How to save the world by Sabine Hossenfelder

Sabine,

I am still waiting for your objection. Let me check whether or not you are ready to answer questions that I consider foundational ones. English is not our mother tongue. Therefore I looked into my dictionary for the meaning of the word humanity and found:

#1 "Humanity is the same as mankind." All essays I got aware of understood humanity in this sense which corresponds to the German word Menschheit.

#2 "A person's humanity is their state of being a human being, rather than an animal or an object, a formal use." While logically a bit imperfectly formulated, this corresponds to the German word Menschsein.

#3 "Humanity is also the quality of being kind, thoughtful, and sympathetic." The German word is Menschlichkeit, and this is what distinguishes your essay.

#4 "The humanities ..." does obviously not apply to the topic of our contest.

You will certainly agree on that #3 summarizes what is also called human values. Because I feel that Mohammed Khali cannot answer my belonging questions, I hope you will dare. To Muslims the doctrine "as many (Muslim) children as possible" is a value in the sense of #3, and when I lived together with a Tunesian he told me why: The more children, the more food for the elderly.

While the notion overpopulation lacks a reference value, it is indisputable that the consequences of unlimited growth cannot forever compensated. Ethics needs to be modified, and I consider this a pressing most fundamental necessity.

Let me refer to Nigeria where Boku Haram is said having kidnapped 200 non-Muslim school girls, possibly with the perspective of selling them. You will certainly agree that this is a crime against humanity #3.

Those who are fighting against polio in Nigeria are guided by #3. They are facing resistance because of distrust. Some Muslims suspect getting cheated with the aim to hinder them getting as many children as possible. While this is definitely not true, I see their attitude unacceptable. Isn't hindering the worldwide fight against polio a crime against humanity #3 too? Do you agree, and if so, is the modification of #3 justified?

Voluntary restriction to one or two children per couple worldwide may stop the rapid destruction of environment. Such modified ethics should be encouraged by demonstrating that life in non-growing states is much richer and more peaceful.

Any objection?

Eckard

P.S., I will use the following rating scale to rate the essays of authors who tell me that they have rated my essay:

10 - the essay is perfection and I learned a tremendous amount

9 - the essay was extremely good, and I learned a lot

8 - the essay was very good, and I learned something

7 - the essay was good, and it had some helpful suggestions

6 - slightly favorable indifference

5 - unfavorable indifference

4 - the essay was pretty shoddy and boring

3 - the essay was of poor quality and boring

2 - the essay was of very poor quality and boring

1 - the essay was of shockingly poor quality and extremely flawed

After all, that is essentially what the numbers mean.

The following is a general observation:

Is it not ironic that so many authors who have written about how we should improve our future as a species, to a certain extent, appear to be motivated by self-interest in their rating practices? (As evidence, I offer the observation that no article under 3 deserves such a rating, and nearly every article above 4 deserves a higher rating.)

Hi Sabine,

Thank you for a very entertaining and thought-provoking essay!

I really like your idea of personal AI assistants that know your values and suggest the right actions for you to take --- in fact, I want one right now, not just to help me make the right choices concerning the future well-being of the planet, but also to help me plan my day to day routine in order to be more productive!

I teach science to 18 and 19 year-old students, and it probably explains why, in my essay, I explore the idea of improving education in order to raise the collective knowledge and awareness of the world population towards the issues that are the most important for the future of humanity. You will perhaps disagree with my solution, since you write in your essay that

We've tried to educate [people]. It doesn't work. The idea of the educated and well-informed citizen is an utopia. It doesn't work because education doesn't please people.

And yet, you also say that

[T]he main problem [...] isn't to collect information, but feeding this information back into the system, back to the many humans who are the initiators of change.

In my experience as a teacher, I certainly have seen a lot of students whose attention span and interest is limited in the way you describe in your "split-second looks at photos" analogy. And yet, I still believe it is possible to teach differently, to teach better, in school settings but also in lifelong learning endeavors, such as YouTube videos, or accessible, entertaining and pedagogically sound MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses).

