t necessarily mean they oppose nationalism in their own countries.
Brilliant! I think that you’ve got it!
People for the most part seem to dislike the nationalisms of other nations. There are exceptions but that is the general rule.
Interesting that both in Western countries where religious institutions are connected to the state and countries where there is supposed to be separation between State and Religion, there is little difference between support for liberal causes.
In Poland maybe one can win elections by appealing to Middle-aged Catholics, I don’t think that works very well in more secular places.
Orbán is probably too tainted for handshakeworthy people to ever change their minds about him, but yes, there are degrees of hostility.
My point was that since European countries are in general rather secular it is unlikely that Christian electoral rhetoric will be that successful – pointing out ethnic issues and multicultural failures is more concrete and focuses more on people’s concerns.
I don’t believe in democracy, but for those who are concerned with gaining power through elections it is important to have effective campaigning – which is imperative if Orbán wants more allies to gain power in Europe.
I’m not sure about that. My impression is that Orban is trying to appeal to some kind of cultural Christianity which might be acceptable even to many secular people, in the sense of “Christianity has deeply influenced our societies and we need to respect its heritage – and other religions, especially Islam, shouldn’t be allowed to usurp its place”. Even if one has severe misgivings about many aspects of Christianity (like I do), one can’t deny its profound influence on European civilization.
The problem with this approach imo isn’t so much anti-religious sentiment of secular right-wingers, but that the dominant view of the churches and also of many Christian laymen in much of Europe has become uncompromising pro-open borderism and condemnation of any national sentiment as quasi-pagan and incompatible with the Christian message.
According to
https://www.downs-syndrome.org.uk/for-new-parents/faqs/general/
people with Down syndrome can reproduce with difficulty, but there is a high chance of passing it on to their children. Actually, I don’t understand how two people with Down syndrome could fail to pass it on, but maybe it’s possible since Down syndrome is caused by an extra 21st chromosome appearing in some early cell division, rather than something missing. Anyhow, seems too risky to me. I accept life’s difficulties when they come to you, but there is no point to go looking for them. Besides, I’ve never met a person with Downs syndrome who seems capable of taking care of a baby.
Sometimes, however, they are able to more or less take care of themselves when they grow up, with some assistance. In this case, I think, they usually live in some kind of group-home nearby their families.
There’s only one solution:
Most plants convert around 25-33 percentage of incoming energy to usable energy, often under harsh conditions, regenerating damage. The best solar panels are 17-20 percentage with high complexity and sensitivity, and do not self-recover.
I’m not sure who his message was meant to reach? If it’s not the neighboring East European countries, as I seem to have successfully suggested, then who? The Germans, the Belgians who are constantly bellyaching about the evils of Hungarian nationalism and their wanton disregard for Brussels dictates to accept more Middle Eastern refugees?
Things you can do right now to maximize your healthy lifespan:
• LCHF diet
• Maximize nutrient density in said diet (red meat, seafood, offal, and dark leafy greens for you vegetable worshipping fags)
• Avoid industrial seed oils
• Intermittent fasting
• Weight lifting
• High intensity interval training
• Keep your ferritin levels low (certain supplements help, but the easiest is giving blood)
• Sleep properly
• Regular exposure to sunlight, ideally in the middle of the day, when it’s not winter
• Moderate consumption of alcohol, ideally dry red wine
• Live at high altitude
Supplements
• Berberine
• IP6/phytic acid
• Curcumin
• Vitamin D (oil-based) paired with Vitamin K2 in the winter
• Resveratrol
• Lithium
Other supplements can be useful in the event of deficiencies (magnesium, zinc, selenium, and omega 3 deficiencies are common). There are also some good supplements to improve your workouts (l-citrulline is highly effective and dirt cheap).
If you’re a multivitamin cuck, make sure to get a non-iron multivitamin.
Pharmaceuticals/controlled substances
• Metformin
• HGH (maybe–possible it enlarges the heart, but seems it does not if you keep ferritin low)
Quality comment.
Even older than that. Genetic engineering still uses the same basic approach as it has done since its invention in the early 70s.
why non iron?
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/08/combining-agex-osin-biotech-and-rejuvenate-bio-for-huge-antiaging.html
That’s patently not true. TALENs were comparable to the original CRISPR but the subsequent refinements to the latter improved fidelity by ~ two orders of magnitude. The CRISPR hype is still bullshit but for very different reasons than the ones you mention.
Apart from Vitamin D and possibly lithium, these are all snake oils as far as the real-life outcomes are concerned.
If you live in an industrialized country the odds of not getting enough iron from your diet are very low. Especially in the USA where all cereals are fortified with iron by law. Vegetarians in countries that don’t fortify cereals with iron (e.g. Denmark) are presumably at risk and would benefit from iron supplementation, but then vegetarians deserve to be rounded up and shot.
