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Vlad!
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« on: June 15, 2009, 01:07:51 PM » |
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http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.htmlThoughts? (I have an opinion myself, but I want to give pholks time to read the article before I give away the metaphor)
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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enemy anemone
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« Reply #1 on: June 15, 2009, 01:21:01 PM » |
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it is kind of long. I haven't finished it yet, but I feel compelled to yell "stop having so many babies!"
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Vlad!
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« Reply #2 on: June 16, 2009, 10:15:40 PM » |
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So Schil, have you finished reading this yet?
Has anybody else managed to muster up the attention span to read what appears to be the equivalent of ten whole pages of text?
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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enemy anemone
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« Reply #3 on: June 16, 2009, 10:22:39 PM » |
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I did finish reading it soon after I had posted but didn't really have anything further to add. I was still stuck on them not having so many babies.
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Vlad!
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« Reply #4 on: June 16, 2009, 10:41:13 PM » |
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But if they didn't continue to maintain their population growth then the entire country would die out. Clearly that's not a desirable outcome! And of course if you look at the parable as applying to our world, the birth and death rates per day in the United States are such that if this were to happen we would still see positive population growth. According to the best figures I can find, the population of the US grows on average by almost twelve thousand people per day[1]. If you take the "stop having babies" approach, perhaps you are a supporter of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement? [1] According to here, the birth rate is 14.18 births per 1k population per year. If the population is about 307 million, this means that if we maintain that rate we will see 4.35 million births this year, or about 11.9 thousand per day. |
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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enemy anemone
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« Reply #5 on: June 16, 2009, 11:26:18 PM » |
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note that I didn't say they should stop having babies, just that they should stop having so many of them. and it's really more of a knee-jerk reaction than a thought-out plan for their society. I don't really find myself interested in coming up with a plan for a society, whether in a parable or in real life, so I didn't think about it further than "well if they don't die like they have been (do they even die at all?) and keep having dozens of kids...augh!"
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NewDimension
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« Reply #6 on: June 17, 2009, 12:56:59 AM » |
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I think paragraph 7 of the parable was pretty self-explanatory concerning the reason why the people had so many kids. They basically feared an early death, loss of their relatives, and a shrinking population, which, at the daily rate of the death toll, would probably have led to human extinction. So I figured that once the dragon was obliterated, the majority of the people would have no founded reason to continue having as many kids as they used to - the fear of death which was caused by the dragon would have vanished, and the people could return the regular rate at which they previously had kids before the dragon terrorized their planet. But the end of the parable never says what happened to the population after the dragon was destroyed, (other than the proclamation that the human population can start anew and not make the mistakes of the past) so we have no clue what would have happened next - but my assumption is that the majority of the population would have stopped having an average of a dozen kids; therefore, the number of kids they had didn't really strike me as odd.
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Vlad!
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« Reply #7 on: June 17, 2009, 08:25:55 AM » |
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...and the people could return the regular rate at which they previously had kids before the dragon terrorized their planet.
If you follow the analogy, there's really no time before the dragon. It's always been there, much like our own mortality has always been a part of the human condition. The problem, as I see it, is that when you remove aging from the equation you create a situation where a stable population means no children. There is no way in which we can practically eliminate aging without also eliminating the view of childbearing as desirable. For examples of this in speculative fiction, see Arthur C. Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth (where extended lifespans make childbirth a much rarer event) and Against the Fall of Night, which shows a society of nigh-infinitely-prolonged humans in which the birth of a child is an oddity. I think it's a reasonable goal to eliminate disease and to increase the useful lifespan of humanity, but to eliminate mortality seems like an impossible goal, if not for technical reasons then for social ones. |
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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Josh
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« Reply #8 on: June 17, 2009, 08:49:56 AM » |
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I think it's a reasonable goal to eliminate disease and to increase the useful lifespan of humanity, but to eliminate mortality seems like an impossible goal, if not for technical reasons then for social ones. Not to mention theological ones! |
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Vlad!
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« Reply #9 on: June 17, 2009, 10:01:53 AM » |
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Not to mention theological ones!
I considered that possibility, but that basically assumes that, if it were possible technically and socially, that God would step in and prevent it from occurring. This doesn't seem to be his MO; instead, if he didn't want it to be possible, he would have made it impossible from the start. Thus, I felt that it would be redundant to include theology in that list. |
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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enemy anemone
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« Reply #10 on: June 17, 2009, 12:54:50 PM » |
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the more I think about this parable the more I think it is propaganda and not a parable/fable.
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Vlad!
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« Reply #11 on: June 17, 2009, 01:04:49 PM » |
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the more I think about this parable the more I think it is propaganda and not a parable/fable.
Can it not be both? |
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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enemy anemone
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« Reply #12 on: June 17, 2009, 01:12:33 PM » |
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I suppose, but propaganda dressed up in a fable seems less like a fable to me, I dunno.
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Vlad!
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« Reply #13 on: June 17, 2009, 01:44:49 PM » |
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I get the feeling that there's a word that means "defending your position by creating an allegory which seems to be isomorphic but actually differs in one or more fundamental areas", but I don't know what it is. Sort of a reverse straw man. In any case, I think that's what this is.
Allegories are an important tool because couching a problem in different terminology may allow those who are involved in the problem to view it objectively (see, for instance, 1 Samuel 12). However, there's always the possibility that the difference between the allegory and the actual problem is the reason it provokes its response rather than that the allegory is exposing the fundamental nature of the problem.
For example, the allegory seems to be based on the premise that humans in their natural state should live forever (or at least significantly longer than they do) and that aging and disease and death are a foreign force that disrupts this natural state. However, I would argue that the natural state of humanity is that of mortality, and to overcome that would be to overcome one of the most fundamental ports of what it means to be human. Aging and mortality is not the sort of thing that can be defeated in a vacuum; if we did so, we'd be just as likely to destroy humanity as to bring about its transcendence.
The reason this parable smacks so heavily of propaganda is that it's dripping with emotional manipulation. Once the fringe group of scientists reached the tipping point of public opinion, everyone became gung-ho unity-of-man everyone pulling for the same purpose happy, and after the dragon was defeated, the king gave a tearful speech about how he wished he had seen the light earlier but how now humanity is the master of its own destiny and woo-woo go team homo sapiens longevitus and it doesn't really address how this society which was for so long centered around dealing with the dragon problem will have to reinvent itself.
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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enemy anemone
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« Reply #14 on: June 17, 2009, 02:52:16 PM » |
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yeah, makes sense. I just found myself annoyed by the story (not just the babies thing) and couldn't take it seriously enough to think very deeply about what exactly I thought was wrong with it.
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