I agree with you that humans

do whatever they please. The only way to change their ways is to please them. Please them differently than before, and change will follow.

So I hope that the educators of the world can come together in a worldwide futurocentric education initiative, and find a way to "please" the people while raising their knowledge and awareness of what is going on in the world, and what is likely to come next. In doing so, to paraphrase what you said in your essay about your proposal, maybe we can "use people's priorities and values in a systematic way to discover shortcomings in the system and improve it".

And when your personal AI assistants become reality, perhaps we will be able to use some of what we learned in the Futurocentric Education Initiative in order to construct a better, less "costly" system to inform and guide mankind towards a better future!

I consider your essay one of the best in this contest, and I hope you do well in the final judging.

Marc

Hi Hossenfelder,

A very relevant essay here! An age where people are well enough to base decisions off of their feelings is indeed something to strive for! The mind ought to be updated in the way we use it. I wonder what all a brain can really do. Neuroscience does have a lot o explore, it seems. Your main first argument that we have simply done to much to change the world and can't seem to catch up goes along with the notion that the progressions and paradigm shifts people as a whole have experienced change at a greater rate today. They seem to be speeding up, and humans are caught with the tough task of jumping from treadmill to treadmill, each faster yet. So I would like to emphasize that that point is valid from what i see and have read elsewhere. It is important to note the issue because it means that something about us has to update quicker, or differently. Tech booms info past what our brains can incorporate into our ways of living. The internet informs everyone about everything, but nobody does or has experienced the majority of what the now know so much about. So some feedback would be appropriate to the sudden influx of info, and of cousre, some paving needs done to reach the day when humans are even more attached to the internet, like brain downloads or what-have-you. A good read that brought up many valid points, this essay also just had a bit of spark to it. It was presented with a personal touch that was refreshing to read. I hope people read this batch of essays in general. Read, and then do a little differently.

With warm wishes,

Amos

Dear Eckard,

Most essays considered the context of the word "humanity" in the contest question and it fits your definition #1 (mankind), though many also thought that our future would be brighter if we all acted more like definition #3 (show kindness).

You wrote: "To Muslims the doctrine "as many (Muslim) children as possible" is a value in the sense of #3, and when I lived together with a Tunesian he told me why: The more children, the more food for the elderly."

In a primitive society with no pension plans or social security, that certainly makes logical sense, don't you think?

Rich countries have fewer children, and they also take better care of their environment (even if they keep growing their population). So ask the next question (as Ted Sturgeon always urged): Why aren't you trying making everyone rich?

Again, ask the next question: Why do Muslim countries (on average, even with all that Middle East oil) have the lowest standard of living on this planet?

It's because they believe that Allah is utterly transcendent, and as Master over us slaves, he is not necessarily beneficent nor ordered. This is what Al-Ghazali, the 2nd-most influential prophet (after Mohammed himself), in fact did teach. The unintended consequence of this was that it destroyed the fledgling sciences in the once-great Islamic civilization--by denying that God's universe had predictable causes or that any causes would make sense. Science breeds technology, and technology is the lever of wealth, because it allows everyone to accomplish more with less. Hence the low standard of living for Islam.

You admitted that "the notion overpopulation lacks a reference value".

I'm not sure what you mean by that, other than the fact the carrying capacity of an environment can be (and has been) changed considerably; first by the evolution of photosynthesis (which poisoned the atmosphere and caused a 300 million year ice age), then the evolution of multi-cellularism (the most totalitarian regime possible), the development of consciousness (which made psychological suffering possible; as opposed to only physical pain), and more recently the invention of fire, agriculture, food preservation, and the green revolution. Each step significantly increased the carrying capacity of Earth, though it changed the environment significantly too. It seems that you cannot imagine the next step, so it cannot happen. Please read my essay on "Three Crucial Technologies" and tell me why nanotechnology and expanding into Space won't increase the carrying capacity of this solar system by many magnitudes.

Are a conservative in the traditional sense: afraid of change?

