These are the rest of the posts made 9/14/10 to the No Bad Memes blog. These are here for archival and research purposes.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Progress is neither linear nor exponential
There are two progress lines to track for our society:
1. Finite implementations: technology, medicine, economics. This progress line is non-linear. However, it's not really exponential per se, either; it's more like a tree with divergent branches, some increasing, others decreasing, others still remaining unchanged.
For example, technological progress has been, on the whole, exponential, but with this 'progress' has come nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, and social malaise. Radiation poisoning, the bubonic plague, asbestos, slavery, coercion, and eye strain are problems that hunter-gatherers never had to contend with. Likewise, we generally don't have to worry about many of the ills of hunter-gatherers, like ticks or living with fractures. Cause and effect is nowhere near as simple as most make it out to be, and there is always the possibility that a new finite problem will come to occupy the niche of a previous finite problem that has since been solved.
2. Continuous problems: the human brain as it generates bad ideas/memes, cultural preconceptions, and genetically motivated desires and preferences. This progress line is actually the parent of the former, but has hardly changed in over fifty thousand years. We may now understand that slavery is a bad idea, but most of us have a long way to go before we realize that life is an intrinsically negative phenomenon with no purpose or mediator. For the most part, the 'problems' described by the former progress line deal with means to an end, while this progress line deals more with our actual values, reasons for existing, and other ends. If we fix these -- and somehow have absolute knowledge that they are fixed for good -- then we'll have fixed everything.
Posted by Leaving Society at 8:57 PM No comments:
A simple question concerning our society
If you're worried that a society lacking ownership, property, trade, money, hierarchy, laws, etc. wouldn't work: does the current system 'work'? Better to go with a system that might work than one that demonstrably doesn't.
Of course, any new system of this sort would require a complete overhaul of how individuals are conditioned, and would only work if all permitted citizens had passed the necessary tests. This is unlikely to ever happen.
Posted by Leaving Society at 7:25 PM No comments:
Pleasant illusions vs. harsh reality
Ever notice that most people hold worldviews that are not only static and finite, but extremely pleasant as well? This, to me, seems an absurd coincidence; there are thousands of competing, concretely defined belief systems, and all of them just so happen to have pleasant connotations. Obviously, they can't all be accurate, but what if none of them are? What if they're all pleasant not because the universe tends toward pleasantness (the warm biome to freezing cold, oxygen-less space ratio is astronomical), but because they were all adopted under the modus operandi of confirmation bias? If such a meme selector is the primary determinant for which belief systems get adopted, as is implied by at least some belief systems being adopted in this manner while all of them share the quality of pleasantness, then perhaps most people are only interested in what feels good -- not in reality.
Just a thought.
Posted by Leaving Society at 6:03 PM No comments:
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