63 Comments

How alive was it ever; i.e., how well did it ever achieve its purpose?

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I'd say over-reflectiveness is narcissistic, in oddly classical sense. The tale of narcissus - he got attracted by repeats of his own voice by the Echo, and he came to the pond, and stared into it, and liked this so much he just sat there reflecting. I dunno if Hansen is over reflective though.

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It requires a fair store of narcissism to make yourself personally the center of attention in a blog post. It's weird (in a narcissistic sort of way) to ask strangers why you're weird. 

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Once you start thinking that the conventional wisdom is wrong about one thing you tend to think it is wrong about other things too.

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Not at all. Not wanting to more like other people is not narcissistic in and of itself. Thinking people should be more like you in the ways that make you successful is not either. And neither is reflection upon yourself and your habits narcissistic, perhaps even the opposite.

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There's also the assumption that bosses will need to express their will by bodily means. Couldn't they just stay disembodied and send squillions of sternly worded emails, for instance? (Come to think of it, that would explain a lot about many workplaces.)

Another assumption is that it will be the bosses who need to work fast in a bodily way as opposed to the serfs who might have to do a zillion routine mechanical tasks per minute. 

Another assumption is that it will always be more practical and more efficient to make a smaller faster body rather than to make a normal-sized body faster.

Another assumption is that a boss's tininess won't adversely affect his/her status, making it difficult for them to maintain command.

Another is that a new mode of organisation won't come along which does not require bosses at all. You touched on some of these things but all are potential debates.Then of course there are the background assumptions that you make explicit.Such as the assumption that there won't be regulation preventing this future from happening.Or the assumption that we will figure out how to make tiny nanotech bodies *before* we figure out how to modify intelligence and break down its functions. (By the time we get to 2mm bodies who's to say we won't also have reverse engineered armies of bots that combine intelligence with a complete lack of recognisable human identity?)

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The only concrete prediction you objected to is a 2mm height. That prediction is conditional on running a certain factor faster than humans and wanting natural body control. The linear relation between speed and body size is simple, general, and based on very basic physics. How is that remotely "so many assumptions in play in your predictions that it would take a hundred years to untangle them"?

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There are so many assumptions in play in your predictions that it would take a hundred years to untangle them, by which point we'll already be in the future and can see for ourselves what it's like.

I do believe there is value to the picture you are painting of an em future: it provides a fixed point for those thinking about the long term future. A vision we can aim to realise or stop from happening. A provocation that can kickstart conversations about what we want and what we really value. 

Personally though I don't think the ground is firm enough for scientific prediction to be viable.

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Actually his note makes a lot of sense combined with mine. There's too many assumptions that have to be made, and a choice of assumptions can lead to anything. But for the purposes of fiction, that does not matter, you can just assume something simple, then proceed logically from there. It's the difference between weather prediction, and generating some clouds CGI that looks reasonably good (I used to work on that).

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I'm happy to admit that I enjoy world-building, but I don't see why this should make me admit I'm not achieving predictive value. Stories usually build worlds for other purposes, true, but why must I think I must be pursuing such fictional purposes if I offer similar levels of detail? Academic social science often offers lots of details about the social worlds it studies. Why can't they think they are primarily trying to see what a world is or would be like?

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Thanks for your talk in London yesterday Robin. I hope it won't be taken critically if I say it shed some light for me on the question of why you are so 'weird'. It seemed to me that, with your strand of thinking on ems, you are essentially writing speculative science fiction and enjoying, as many others have before you, the act of world building. The difference is you are presenting your fiction in an academic context. This perhaps makes you and some of your audience feel you are doing something more respectable and of greater intellectual importance than playing a sophisticated sci fi roleplaying game, say. But personally, listening to you talk about ems with 2mm tall nanotech bodies, I was just thinking 'I don't know whether he believes this stuff but it sure seems like he would enjoy believing it'. I also thought, wouldn't it be more honest to just write a sci fi (or econ-fi) novel? But two reasons why that might not be what you want to do:

1. Maybe you want to keep your thinking abstract and not be tied down by having to describe scenes moment by moment, or having to come up with characters?2. Maybe admitting that you're driven by the pleasure of fantasy as much as the spirit of inquiry would affect your enjoyment?

I don't mean this to be rude - I know I am reaching in my diagnosis and you might think I'm way off. Moreover I actually think what you're doing on ems is very interesting. But to me it's interesting not because of its predictive value but because of its unusual position on the intersection of academia and fantasy.

Perhaps with your critical posts on the human need for stories (eg how they lead us to expect more interconnections and moral comeuppance than reality provides), you are starting to acknowledge that you are indeed doing fiction with the storytelling bits which you object to taken out. But I for one would feel less thrown off balance by you and more confident that we shared a reality if you came out and admitted that.

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I think you missed the obvious: You do not like most people due to the random makeup of your personality, and therefore try to signal a non-standard group affiliation.

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You probably underestimate the importance of learned behavior in this analysis.

I'm weird in a similar way because of several factors.  When I was young my parents encouraged (or didn't discourage) unconventional thoughts, e.g., was praised rather than upbraided for asking difficult questions about god.  I was smarter than most of those around me during my youth so I could take unconventional positions without the same level of risk they have for most people (who would be unable to select defensible views or defend those views from the attacks their unconventionality draws).  Furthermore, I craved recognition and attention while young and I was unable to get that recognition through social popularity, athletic ability or the like so standing out in class was more appealing by comparison.  One of the easiest ways to get teachers to think you are bright (esp if you want to look smart not merely diligent or like a suck up) is to competently challenge the conventional views they present.

So ask yourself if you were rewarded for this behavior in the past and if so why was this behavior rewarding.

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 Hanson is pretty rare and unusual, even if you broaden his reference class to 'all Singularitarians', so it's possible that his explanation is equally rare and unusual, yeah...

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it is so very hard to get perspective on oneself, and to avoid self-deception.

 This is the purpose of psychoanalysis, but it seems a dying art.

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I care why I'm weird, but I don't think much about it, out of pessimism about the likelihood of my getting the right answer:  it is so very hard to get perspective on oneself, and to avoid self-deception.

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