You also said, "It is indisputable that the consequences of unlimited growth cannot forever compensated."

I bed to differ. Our single-celled bacterial ancestors would probably have said the same thing 3.6 billion years ago. As Malthus said more than 200 years ago. Isn't it indisputable that the exponential growth of Moore's Law and Kurzweil's more general Law of Accelerating Returns have a much faster growth rate than human reproduction? (e.g. 18 months vs 30 years) I will concede that according to our best current scientific theories, Asimov's ball of flesh can't expand any faster than the speed of light.

Finally, you said, "Ethics needs to be modified, and I consider this a pressing most fundamental necessity."

Ethics *ought* to be modified? Do you realize the inherent contradiction in your statement? How can you apply an imperative to changing a set of imperatives? You can't. At any rate, Ethics is objective, not subjective. If it was subjective, then it would only be an individual's or group's changing opinion. How do you know that it isn't your "personal ethics" that needs to be changed?

What's wrong with having a ball of humanity augmented by silicon, diamondoid, biology, and superconducting machines expanding into the universe at light speed, transforming all the dead matter in the universe into life that thinks, feels, and loves?

The future of brain implants, Wall Street journal An interesting article on one of the themes of your essay.

It ends, Quote "Will these devices make our society as a whole happier, more peaceful and more productive? What kind of world might they create?It's impossible to predict. But, then again, it is not the business of the future to be predictable or sugarcoated. As President Ronald Reagan once put it, "The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.""

"The augmented among us-those who are willing to avail themselves of the benefits of brain prosthetics and to live with the attendant risks-will outperform others in the everyday contest for jobs and mates, in science, on the athletic field and in armed conflict. These differences will challenge society in new ways-and open up possibilities that we can scarcely imagine."

Recap. The human species has created a complex hybrid environment/system X (technology, politics, economics, etc., on top of the natural system/biosphere) that has somehow changed the rules of the evolutionary adaptation game to our advantage. But the accelerating complexity growth of X is bringing it out of our control, making it hard to close the feedback loop between individual human actions and their effect on X. Our cognitive skills have been left behind, with a mismatch between our ability to analyse local scenarios and act accordingly, and the global dynamics of system X.

And so you propose to build a `bring-closer` information system for bridging the gap between global-collective and local-individual info and action, that should also learn from the priority lists expressed by individuals. Users should ideally find the information all in one place, well integrated and effectively presented, to please their intuition.

My concern (partly expressed in a previous comment) derives from the gap I perceive between plainly collecting and integrating information on one hand, and actually computing the correct global consequences of individual actions on the other, for informing the decision of the individuals (and the institutions).

In other words, I totally agree on the psychological usefulness of the `bring-closer` service for wiring back to our cognitive circuits - that`s one of the most brilliant and well expressed ideas of your essay - but I believe the devil would often be in the process of actually building the info to be displayed closer. Computing the consequences of a local event in a complex system is intrinsically hard. (Not to speak of the potential uncontrolled influences from political or commercial agendas in this process, but that`s a general problem.)

I am still inclined to look at these issues in terms of emergent properties of a layered system, where the emergent entities are largely independent from those at the lower layer. Under this light, it occurred to me that your proposals could be seen as a creative and generous attempt to strengthen the communication channel between two adjacent layers, in both directions. And this vaguely reminds me of an essay on the importance of top-down causation by George Ellis in a previous contest.

Regards

Tommaso

PS

(I hoped that re-reading and re-commenting your essay could help me deciding how to rate your entry, but I confess that I still have mixed feelings between the pleasurable presentation style, the originality of the analysis and the potential problems with the proposed solution. Not that this would change anything, given your top position in the community ranking! Congratulations!)

Dear Sabine

Scientifically lay people are certainly not lazy and indifferent... They may not be scientists, scholars, or academics, but you would be surprised how much they might know about relevant things concerning life... And in general, the less influenced by irrelevant values of the society - the wiser they are. The reason why they may not be interested in science is in "science", not in them. The "fundamental science" transformed into a mass in Latin... Lay people are conditioned by and respond to the system that they don't understand, which doesn't make them any different from you or anybody else. Knowledge is not the information learned by heart, but the information understood by heart. Do you understand any equation containing G, or any other "universal constant of nature"? Do you understand the quest of searching for the smallest division in nature? Considering you knowing the fractal mathematics... and that all natural forms are fractals...

