Study Notes: Apr 12-18, 2015: "Hope for a Lumpy Filter" &c

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 

• Post, "Economics of Star Trek" by Surplus Economics
• Article, "Technologies of Abundance and the Fairytale of Jobs" by Extropia DaSilva
• Post, "Hope for a Lumpy Filter" by Robin Hanson
• Article, "What Wide Origins You Have, Little Red Riding Hood!" by Rachel Hartigan Shea

Homework for the future:

• Go through at least five entries in in my "P Articles" bookmark folder. Let's go with: (1) "The Old Ones: The Time Before Sumeria"; (2) "Conceptions Of Soul In Old-Estonian Religion"; (3) "Runes"; (4) "Fenrir's Shrine"; (5) "Kitsune, Kumiho, Huli Jing, Fox"
• Read the posts linked to by "Responses to the Anti-Reactionary FAQ.". Eventually. 
• Still on the to-do list: studying the Austrian School of Economics.
• Also need to do some reading on polyamory. 
• Also on the to-do list: All of those themes that I decide I want to play with, and cool bits that attract me, and things like that? Let's get systematic about that, put them into a single document (might be public, might not) and work with at least one of them every week. Systematic. Systematic. I do it best when I do it systematically. 

"Economics of Star Trek" 

• "Imagine instead not us traveling into this supposed post-scarcity future but someone from the distant past traveling to our own time and economic level. From a time when 80% of the population was required to labour full-time to produce sufficient food, when having shoes or more than one set of clothes implied wealth, when sunset meant darkness for all but a minority who could afford candles. What would such a person say about the postness or otherwise of our present 'scarce' levels of production? If in fact we have already arrived as a post- scarcity [sic] economy why don't we know it?"
• "What happens in a market economy when production exceeds scarcity? The answer of course is that consumption rises." 
• "Producing food in its raw form is an exercise in falling profits. Continuous profits are only found in processing. That is, taking the raw food and continually adding value to it in any way possible (image, taste, health benefits, packaging, convenience, etc.). At each processing step more profit is realised." 
• "The nonsense of conservatives ranting about lazy people is just that." 

"Technologies of Abundance and the Fairytale of Jobs"

• "As children, we are asked 'what do you want to be when you grow up?'. [sic] Such a question makes it seem as if starting a job is akin to beginning some great quest to become an idealised self. It sounds rather like playing an MMORPG with leveling up, character development, Achievements, and other rewards as one follows a path to greater success. It all sounds jolly exciting. But, you have to wonder: If that is what a job is like, why is it that the number one item on most people's 'things to do when I win the lottery list' is 'tell the boss where to stick his job?'. [sic]
• "Work, when it is truly productive and meaningful, is among the most rewarding activities a person can engage in. People need to work, it is vital for maintaining a healthy body and mind. But most of the jobs that people are required to do so restrict one's capacity to enjoy the richness of life and so limit one's full potential, it seems almost criminal to associate jobs with so noble a word as 'work'."
• "The objection [to a job-less future] is not just that jobs are just a way of obtaining money but that having a job is somehow indispensable in providing motivation and drive and the desire to get off one's butt and so [do] something productive." 
• "Aubrey de Grey has spoken of what he calls a 'Pro-Ageing Trance'. When people say that death is inevitable or that it must serve some useful purpose, he sees this as nothing but a psychological defence system people have developed in order not to have to confront the grim reality of their own demise." 
• "Now that medical science could conceivably be on the verge of developing actual methods for dealing with the 'seven deadly sins of ageing', the Pro-Ageing Trance is no longer a psychologically useful defence mechanism but rather an impediment to progress, for it is preventing people from getting fully behind the SENS [Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence] Agenda and lobbying for better funding and support." 
• "Since people are an absolute necessity, it was necessary for society to nurture an attitude that having a job was also an absolute necessity. Not just because it pays but because it is the only true means of having purpose in one's life. It was in society's interest to make those who were unemployed feel like pariahs, since that social pressure would provide motivation to join the ranks of 'slaves with white collars' producing shit we don't need but which advertising had convinced us we desired." 
• "What if we were truthful about jobs and told our children 'some people have careers but the vast majority are wage-slaves, since the job market has way more unpleasant, dreary, and uninspiring jobs which people are obliged to do because of money pressures. Given that there are so many dull jobs there is every chance you will join the ranks of wage-slaves, regardless of how talented you actually are'. 
• "If we continue to equate jobs with work (and, remember, people do need to be engaged in genuinely meaningful work) we may make the mistake of believing people need to have jobs even when robots and other forms of high-technology have filled most roles in the job market. We may invent jobs in the mistaken belief that people have to have them in order to live full lives." 

"Hope for a Lumpy Filter"

• "The great filter is the sum total of all of the obstacles that stand in the way of a simple dead planet (or similar sized material) proceeding to give rise to a cosmologically visible civilization. As there are 280 stars in the observable universe, and 260 within a billion light years, a simple dead planet faces at least roughly 60 to 80 factors of two obstacles to birthing a visible civilization within 13 billion years. If there is panspermia, i.e., a spreading of life at some earlier stage, the other obstacles must be even larger by the panspermia life-spreading factor." 
• "The total filter could be smooth, i.e. spread out relatively evenly among all of these candidates, or it could be lumpy, i.e. concentrated in only one or a few of these candidates."
• "For try-try filters, a system can keep trying over and over until it succeeds. If a set of try-try steps must all succeed within the window of life on Earth, then the actual times to complete each step must be drawn from the same distribution, and so take similar times. The time remaining after the last step must also be drawn from a similar distribution." 
• "A year ago I reported on a new study estimating that 1.75 to 3.25 billion years remains for life on Earth. This is a long time, and implies that there can't be many prior try-try filter steps within the history of life on Earth. Only one or two, and none in the last half billion years. This suggests that the try-try part of the great filter is relatively lumpy, at least for the parts that have and will take place on Earth."

"What Wide Origins You Have, Little Red Riding Hood!"

• "In parts of Iran, the child in peril is a boy because little girls wouldn't wander out on their own. In Africa, the villain could be a fox or a hyena. In East Asia, the predator is more likely to be a big cat." 
• "What you do with phylogenetics is you reconstruct history by inferring the past that's been preserved through inheritance. The descendants of ancestral species will resemble them in certain ways. You can figure out which features of a related group of organisms or folktales could be traced back to a common ancestor." 
• "It's been suggested that the story may have originated in East Asia and spread westward, and  as it spread west, it split into two distinct tales, 'Little Red Riding Hood' and "The Wolf and the Kids.' People have long recognized that there's some kind of relationship between the two stories, but nobody's really been able to demonstrate what the nature of that relationship is. A popular theory is that they're both descended from Chinese tradition, because these Chinese tales have elements of both." 
• "In the East Asian tales we find a version of the famous dialogue between the victim and the villain which goes, 'What big eyes you have!' But my reconstructions of the prehistory of the tale suggest that this dialogue evolved relatively recently. This is supported by the fact that it's missing from the 11-century poem, which is the earliest known variant."