Iron accumulates in your blood. And iron-oxidizing bacteria require iron to multiply.
A number of the supplements I mentioned inhibit iron absorption, as incidentally does dairy.
But by the far the best way to get your ferritin level down is to give blood. And in the process you may save a life.
Note that if you’re female and have not gone through menopause there’s no reason to be concerned about your ferritin levels. It’s quite possible this explains part of the male/female longevity gap.
Superintelligence deriving not from human brain emulation but from simple progress in algorithms seems to be missing from this discussion. And I’d say that’s what’s coming; and everything therefore depends on the value system that the algorithms pursue.
The “biophoton redshift” paper, with its claimed correlation between organism intelligence and biophoton spectrum, leaves me suspicious, and I say that as someone who does place a high likelihood on quantum effects in the brain being relevant to consciousness. From what I understand, they take room-temperature slices of brain from various species, infuse them with the neurotransmitter glutamate, and measure weak emissions of photons with an apparatus of their own design. The claim is that each species has a characteristic wavelength of emission, and that the higher the intelligence, the redder the photons. I’m very skeptical, this sounds like someone’s pet theory and I suspect confirmation bias at work somehow.
US exascale HPC is allegedly scheduled to be on line in 2021.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/07/hpe_exaflops_memory_sharing/
From past results US performance jumped 6X in 6 years while that for China double in 3 years, both are expected to reach exascale within 10 years.
The ‘redshift’ by Zhuo Wang, Niting Wang, Zehua Li, Fangyan Xiao, and Jiapei Dai looks like crap. A fatal combination of wishful thinking combined with poor methodology.
It sounds kind of like religious superstitions.
Sleeping properly – advice for old men, teenage girls and dead people.
Vodka, cognac, whisky, shochu – less impurities, does not make you sleepy in the office.
And KFC?
Tea, coffee, nicotine gum, usually before bed,
Orban’s speech and “philosophical distinctions”, sounds kind of retarded and aimed for a more uneducated segment of society (which I guess is a lot of his voters).
But Orban’s actions, and policy mix seem quite good, and Hungary is obviously doing well in recent few years. It’s a country which (along with Czech Republic and Poland) – probably economically catching up with a few Western European countries soon.
You can also emphasize politicians in Hungary, have to fill their speech somehow (even with trying to create some exciting ideological drama which does not match logically).
It is a small and peaceful country, not a superpower or even regional power – so the politicians do not have many exciting things to talk about otherwise.
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Offtopic, but looking again backwards at Trump’s introductionary comments when transcribed. It was all nice comments and reasonable – but lol this guy is really talking to Putin like it’s two kids in a school nursery area.
Anatoly, do you believe that average IQs for various countries are going to stop increasing once the average is around 175 (by today’s norms; IQ tests are routinely re-normed to 100)?
If not, do you think that there is any ceiling for average IQs for various countries if one uses things such as gene editing of embryos?
Also, as a side note, the more intelligent countries should be kind and charitable and thus help the less intelligent countries by paying for IQ-enhancing technologies to be introduced and commercialized there. It would be a lot more charitable and a lot less harmful form of aid to Third Worlders than open borders (which would severely harm the West) would be.
I think Orbán is hoping for a kind of gradual flip to nationalists in West European countries like in Italy or Austria.
I find it both amusing and exasperating at the frequency in which newspapers and politicians from small European countries (which is really most of them) condemn or praise events in USA, Russia, China, Pakistan etc. which doesn’t concern them and act as if their opinion matters.
I don’t think he is stupid – but likely he is beginning to become senile. It would explain his love for superlatives, tendency for repetition and sometimes engaging in ackward wording.
I don’t know maybe? I am not a Musk dick sucking fanboy(unlike almost all of his followers) but if he can really get the launch costs as low as he implies he can for the BFR then it may be possible. Profitable? Well except for asteroid mining that may take centuries regardless of how low you can get the launch costs down to.
Conscious or unconscious zombies are still zombies. The consciousness problem might be a problem that will remain unsolved. The best we can think of within the materialist framework that it is an epiphenomenon which has no causal function. In this sense we are all zombie insisting on having consciousness.
Using very pretentious phrases like “my main concern” or “I would second” is not a proof of consciousness even in rudimentary Turing test’s term.
Quantum interactions have been found in plants as well:
https://io9.gizmodo.com/new-evidence-that-plants-get-their-energy-using-quantum-1498695627
I’m not about to jump on anything with consciousness and quantum effects, but I think there’s good evidence that quantum phenomena interacts with aspects of biological processes in nontrivial ways now. It doesn’t seem impossible that it has some interaction with information processing in neurons.