When CERN announced the possibility of finding the Higgs Boson, I was sitting in a café, watching the faces of people scrolling newspaper headlines... The supposed to be "The ultimate discovery ever", didn't catch anyone's attention... It didn't change anything in anyone's life. There was no enlightenment, no shift of a consciousness, understanding, philosophical insight... but it produced some good jokes :) It may be that people are simply fed up of being stuffed with useless information. Instead of increasing our spiritual wealth, junk makes us spiritually fat, increasing our inertia.

If one refers to the laws of nature, one sees its self-organised, self-sufficient and self-similar matrix of chaos. If not disturbed, one witnesses equilibrium tending to equilibrium. On the other hand, self-proclaimed legislation of men, tend to ever greater order, i.e. ever greater polarization. "If there would be no order, there would be chaos..." Facing such contradiction we are offenders either to nature, either to the artificial system of institutionalised men...

"I am" follows only the rules of living knowledge, not the rules of dead conjunctions maintained by non-living institutions which usually do things in the name of humanity, in the name of progress, in the name of democracy, in the name of our children, in the name of some god, etc... never in the name of "I am". Well, statistically, "I am" is insignificant, anyway :)

Institutions are not to be misinterpreted as organ of an organism. Institutions are official seals whit taken power to set rules, valorise and judge. Although build and fed on the idea of the individual, institutions are negation of the individuality. With time, they become purpose on its own, acting as a tail of retardation creating instruments and tools for their own existence, thus maintaining and creating problems... On a big scale, the result is the self-similar matrix manifested as the age of problems...

You may have been noticed that non-living systems - institutions (states, religions, corporations, institutionalised science...) - favour all which is unnecessary, artificial, unhealthy, uniformed, obedient, destructive, lethal, non-reproductive, and non-alive. On the other hand, living necessities like reasoning, individual intelligence, sexuality, reproductive organs, natural food, healing plants, freedom, diversity, life as such... are "legitimately" stigmatized, neglected, rejected, forbidden, tortured or executed... On the universal scale this self-similar matrix can be recognized as Tanatos versus Eros... On a scale of a body, it is virus versus cell.

So, just let "I am" be self-sufficient, self-organised, self-aware, self-responsible and unique "I am". Do not think of mapping "I am's" brain or extending its capabilities with some artificial implant (do you know or does anyone know what brain really is?). "I am" does not want to be "I am not". "I am" is not the statistics in some stock market graph or the IP address in some global network. "I am" is alive and life is the infinite chaotic function of equilibrium tending to equilibrium. "I am" is the measure and the building block of "We are" - the Humanity.

To conclude, instead of "How to save the world", I would suggest "How to save I am". Only then, billions of infinitely unique, though self-similar snowflakes can fall free, creating a matrix of harmony. And if we are imprinted that this is utopia, then the universe and everything in it is utopia indeed :)

Regards,

andrej

Hello Sabina

I just read your essay and can see why it is doing well. You make a good summary of good summary of the human predicament in this paragraph:

"No, the biggest challenge mankind faces today is not the development of some breakthrough technology. The biggest challenge is to create a society whose institutions integrate the knowledge that must precede any breakthrough technology: The knowledge about the systems themselves that is necessary for the realization, adaptation and use of technologies . All of our big problems today speak of our failure, not to envision solutions, but to turn our ideas and knowledge into reality. We have a social problem, not a technological one."

Indeed, our problem is social and not technical. You speak of a "priority map". In my essay, 'Our journey to the next paradigm', I deal with this as an envisioned future that uses existing tools of science, psychology and social management to guide the future rather than today's form of governance, highly influenced by corporate interests, all based on a flawed economic system.

