If your mood changes every month, and if you die in any month where your mood turns to suicide, then to live 83 years you need to have one thousand months in a row where your mood doesn’t turn to suicide. Your ability to do this is aided by the fact that your mind is internally divided; while in many months part of you wants to commit suicide, it is quite rare for a majority coalition of your mind to support such an action.
From your mass suicide link, most of the historic examples occurred when a community lost a battle and chose suicide over capture. Mass suicide that only kills the losing side won't result in extinction.
However, it's conceivable that a losing side might try to kill not only themselves, but everyone. E.g. the Guadeloupe example; if the former slaves could have taken all the French troops with them, they conceivably would have.
However, we already have that danger on the world stage, with the US and Russian nuclear capabilities. Maybe we should try to minimise the number of actors with that capability, which could be done with a world government?
> increasingly short periods over which moods and sanity changes
Governments include measures to protect against this. E.g. mood and sanity may change, but it needs to stay changed for 4 years to get a majority supporting the new mood and sanity into Congress.
Also these changes don't randomly flip to extremes.: they are more like random walks in the presence of various force gradients. So the odds for a well designed government to become able to commit suicide is much smaller than your presentation suggests.
War can do a lot of damage, but to really kill everyone you'll need detailed monitoring and control. A world government would disarm conflicting powers, but it would arm the powers it relies on to enforce its edicts.
No, but people routinely use it to create normative legitimacy for their own idiosyncratic preferences. I rarely see people say, "I want civilization to perpetuate into the long-term future, but I know it's as arbitrary as paperclip-maximization". Instead you get talk that implies we all want this, or it's a moral obligation, or it "maximizes utility" (where the speaker doesn't mean his own utility, but some kind of abstract and aggregate moral good). Politically, such framing is the bedrock to coopt societal resources and allocate them to ends not benefiting tax payers and voters.
If you want to minimize the risk of your personal suicide, you probably shouldn't keep a gun. Similarly, if you want to avoid collective suicide (on whatever scale), you need international disarmament. It seems quite fatuous to claim that world government increases the possibility of mass suicide when it is a necessary step to preventing it, the main engine of mass suicide being international war, the primary instrument of which is the nation state. To think that abolishing nation states would increase the likelihood of "mass suicide" surely needs more of an argument than you've provided.
You vacillate between proclaiming that we can't coordinate to prevent a dystopia to decrying world government as vehicle of mass suicide. It certainly seems that you're looking for reasons to rule out world government. But then, why? You favor abolishing migration barriers, the sine qua non of the nation state.
That's right. It's not an argument against cooperation or the mutual usefulness of people. It's an argument against aggregate utility systems. Technically I'm not even saying you can't be a utilitarian in the sense that you can arbitrarily decide you want to maximize pleasure - pain in the universe. It's not logically compelling, but the opposite isn't logically compelling either. You can decide this like you can decide to be a paperclip maximizer. The part I find objectionable is when the different preferences of people are lumped up in a way that makes them sound more coherent than they are, or more aligned with the goals of a speaker. A word as simple as "we" can have huge hidden complexity and even falsehood. Preference utilitarianism is literally incalculable because different entities have fundamentally incompatible preferences. If you want life to perpetuate for trillions of years, I don't object to that. But I don't have this preference and it's not morally correct in any logically compelling sense.
"Divide the trillions of future years over which we want to last..."
There is no "we" that wants to last trillions of years. Utility is agent-dependent. Some agents want to last trillions of years, others don't. If all of them did, suicide wouldn't be a thing. I consider the option value of suicide to be positive, as it allows an intelligent entity to choose the neutrality of nonexistence over types of existence it considers to have negative utility.
When you talk about world government choosing suicide, you're not really talking about suicide, but mass murder. If you apply it metaphorically to civilization as a whole, you're engaging in a collectivist bait-and-switch. Collectivism is to be rejected because utility is agent-dependent and different agents want different things. If you believe that you individually will last for trillions of years with anything representing non-negligible probability, I have bad news for you.
*Respectfully*, you have a whole book (that I own and enjoyed) about mind uploading and what might happen *subjective millenia* after the first minds are uploaded!
My understanding is that near the end of Hitler's life (after losing battles), he considered a course of mass destruction for Germany, although in the end there was just suicide for him & some members of his inner circle (and their families). I gave the example of the Xhosa famine earlier, and to that one might add Maoist China, although the population recovered.
That example of religious mania only spread through the Xhosa, although a minority of Xhosa refused to heed it. Hanson does not appear to believe that there are multiple governments currently capable of destroying humanity:
I take suicide to mean all the things that permanently prevent life in the previous form(s). This includes things that we'd call cancer or Alzheimer's or dementia if it were a human or that has been called Moloch if applied to society. One example failure mode is totalitarian control in a way that guarantees (too much) stability. So much that no further growth becomes possible or even regression to a stable cibtrollco level. Leaders can maybe easier steer into such a dead end without realising so.
What sort of mechanism would allow one person to destroy the world in one second? Today we have the "finger on the button" threatening MAD, but there would be no need for that in a world government. What would bring us to build such a mechanism? If it takes an individual a month of suicidal mood to go through with it, it must take a lot longer for a government (made up of many individuals) to do so.
Suppose instead the world must maintain a suicidal mood for a year to follow through with self-destruction. If we apply the individual suicide rate of 13.42 / 100K to this hypothetical world government then it has 99.99% chance of surviving it's first year, 98.67% of making it 100 years, and only 26.1% of surviving 10K years. Yikes!
Come on, you're quibbling in circles. No suicidal cult has ever taken over or come close to taking over a country. Obviously culty political movements can have deadly serious consequences (Nazis!), but even they have never shown much impulse towards deliberate self-destruction.
