Ship of Fools: Why Transhumanism is the Best Bet to Prevent the Extinction of Civilization MetaNexus (hat tip reader Francois T)
Undersea river discovered flowing on sea bed Telegraph (hat tip John M). From last week, still cool.
Gee Whiz: Human Urine Is Shown to Be an Effective Agricultural Fertilizer Scientific American (hat tip reader Francois T)
Stephan Salisbury, Extremism at Ground Zero (Again) Tom Englehardt
Pyxified, Merrill’s subprime sink FT Alphaville
The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It Democracy Now (hat tip reader Stephen V).
State Dept. faces skyrocketing costs as it prepares to expand role in Iraq Washington Post
Has Obama Run Out of Economic Options? Michael Hirsh, Newsweek
Can Gas ‘Fracking’ Pollute Groundwater? Unlikely. Christopher Helman, Forbes (hat tip reader Doug S). An unusually ham-handed effort to pass off corporate shilldom as journalism. The author has been with Forbes for 12 years, mainly covering Big Oil. His dismissive post cites a single study, performed by a Halliburton sub, and his only other sources are oil company execs.
Wells Fargo Loses Ruling on Overdraft Fees New York Times.
US regulators tighten control over Wall St risk Financial Times. Maybe this is just coincidence, but this comes just after Chris Whalen’s blistering attack on the NY Fed putting a “technically incompetent” examiner in charge of bank supervision.
MBIA Says It Will Have C.M.B.S. Losses Floyd Norris, New York Times.
Structural unemployment is a new problem, needing new solutions Gavyn Davies
Short sellers and liberal reformers unite John Dizard, Financial Times
Antidote du jour:
42 comments
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RE: first link: “I want to explore the objection that transhumanism is an ill-advised experiment because it puts us at unnecessary risk. My reply will be that creating posthumans is our best bet for avoiding harm. In a nutshell, the argument is that even though creating posthumans may be a very dangerous social experiment, it is even more dangerous not to attempt it: technological advances mean that there is a high probability that a human-only future will end in extinction.”
see: http://geaugailluminati.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/the-human-race-is-almost-finished/
Re: it is even more dangerous not to attempt it
KeyRyst, I am so sick of “adult” intellectuals taking about human nature. Any line of philosophical “reasoning” that doesn’t directly address the problem of the sociopaths having an evolutionary edge is pointless.
Assuming that creating a new “transhuman” was even a possibility, the nicely placed “ISM” on the end of the word wouldn’t automatically make the result “good” (as the word implies; transhumanISM = eat love and pray; oooommmmmm). All these bozos would accomplish would be the creation of a new super-race of sociopaths. And why is THAT? Because (you innocent simpletons) the sociopaths would run the damn program to begin with, because the liberals would end-up wanting it government funded – and the sociopaths OWN the government. Loot attracts sociopaths like poop attracts flies!
This is why liberals aggravate me so much. The problems are simple. They’ve got enough intelligence to solve the problems, but they don’t have enough intelligence to see THE problem. The liberals should be working on improving social system (ie government) such that it lowers the probability of the sociopaths winning (you can’t get the probability to zero, but Christ you don’t have to increase (!) the odds with every goofy-ass liberal idea). Nothing else needs be done.
These bullshit fantasies of transhumanism are worse than doing nothing; it’s the equivalent of the Libertarian fantasy of Anne Rand coming back from the dead – wielding her righteous sword of Libertarian Justice – and vanquishing all the socialist.
I’m sick of it, I tell ya! Sick of it.
I am quite confident the problems are not simple.
I am also quite confident that the overwhelmingly complex *systems* of human society and interaction contain many curbs on sociopaths that you have not considered. In your simple world, all predator species would quickly make all prey species extinct, when in fact you see wide fluctuations in predator and prey populations over time. Sorry, sir, world just don’t work the way your simple mind (or my simple mind) conceives that it does. You can get as angry as you want, but your anger looks silly to someone who has figured out that you don’t know what you think you know.
The prey outnumber the predators by large margins. Of course, the number of prey increases in years of plenty and the number of predators increases in kind. The cycle reverses during lean years.
The same pattern can be seen in the boom bust cycles of capitalisim. During rich years (easy credit) the number of saps (prey) increase and lots of them are eager to sign on the dotted line, the number of predators increase to offer a pen to the saps and say ‘sign here’, they give saps no doc, no down, alt a loans, second mortgages, and bundle those loans and slice them into tranches for sale to more saps owning retirement accounts or to saps across the seas, etc. As credit for this activity dries up, or the pool of saps (prey) diminishes, the predators temporarily move on to become used car salesmen, shoe shine boys, or telemarketers…but the predators are biding their time, waiting for the next wave of easy credit to lure more saps… which they will feast on.
