Agreed. But also, hive insects like bees and ants have been around for a long time, and continue to thrive.
I also believe this, but maybe because my model is based on my, human, experience? It does make me wonder how some creatures evolved so that the hive or colony becomes the ‘me’-unit.
Locus of selection matters. It’s important that in hyper-social species like ants and bees that the majority of the population does not directly reproduce. When there is no opportunity to have children of your own, self-sacrifice to protect your breeding relatives is one of the best ways of ensuring that at least part of your genome persists.
Dawkin’s Selfish Gene has flaws, but it’s worth consideration, especially the bits discussing altruism and kin-selection.
One of the very few (overrated) selling points of cars over public transportation was the personal freedom of driving a car on the open highway.
It’s a lot less like On The Road when the manufacturers’ software leaves Dean Moriarty out of an argument about where he should crash.
And what to do when the Highway Patrol — or Homeowners’ Association private security — thinks the car matches the description of a suspicious character? Who decides where to pull over?
I think public transportation is great. I also think the flip side of your argument is something the proponents of self driving cars aren’t thinking enough about. People like to drive.
I know, right? I hate car movies and even I forget I hate car movies sometimes. Because freedom. How fun would Tokyo Drift not be if they couldn’t hack all the STIs with their FLOSS laptops so many times for the drifting.
So which approach is safest? Keeping everything secret and unalterable except by a team of programmers with minimal public accountability, or leaving it open to the eyeballs of multiple interested parties?
Thinking people won’t tinker is just as big a mistake as thinking a system of self organized cars will just merrily putt along and do what you expect with simple rules like “stop if the car in front of you is stopped”. There is a lot of complexity that arises out of simple behaviours when the number of individual nodes is increased.
So true. Why so forgetful? Modding cars is the time-honored, all-American pastime. American Graffiti? Grease? Nearly every tv hero for years had to have a special unique car to complete the cultural signification of his (sic) identity.
It’s true, many do. Some don’t. I bet many people liked horses, too.
Many still do.
No technology ever “replaces” the ones people claim it will. Look at television, vs movies, vs streaming, etc. Transitions are never a drop in replacement of X for Y. I’m not arguing about what comes next, I’m arguing that the simplistic notion that you can drop a new technology into an existing infrastructure and expect everything to be “Hunky Dory” is naive at best.
No one is considering each persons potiential future hitler value or pfh.
Clearly you kill the group as between them they will have a higher chance of producing at least one future hitler compared to the one guy on his own.
Yeah all my arguments reduce to a finite pile of ran over Hitlers.
OT, but this is one of the fun things about the Mosuo system - men don’t have sons and daughters, they have nephews and nieces and put their energy into supporting them. For this reason, they actually have an stronger assurance that they’re helping to promote their own genes than in the systems we’re more familiar with (where there’s less of a guarantee that you’re actually related to a child).
I like it, because it challenges the assumptions that our goodness is actually altruistic, both making us more realistic about the goodness of our own nature and giving us hope that mutual support doesn’t have to involve unrealistically high expectations on human behaviour.
But there is still no indication of why promoting their genes should matter. Is it rational to assume that your genes are special simply because they are yours? This seems trivially dismissed as a naive self-serving bias.
I don’t know about what might be “goodness” or “high”, I am simply more interested in humans designing their own behaviors, rather than resolving themselves to living in delusion with the excuse that it is automatic. I suspect that “human nature” is a colossal waste of time, and is more likely to destroy humanity than optimize it.
What I try to do to think clearly is to analyze concepts for any implicit games, and audit those separately. Games are great, but they should be used deliberately. Deciding that an argument was better if you get your way is a game. Assuming that it matters how much money you have is a game. Trying to maximize your life or resources are a game. They are, in themselves, irrational. By which I mean that there is literally no ratio, no sense of proportion involved. Deciding that I should sell 2,713 units because that is exactly as many as are needed is rational. Deciding that I should sell “As many as possible!” is decidedly irrational. It’s basically saying that reality is not the main consideration in one’s reasoning.
I often un-bias much of my thinking, and that of others which is presented to me, with three easy questions:
If it relates to me specifically, rather than most other humans, it is probably not generally applicable.
If it relates to humans specifically, as distinct from other organisms, it is probably not generally applicable.
If it relates to living things specifically, rather than the universe-at-large, it is probably not generally applicable.
The “trick” is that much of human reasoning defaults to dealing in (contrived) absolutes, because they seem easier, functioning as a sort of conceptual shorthand. So people are often eager to put forth ideas not based upon their own evaluations, but by assertions of their “natural universality”, which are often intuited by others without even cursory consideration.
Not at all - I’m not an evolutionary biologist, but the theory seems to go that passing on your genes matters. Many men seem to care whether the child they’re caring for is actually “theirs”, although I don’t personally notice much of a difference. I just think it’s interesting that this system fulfils the conditions for passing on your genes if this matters to you, and it’s actually a more secure way of knowing that this is true.
I’d say that there are a number of behaviours that have led to us being able to function in a society. We aren’t chained to them, but often people assume that they are more altruistic than they are, which leads to blind spots. Often ‘altruism’ towards our own group can actually be a form self preservation, and it can go hand in hand with xenophobia or other bigotry - we’re not as good as we think we are.
I would say that the fact we are human means that we have to deal with human nature. I don’t think it’s ideal for many of our purposes, but I find that acknowledging and working with human nature is better than fighting against it or pretending it doesn’t exist. It could easily destroy humanity, but it’s also capable of great things.
No, but it might apply to you generally, and you may have some things in common with those around you (no, seriously!). Similarly, I don’t claim that other mammals follow human nature, but we are both living things and have some things in common. At the end of the day, we aren’t very rational - even those who claim to be ruled by logic. We are physical beings who are affected by many cultural, physical, mental and environmental factors, and sometimes it’s important to recognise the factors that affect humans specifically, even if they aren’t generally applicable to frogs and trees and supernovae. Some factors won’t affect everyone equally, but they are important enough that they will matter if you’re talking about a large enough population.
In an automated driver situation the challenge is clear. A Person, dog, cat, deer, jumps into the road giving the car not distance to stop, and oncoming traffic is either large enough or fast enough that swerving could cause a fatal head on accident.
I have seen other articles that this could be part of the setup process for a new car. Please select the sorts of things that you would have the vehicle swerve to save, even if it endanger’s the lives of the occupants.
In the present day we don’t make those decisions in advance, we do them in the moment and we forgive people the negative effects of their decisions because they are made so quickly, but given a year of debate in a corporate boardroom?
Random thought. High-power lasers or small but fast missiles that neutralize the obstacles in the vehicle path and reduce the collision effects.
Edit: and I propose a way to solve the trolley problem: program the self-driving cars to run over philosophers.
Harsh but fair. Compared to scientists, engineers, builders, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, horse trainers, farmers and miners philosophers really haven’t contributed much to civilisation except for their basic founding idea, which is that philosophers should tell everybody else what to do.
Can we run over politicians and pundits instead? That’d be a net benefit, right?