Thanks. I do not know. I always was assuming that quantum effects must be involved in photosynthesis as in any molecular reaction that consumes photons. I do not know enough to assess the significance of this research. What does it really change? I guess the key phrase is “nontrivial ways.”
If I’m a mother who, say, wanted my daughter to give me a bunch of grandchildren, could we select for a the trait or suite of traits that would lead the daughter to want lots of children and to have the capability to nurture them?
If I’m a government official concerned about the future defense of my nation, could we find a way to select for the traits that would make someone want to be a soldier and to be good at it and force/incentivize a certain portion of our population to select for them?
If we can do those sorts of things, I think we will. Yes, most parents will want smart children, but they’ll also want other things, and once we get to the point of “smart enough” they will make the trade offs to get those other traits, and I would imagine governments would as well.
Improving the lot of human beings is the point of this, not maximizing efficiency. Are you an economist by any chance? You seem to have the same blind spot.
Barban et al. (2016), Genome-wide analysis identifies 12 loci influencing human reproductive behavior. Nature Genetics, 48(12), 1462-1472. doi: 10.1038/ng.3698
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PWSfWSb5KwE
“””The role of genetics in fertility and having kids”””
“Able to account for 1% of the variance. So dont hold your breath.”
The existence of quantum processes in human cognition is a red herring with regards to repairing and regeneration of human brains as well as emulating them in computers. Regardless of quantum or classical phenomenon, cognition is clearly based on the molecules underlying the neurobiology of the brain. Figure out how this works and you can repair and regenerate brains. With advanced enough computers (quantum computation) you should be able to emulate them as well.
Seasteading and space colonization are an issue of cost. Seasteading will be doable when the capital cost of fabricating deep ocean structures drop by a factor of 10 from current costs. China’s Broad Group is a step in the right direction with their prefabricated high rise buildings. Further developments needed are a means to “spin/grow/extrude” structural members in large quantities as well as the robotic assembly of such into large structures. The developments are feasible by 2040.
Politically, seasteads are no different than any other kind of city-state. Think of them as Singapore 2, Singapore 3……Singapore N. I see no reason why the rest of the world has any more problem with recognizing ocean city-states any more than it had with recognizing Singapore 1 in 1965.
Space colonization will be a lot longer in coming. Freeman Dyson wrote detailed the need for space colonization being self-financing in his article “Pilgrims, Saints, and Spacemen” in the September 1979 issue of L-5 News. In short, there really is no “product” or service that can be made in space and returned to Earth for profit. Thus, space colonization can only be done by self-financing groups. This requires that not only the space transportation costs drop, but also all of the cost associated with habitat construction (asteroid mining, materials fabrication, automated construction of the habitat itself, and biomeme creation) drop low enough such that those wanting to leave Earth can do so by financing it themselves. Dyson believed that synthetic biology (the biological version of nanotechnology) would be necessary to “grow”, rather than build habitats and everything in them. Perhaps advanced automation would be sufficient.
Either way, space colonization is a late 21st century game.
I don’t think Drexlerian (dry) nanotech is possible. But the biological equivalent, synthetic biology, certainly is. This will be developed over a period of decades and will give us everything from new bodies (that do not age) to space habitats.
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For a billion dollars plus operating expenses 10,000 people could live comfortably and work efficiently on something like this:
http://www.beautifullife.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/18/what_is_the_largest_cruise_ship.jpg
The Sea Gypsies of Malaysia need much less to be one of the happiest people on this blue planet:
https://www.natgeomedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/fish-sea-bajau-malaysia_82428_990x742.jpg
https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2604/4151693456_63b7cfd221_b.jpg
http://gezginlerkulubu.org/wp-content/uploads/Denizle-ici-ice-yasayanlar-denizde-yasayan-insanlar-bajau-filipinler-2.jpg
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XxbKM6cokI4/maxresdefault.jpg
Just curious, how does high altitude help?
Seasteading significantly implies some form of legal autonomy, but there’s no real way to avoid that since its ultimately based on force. Any significant state entity can bring a seastead or cruise ship to heel.
This wasn’t always the case: pirate ports occasionally existed basically built from scratch such as Nassau and Ile Ste. Marie. In the case of Ile Ste. Marie, natives were present but the tribes helped them since it really didn’t matter who the pirates were hurting.
But eventually the long reach of the state meant that immunity from any state laws has increasingly become only the province of another powerful state entity.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/08/evolution-chose-to-turn-off-most-regenerative-capacity-at-the-embyonic-stage-but-we-can-choose-to-turn-it-back-on.html