Re: I am also quite confident that the overwhelmingly complex *systems* of human society and interaction contain many curbs on sociopaths that you have not considered.
Overwhelmingly complex?!! This is the same argument that the political types use when justifying the economic policies of their pet economist (say Krugman or the Supply Siders). Ooohhh, “economics is VERY hard”.
It’s NOT overwhelmingly complex, and economics isn’t very hard. It IS hard, though, if basic human psychology is ignored (eg, Assuming I pull an assumption out of my ass that all humans are rational, if follow that…). The history of the world is (in a nutshell) the sociopaths manipulating (and usually eventually killing) the dumbasses (which are also the lessor sociopaths) for fun and profit.
The liberals are society’s only hope of controlling the sociopaths but they’ve got (at least) to admit they exist and stop helping them win.
And yes, I know, the predators feast on each other too. It’s part of the process. The best sociopaths feed on the less-best.
NOTaREALmerican; by your response i can see you didnt even attempt to read my post; i took all your objections and postulates into consideration beforehand and dealt with them….quoting:
“further distorting & obscuring our ability to design a viable replacement species may be that some of the behavioral patterns now called criminal or psychopathic
are actually manifestations of neurological traits of the human life form that have allowed for the collective survival of the species up till this point in time…psychotic individuals have been on the vanguard of many of the species frontiers; the meek masses & their leaders may be psychoparasitic, and be unable to change or survive on their own without this vanguard to show the way…it is a delicate symbiotic machinery we will be being tampered with, with many variables and unknowns, but if we felt there was any other way, we would not be advancing this direction…”
Ok. As Sponge Bob says: Good luck with that.
(And watch out for the sociopaths).
What is this “Civilization” and why must we protect it? It doesn’t seem like it’s been working well lately.
Culture is probably more preservation worthy than civilizaton – I am thinking Bonobo primate culture, before we became Homo Not-So-Sapiens Not-So-Sapiens.
Reporter: “So what do you think of Western Civilization?”
M.K. Gandhi: “Oh, I think it would be a good idea.”
I recently watched the “Gasland” documentary. It seems clear that the whole process of fracing is dirty and risky. The so-called “Halliburton Exemption” from the clean water and clean air acts is itself an admission that the process fouls water tables and the air. Guilty demeanor, ahead of the crime.
That entire article can be revealed to be total horseshit in 30 seconds of video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRZ4LQSonXA&feature=related
“Human Urine Is Shown to Be an Effective Agricultural Fertilizer”: which is why the keen gardener (or her husband)pees on his compost heap of a summer’s evening. Can “scientists” publish any old well known stuff and pass it off as new?
Thanks to poo powered brains, we now realize how useful human urine is.
Agreed. The natives here in Africa have known this for centuries. Result: Beautiful natural fruits, produced without western chemicals. No scientists required. BV
And what makes you think the Africans who developed this technique were being unscientific? You don’t need white lab coats or even peer reviewed journals to be scientific.
Falsifiable hypothesis: pissing in the fruit grove yields a better crop.
Field study: piss in some fields and not in others. Try it under a variety of conditions.
Result: pissing in the fruit grove generally yields a better crop. Let’s pass it on as useful wisdom.
That is an entirely scientific approach.
Excellent point. The creation of maize did not involve a single white lab jacket or pen protector, but surely was science.
As Solomon said…”There is nothing new under the sun”…
“The Egyptian hieroglyph for fuller is two legs standing in water; this fact and the paintings of Pompeii show that the materials, both new cloths and laundry, were pounded by stamping them with the feet. Soap being unknown, nitron was added to the water, a substance identical with soda. Clothes cleaned by the fullers were therefore known to the Greeks as nitrumena. Human and animal urine was also frequently used. Urine which had stood for a week or two formed a kind of liquid soap with the fat contained in the textiles. The Roman fullers gleaned their supply of urine from large earthen jars which were placed at quiet corners for the use of passers-by.”
“Can “scientists” publish any old well known stuff and pass it off as new?”
As long as it hasn’t been documented in a scientific publication before, yes. Anecdote and common wisdom are useful sources of hypotheses, but you have to actually DO the experiment to have real evidence for or against the hypothesis. It’s not, believe it or not, acceptable in the scientific community to say “well, everyone knows x” or “we could have predicted x, therefore we don’t need to do the experiment”.