Hope you continue to do well in the ratings.

Don Chisholm

Dear Sabine

Your essay is well written, organized and at the same time controversial. It has enough material for long discussions. Although I agree with some points in your essay I also have some disagreements.

You mention that: the mother of all problems, is to convert these ideas into courses of action.... we are also lazy and if intuition fails us, inertia takes over

I don't think this is the problem. I also wonder who is "we" because in current societies, people have different functions. There are those who are in charged of ruling, those who develop science and technology, businessmen, teachers, workers, etc. Therefore, I would not expect from a worker to take actions against global warming or waste disposal. So each person has a function in this society and each person has to do what they have to do. In my view, politicians and businessmen as well as scientists are in charged of driving humanity and they should be responsible for the consequences of their actions. This is also related to this comment: It's just that in practice it takes too much effort to look into the details. And they actually do not want to know the details.

I don't think we are lazy, I think those who lead and steer countries have other interests, such as supremacy, hegemony, economy, etc. I discuss a little of this in my work and I'd like to invite you to read it and leave some comments.

All the best for the contest!

Best Regards

Israel

Dear Prof. Sabine,

Excellent essay indeed. To lower the cost of relevant information needed by the decision maker is key to humanity. Yes, I concur. I like this one most out of five you listed: "Upgrade priority maps to brain extensions. In the long run, we should avoid using the visual cortex as pathway to display matches with priority maps. The potential of cheap information will be fully realized when information about our social systems is directly fed back into our brain and we can truly feel the consequences of certain decisions."

Good luck!

Regards,

Leo KoGuan

Hi Sabine,

I really enjoyed the central theme of your essay. Your comments about scientific people overlooking the cost of information issue for regular people is a great one. I also think your ideas concerning priority maps is very interesting. A priority map would sure be handy even for this contest!

For me, your priority map resembles something sales and advertising people get that science often doesn't. In a sense, an advert is a priority map like you describe - associating the purchase of a product with a desired outcome such as hedonistic, sexual or social advantage. One core difference is that the objective is to sell the product using any means rather than provide accurate information. In a sense this is my only gentle criticism of your paper - isn't this space already occupied, wherever possible, by advertisers? Perhaps they might actively discourage or intefere with accurate priority information? Do you think encouraging this method of human decision making might actually increase the power of advertisments on people if they begin to neglect the capacity to research and think complexly?

Criticism aside I thought your ideas were very enjoyable to read with some very precise points. I hope you make further progress exploring this great topic. If you get a chance I'd love for you to view my own entry (mine draws on science fiction to make its point) and rate it! Thanks again, best regards,

Ross

Dear Susan,

I past your essay to my wife, that is working in the marketing of carbon offsetting company. She was very inspired and started a new discussion on marketing strategy.

So it seems already reading your essay might bring us to a better future.

Regards

Luca

Sabine Hossenfelder,

I like your essay very much; however, I have held off rating it. Here is one reason why? Could you please say more about your analysis of the mortgage crisis with respect to measuring emotions?

"Moreover, emotions can capture problems that do not result in actions at all (are not "revealed"). Take the 2008 mortgage crisis as an example. If you read reports from back then, many people clearly felt something was wrong. "Something about that feels very wrong," a banker said, "It makes me sick to my stomach the kind of loans that we do," a mortgage broker was quoted with [6]. But these feelings didn't register in the system. Imagine we could have measured the tension in priorities between, say, keeping their job and acting morally right. This could have been an early warning sign. How many warning signs do we currently miss?"

If feelings were measured, who's would we choose to side with? There was a vast number of others who were available to be tested at the time. What would their responses have registered? It is not my intent to pin blame. My question has to do with the difficulty of relying upon emotions ahead of an event. Who would you have relied upon for emotional guidance before the collapse?