From your mass suicide link, most of the historic examples occurred when a community lost a battle and chose suicide over capture. Mass suicide that only kills the losing side won't result in extinction.
However, it's conceivable that a losing side might try to kill not only themselves, but everyone. E.g. the Guadeloupe example; if the former slaves could have taken all the French troops with them, they conceivably would have.
However, we already have that danger on the world stage, with the US and Russian nuclear capabilities. Maybe we should try to minimise the number of actors with that capability, which could be done with a world government?
> increasingly short periods over which moods and sanity changes
Governments include measures to protect against this. E.g. mood and sanity may change, but it needs to stay changed for 4 years to get a majority supporting the new mood and sanity into Congress.
Also these changes don't randomly flip to extremes.: they are more like random walks in the presence of various force gradients. So the odds for a well designed government to become able to commit suicide is much smaller than your presentation suggests.
War can do a lot of damage, but to really kill everyone you'll need detailed monitoring and control. A world government would disarm conflicting powers, but it would arm the powers it relies on to enforce its edicts.
No, but people routinely use it to create normative legitimacy for their own idiosyncratic preferences. I rarely see people say, "I want civilization to perpetuate into the long-term future, but I know it's as arbitrary as paperclip-maximization". Instead you get talk that implies we all want this, or it's a moral obligation, or it "maximizes utility" (where the speaker doesn't mean his own utility, but some kind of abstract and aggregate moral good). Politically, such framing is the bedrock to coopt societal resources and allocate them to ends not benefiting tax payers and voters.
it's not morally correct in any logically compelling sense.
You really think anything is? (See http://juridicalcoherence.b... )
If you want to minimize the risk of your personal suicide, you probably shouldn't keep a gun. Similarly, if you want to avoid collective suicide (on whatever scale), you need international disarmament. It seems quite fatuous to claim that world government increases the possibility of mass suicide when it is a necessary step to preventing it, the main engine of mass suicide being international war, the primary instrument of which is the nation state. To think that abolishing nation states would increase the likelihood of "mass suicide" surely needs more of an argument than you've provided.
You vacillate between proclaiming that we can't coordinate to prevent a dystopia to decrying world government as vehicle of mass suicide. It certainly seems that you're looking for reasons to rule out world government. But then, why? You favor abolishing migration barriers, the sine qua non of the nation state.
That's right. It's not an argument against cooperation or the mutual usefulness of people. It's an argument against aggregate utility systems. Technically I'm not even saying you can't be a utilitarian in the sense that you can arbitrarily decide you want to maximize pleasure - pain in the universe. It's not logically compelling, but the opposite isn't logically compelling either. You can decide this like you can decide to be a paperclip maximizer. The part I find objectionable is when the different preferences of people are lumped up in a way that makes them sound more coherent than they are, or more aligned with the goals of a speaker. A word as simple as "we" can have huge hidden complexity and even falsehood. Preference utilitarianism is literally incalculable because different entities have fundamentally incompatible preferences. If you want life to perpetuate for trillions of years, I don't object to that. But I don't have this preference and it's not morally correct in any logically compelling sense.
But there is also no "I" that can do it's utility calculation independent of a supportive society.
"Divide the trillions of future years over which we want to last..."
There is no "we" that wants to last trillions of years. Utility is agent-dependent. Some agents want to last trillions of years, others don't. If all of them did, suicide wouldn't be a thing. I consider the option value of suicide to be positive, as it allows an intelligent entity to choose the neutrality of nonexistence over types of existence it considers to have negative utility.
When you talk about world government choosing suicide, you're not really talking about suicide, but mass murder. If you apply it metaphorically to civilization as a whole, you're engaging in a collectivist bait-and-switch. Collectivism is to be rejected because utility is agent-dependent and different agents want different things. If you believe that you individually will last for trillions of years with anything representing non-negligible probability, I have bad news for you.
*Respectfully*, you have a whole book (that I own and enjoyed) about mind uploading and what might happen *subjective millenia* after the first minds are uploaded!
My understanding is that near the end of Hitler's life (after losing battles), he considered a course of mass destruction for Germany, although in the end there was just suicide for him & some members of his inner circle (and their families). I gave the example of the Xhosa famine earlier, and to that one might add Maoist China, although the population recovered.
That example of religious mania only spread through the Xhosa, although a minority of Xhosa refused to heed it. Hanson does not appear to believe that there are multiple governments currently capable of destroying humanity:
https://twitter.com/robinha...
I take suicide to mean all the things that permanently prevent life in the previous form(s). This includes things that we'd call cancer or Alzheimer's or dementia if it were a human or that has been called Moloch if applied to society. One example failure mode is totalitarian control in a way that guarantees (too much) stability. So much that no further growth becomes possible or even regression to a stable cibtrollco level. Leaders can maybe easier steer into such a dead end without realising so.
See also: Stand-By by Philip K. Dick.
What sort of mechanism would allow one person to destroy the world in one second? Today we have the "finger on the button" threatening MAD, but there would be no need for that in a world government. What would bring us to build such a mechanism? If it takes an individual a month of suicidal mood to go through with it, it must take a lot longer for a government (made up of many individuals) to do so.
Suppose instead the world must maintain a suicidal mood for a year to follow through with self-destruction. If we apply the individual suicide rate of 13.42 / 100K to this hypothetical world government then it has 99.99% chance of surviving it's first year, 98.67% of making it 100 years, and only 26.1% of surviving 10K years. Yikes!
Come on, you're quibbling in circles. No suicidal cult has ever taken over or come close to taking over a country. Obviously culty political movements can have deadly serious consequences (Nazis!), but even they have never shown much impulse towards deliberate self-destruction.