A good example is antimalarial drugs. Artemisinin was documented as an effective antimalarial in a thousand-year-old-plus Chinese herbal medicine treatise. It was “rediscovered” by science a couple of decades ago by subjecting the folk wisdom recorded in that treatise to scientific examination, and is now widely used as an effective antimalarial. Would you have preferred that we simply accepted everything written down by some Chinese herbalist centuries ago as medically useful fact, because it’s “old well known stuff”?
Perhaps or perhaps no with your example.
But it is not always the case you need scientific proof to act.
Here is an example.
People have, for as long as we can remember, helped the less fortunate in the tribe, without knowing why. Then, scientists explain that in terms of improving the tribe’s chances to pass on its collective genes, or something like that.
But you don’t really need to know that or have it demonstrated scientifically the benefits for you to act.
So, if urine worked before, there is no reason not to continue, uless we are talking about some different urine – not the traditionall, ‘organic’ urine from our drinking and eating organic stuff, but some new urine from our digesting and imbibing chemical-infested food and drinks, courtesy of ‘science’ and its cousin, ‘technology.’
Science is needed when we live in a world where science exists. That’s the trap. Science is not needed in a world balanced ‘naturally’ (before the arrival of Homo Not-So-Sapiens Not-So-Sapiens) where you suffer pain and death as a natural part of existence.
You may laugh at the small brain of a rat, but show me a bunch of unhappy rats, if you can.
The more you are addicted to the ‘solutions’ presented by science and technoloyg, the more you will need the pair to solve the problems caused by their ‘solutions.’
I see that as an addiction, maybe a Ponzi scheme.
The one thing people don’t do is to go back and see if Luddites were right – at least examine the possibilities. They prefer the history be etched in stone that the Luddites were and are wrong, forever. And a problem caused by science be solved with more science – never contemplating removing science from the problem. Where have we heard this criticism before – something about ‘the problem can not be the solution?’
I am open to see how scientists can demonstrate scientifically that science can solve all the problems we have today, that it is not just some ‘unscientific hope,’ becuase that would be unscientifically not cool.
Short of that, I am open to see how scientists can demonstrate scientifically that science is the ‘curretnly best available tool’ to bring about happiness. It would help the case if it can be shown that a scientific human is happier than, say, an unscientific bird or elephant.
And if happiness is too vague a measure and science has no answer for that unscientific object, I will ask, what good is science then – just a pursuit to keep us busy, going around the wheel like a hamster?
“I am open to see how scientists can demonstrate scientifically that science can solve all the problems we have today …”
Happily I know of no scientists that would make make such an idiotic claim. You’ve done nothing but setup a straw man.
MyLessThanPrimeBeef: “I see that as an addiction …”
It probably is, just like eating. Has eating ever cured your hunger? Of course not; it’s just a palliative.
“The one thing people don’t do is to go back and see if Luddites were right – at least examine the possibilities.”
I see people examine it all the time, for example on this site. Actually trying it is another matter. That’s rare. Do you want to try it? Give up electric lights, hot and cold running water, flush toilets, central heating and of course computers and the Internet. Let me know how it works out for you – by snail mail of course.
Alex: I see people examine it all the time, for example on this site. Actually trying it is another matter. That’s rare. Do you want to try it? Give up electric lights, hot and cold running water, flush toilets, central heating and of course computers and the Internet. Let me know how it works out for you – by snail mail of course
—–
That’s what I mean.
Talk and think about it, more than what has been done on this site. Talk about how to go about it…how to actually try it.
How to do away with flush toilets? I don’t know. But we should keep thinking and talking about it.
Just because you don’t know the answer should not stop you from talking about the problem; otherwise, we only talk about the problems we can solve and simply bury our heads in the sand with the problems we can’t solve.
“I am open to see how scientists can demonstrate scientifically that science can solve all the problems we have today …”
Happily I know of no scientists that would make make such an idiotic claim. You’ve done nothing but setup a straw man.
————-
I will make it simpler.
How does a scientist react to the statement that scientists are ‘hoping’ that they will solve today’s problems in the future? Is there something unscientific about scientists and hoping in one sentence? Should we expect something more concrete and have we been given that?
“You may laugh at the small brain of a rat, but show me a bunch of unhappy rats, if you can.”
Sure, just as soon as you show me a bunch of happy rats, if you can.
True confession time: I have no idea how to tell how happy or unhappy a rat is. What’s your secret?
As an aside, there’s some interesting work that’s recently been done in mice to generate a scale for measuring the amount of pain a mouse is experiencing from it’s facial expressions.
Paper here:
http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v7/n6/abs/nmeth.1455.html
Summary here:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/science/mice-show-pain-through-facial-expressions-research-finds/article1562345/
Oh, look how happy the fish is!