"...on Oversight and Government Reform

Darrell Issa (CA-49), Ranking Member

The housing bubble that burst in 2007 and led to a financial crisis can be traced back to federal government intervention in the U.S. housing market intended to help provide homeownership opportunities for more Americans. This intervention began with two government-backed corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which privatized their profits but socialized their risks, reating powerful incentives for them to act recklessly and exposing taxpayers to tremendous losses. Government intervention also created "affordable" but dangerous lending policies which encouraged lower down payments, looser underwriting standards and higher leverage. Finally, government intervention created a nexus of vested interests - politicians, lenders and lobbyists - who profited from the "affordable" housing market and acted to kill reforms. In the short run, this government intervention was successful in its stated goal - raising the national homeownership rate. However, the ultimate effect was to create a mortgage tsunami that wrought devastation on the American people and economy. While government intervention was not the sole cause of the financial crisis, its role was significant and has received too little attention.

In recent months it has been impossible to watch a television news program without seeing a Member of Congress or an Administration official put forward a new recovery proposal or engage in the public flogging of a financial company official whose poor decisions, and perhaps greed, resulted in huge losses and great suffering. Ironically, some of these same Washington officials were, all too recently, advocates of the very mortgage lending policies that led to economic turmoil. In a number of cases, political officials even engaged in unethical conduct, helping their political allies, family members and even themselves obtain lucrative positions in the mortgage lending industry and other benefits. At a time when government intervention in private markets has become alarmingly common, government "affordable housing" initiatives offer important lessons about the dangers of government efforts to manipulate or conjure outcomes in the market. ..."

There is much more that could be said about who played what role. However, my point still has to do with emotions. I don't remember the date, but, President Bush, in a speech to the nation, mentioned with pride the high rate of home ownership. I recall feeling that that was a good result. I knew that mortgages were very lenient compared to any that I had received in earlier years. But it felt good to think that the government was making it possible for more people to own homes.

Dear Mrs Sabine Hossenfelder

The future of our world is very dependent from knowledge of phenomena, from which we are dependent, thus from knowledge of correlations of these phenomena. I wrote about this also in my essay. You also write about similar things. Your idea about chips in heads is cruel, but I am afraid that it will be necessary for survival of humanity. For instance, number of people will soon be to large, thus migration in the universe will be necessary. Until then the problems on earth should be solved, and this should be done very effective, or it will be very painful.

Besides your solution, development of artificial intelligence should be also necessary.

I was thinking something similar for jobseekers. Recruiters sometimes have 500 candidates, but they do no choose the very best candidates. Recruiters only needs a few seconds for one candidate. However, if the candidates files in questionnaires, it would then be statistically processed by the recruiters. So they can obtain more information from the candidates. This is a similar principle as that which you are requesting.

Besides, our contest is also is an example of what you write. We cannot read all essays, I would need chips in the brains. At the same time, I wish that others read and comment on my essay. I would be very grateful for this, including the comments of old essays. Also I read your essay. : )

p.s. In your old essay I gave that your model disagrees with Duff's paper. You do not answered me. :)

Hi Sabine,

Thanks for your interesting essay. I think there are corollaries with the "dialogic web" I discuss in my essay on computationally intelligent personal dialogic agents. It is like a "virtual conscience" that can guide us through our interactions with others and the world. I have developed a prototype as part of a "CAREER Award" grant from the US National Science Foundation, and studies indicate that it can "nudge" people to more effective actions by providing feedback and guidance in their everyday actions.

I'd appreciate a rating on my essay, if you can do that, since I am a bit short on ratings. Also, if you know of anyone that might be interested in collaborating on the further development of the dialogic web, please give them my contact info. My gmail username is my first name, then a period, then my last name.

Thanks,

Ray Luechtefeld, PhD

Dear Sabine,

thank you for your interesting essay!

Today I stumbled upon this gallery of `awareness-focused' ads:

http://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2014/05/29/foto/guarda_e_pensa_quando_la_pubblicit_diventa_messaggio-87596208/1/?ref=HRESS-1#1

and it made me think of your essay. Is this the sort of strategy you would use to trigger an emotional response in the public, right there where they are taking the decisions that matter (e.g. throwing a plastic bottle or something...)?

best,

Flavio