You are not a fish, how do you know?
Yes, but you’re not me, so how you don’t know I don’t know?
————
So goes the exchange in Zhuangzi.
You are not a rat, but you don’t know if rats are not unhappy. It’s assumption.
You are a human and you and I do know there are many unhappy humans. It’s a fact. People tell us so.
“You are not a rat, but you don’t know if rats are not unhappy. It’s assumption.”
If you want to argue epistemology, you’ll have to do better than this, I’m afraid.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re on about in your comments here- you seem to believe that the scientific method is unnecessary, or detrimental to the human experience. My comment had absolutely nothing to do with the relative merits of the scientific method versus other forms of truth-seeking. I was merely explaining why scientists actually do perform experiments to confirm seemingly obvious or common-sense hypotheses.
I just hope the panda in today’s antidote somehow ran into the camera ‘naturally’ as he wandered around his natural habitat and without human interference or design; otherwise it might be just too cute or too cruel for my taste.
Judging by the background, it seems to be the latter, unfortunately.
RE: “Ship of Fools: Why Transhumanism is the Best Bet to Prevent the Extinction of Civilization”
“True, it helps to have millions of dollars in equipment and a well-trained research team to conduct genetic experiments, but it is not necessary. Even as I write this, private citizens are using genetic technologies in their basements and their garages with no government oversight. This burgeoning movement is referred to as ‘biohacking’. For a few thousand dollars and a small room to work, one can become a biohacker.”
“Sometimes it is suggested that there are always survivors when a virus or some other pathogen attacks a population, and so even the worst form of bioterrorism will not kill off the human species. In response, it should be pointed out that it is simply empirically false that there is no evidence that pathogens can cause the extinction of a species.9 A bio-misanthropist who was worried that a virus was not virulent enough to wipe out the entire human population might be well-advised to create two or more viruses and release them simultaneously. Furthermore, it is not clear that one would need to kill every last human to effectively bring civilization to a halt for the foreseeable future.”
So some clowns tired of waiting for the ‘end time’ get tired of waiting and begin viral modification in their home workshops. They want to be whisked up to heaven RIGHT NOW, and they don’t mind taking the other 7,000,000,000 of us with them. I wonder if Darwin would consider this a normal step in human evolution?…the snapping of a tiny twig on a branch of the tree of idiots that walk upright.
We should really stop saying “unemployment” and start saying disemployment. Words should have some relation to reality, no?
Yves, perhaps you should link to this, in light of the discussion on public vs. private pay:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/income/2010-08-10-1Afedpay10_ST_N.htm
“Federal workers earning double their private counterparts”
Surely USA today is at least as credible as a leftist think-tank (CEPR).
Yves,
Would love to hear you or the MMT crowd respond to “U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don’t Even Know It: Laurence Kotlikoff”:
http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601010&sid=aiFjnanrDWVk
tyaresun
Great stuff here on the economy!!
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2010/08/feds-new-round-of-quantitative-easing.html#comment-form
Re: Fracking.
An excellent second opinion by Professor Anthony Ingraffea of Cornell University.
http://nyrad.org/videos.html
Re the food bubble:
It was part of the Washington consensus that “developing” countries should not just eliminate food subsidies to their malnourished populations, but also eliminate grain reserves. So terribly inefficient for stimulating market forces, you see.
But, er, pure market prices tend toward increasing volatility, and where volatility increases, speculators won’t be far behind. (There’s a reason developed nations once instituted agricultural subsidies, eh?)
Just another instance of idiot economists trading off sufficient redundancy to ensure stability for delusional expectations of “efficiency”.
It amazes me that this story hasn’t gotten more coverage. At least in America if the economy crashes or food prices go up, you’ll probably eat. You may loose your job, your home and your medical coverage, but at least you’ll eat. I’m not being sarcastic – in many parts of the world that’s not true.
Not only can you eat but you can wash your clothes in urine! Want to get on a ‘frugal’ board and impress them? You heard it here first…on NC!
Intelligence is completely irrelevant to major policy decisions. Such decisions are matters of judgment, and knowledgeable, ordinary citizens are just as capable of making these determinations as political leaders allegedly in possession of “secret information.” Such “secret information” is almost always wrong — and major decisions, including those pertaining to war and peace, are made entirely apart from such information in any case.
You, Too, Can and Should Be an “Intelligence Analyst”
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/08/you-too-can-and-should-be-intelligence.html
India trashes ‘superbug’ report, says it’s doctored
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/India-trashes-superbug-report-says-its-doctored/articleshow/6301982.cms