Top Pick for Debate with Jacob?

[7Wannabe5]

I recently read "The Rational Optimist" by Matt Ridley and came to the conclusion that he was my top nominee for the anti-Jacob. Would those of you who have also read this work concur? Any other suggestions?

[jennypenny]

I haven't read it. How saccharine is it? (wondering if I could get through it ... I found myself rolling my eyes frequently through Kelly's The Inevitable)

[chenda]

Might explain why he run Northern Rock into the ground

[7Wannabe5]

I wouldn't describe it as saccharine. It's well-written, interesting and even occasionally humorous. His style is more like let me rapidly throw everything inclusive of the kitchen sink at you in support of my argument. He's not a no-overlap-of-Venn-diagram-anti-Jacob, like, for instance, Shirley MacLaine would be. More like a nod-in-agreement-up-to-point-of-critical-juncture-anti-Jacob. For instance, he would agree with 96% of the science of climate change, but not the economic forecasts.

P.S. I just added the Kelly book to my infinite regress of reading lists.

[7Wannabe5]

@chenda:

Well, somebody has to take on risks for the good of humanity...duh.

[Jason]

Now you ask.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/obit ... amous.html

[jennypenny]

@7W5--I loaned out my copy of The Inevitable. When I get it back, I'll mail it to you if you want.

[7Wannabe5]

@jennypenny:

Thanks! I am 30 days insecure on mailing address, but please contact me when you have it in hand. I will gladly round-robin something interesting back your way.

[7Wannabe5]

..this generation of human beings has access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours, square feet, gigabytes, megaherts, light-years, nanometres, bushels per acre, miles per gallon, food miles, air miles, and of course dollars than any that went before. They have more Velcro, vaccines, vitamins, shoes, singers, soap operas, mango slicers, sexual partners, tennis rackets, guided missiles and anything else they could even imagine needing. By one estimate, the number of different products that you can buy in New York or London tops ten billion.

Therefore, obviously, we should carry on with the status quo. Forward, ho! Would be Ridley's thesis in a nutshell.

[Kriegsspiel]

Peter Diamondis maybe.

[Jin+Guice]

I just finished Abundance and Kriegsspiel beat me to the punch with the Diamondis recommendation. I read the Ridley book a few years ago from an MMM recommendation and Abundance is in the same vein. These books also make me think of the recent techno-optimism apocalypse thread.

My other votes would be for some enlightened richy who could articulate an argument for the work hard/ play hard paradigm or Daniel Suelo who'd claim that Jacob isn't extreme enough and we should all just live in caves. I guess it depends what dimension they'd be arguing on.

[Campitor]

I would nominate Steven Pinker as the anti-Jacob. Although I think Jacob is pretty good as is.

https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker ... anguage=en

[daylen]

Ha! That guy is a pure optimist. +1 Pinker

[daylen]

I change my vote to Nick Bostrom. This guy has constructed a research organization contingent on the idea that humanity can unite and have a long, prosperous future. I can picture the debate starting out with Jacob pointing to a few facts about resource availability, then Nick would respond with a dissertation on how future innovations will likely nullify such concerns. After about a week of Jacob pointing to data and Nick writing response papers.. Nick would finally get tired and retreat to his academic fortress where he would start putting the pieces together during long, sleepless nights. Nick would then dismantle his "Future of Humanity Institute", move to Canada, learn forging/hunting/building skills, start writing anonymous essays on individual risk reduction strategies, and send explosive letters to optimistic social scientists.

[jacob]

This thread reminds me of the [age old] which is the best martial arts debate. At the turn of the 19th century, swordfighters couldn't really decide which fighter or style was the better one. The new school believed it should be settled with rules, points, and wooden swords; whereas the old school thought that only steel and potential/likely death mattered, because having accepted and mastered the possibility of one's death as an outcome was much more important than any technical skill. When "debating" such things or anything, it's crucial to establish the premises of the "debate", because the premises determine everything.

Of course, the ultimate determining premises are the consequences of real outcomes. The problem with those is that we often have to wait for them. Worse, timing might matter. Consider the famous bet between Ehrlich and Simon, which Simon won in the short term but which Ehrlich won 10 years later. That was, essentially, a stupid bet by construction because it was determined by timing. You see this repeated in the debate between passive and active investments all the time.

This is why I think debating/competition is stupid. It gets people into a tactical mode where useful information is withheld in order to win. The general problem is that humans adapt to whatever they're measured by ... and if it's winning a debate, the conversation (information provided) obtains accordingly and often the result (winner) is meaningless. Case in point, an unscientific debate about the veracity of evolution.

Thus in a very real sense, I think sparring is actually much more instructive as far as the audience is concerned. Rhetoric can be used for information as well as misinformation and sparring at least avoids evil use of the latter. As to who won the "real debate", let reality decide. We'll see who lived best after we're all dead. Also see the original Greek (Aristotle) definition of happiness.

[daylen]

This is why I think debating/competition is stupid. It gets people into a tactical mode where useful information is withheld in order to win.

This part is key. I think competition can make sense for everyone if the players are cooperating on a higher level. The second sentence assumes that people agree on what "useful information" is. Reasonable people can usually get along because they agree that data+reason wins over loyalty+authority (ERE forum, math-heavy sciences, engineering, trading, and so forth).

In the context of a two person debate, winning or loosing is a zero-sum outlook. In the context of a larger population, internal debate between sub-populations is interaction that makes opinions visible (increases information flow). Once opinions are visible, the population can then discuss or test them. People are dumb in isolation, but there is a crowd wisdom effect.

The problem is that the crowd wisdom effect is not monotonic. When the human population reaches a certain size the sub-populations do not need to interact and this creates value fragmentation. Useful information becomes subject to cultural interpretation.

[daylen]

I suppose that one extreme view is that all communication is bad, because it leads to group forming (cooperation) and a less equal distribution of resources which is unstable in the long run (competition); the opposite view might be that communication between all life is good, because communication directed towards agreement acknowledges that a positive-sum game can be played.

The perspectives of "competition is bad/good" and "cooperation is bad/good" seem entirely dependent on what levels of existence are being considered. Evolution appears to have favored a complex nesting of competition and cooperation that is dependent on regional bio-diversity and resource availability. Should an individual organism submit to the forces implied by their evolutionary history? ..or should they ignore it in favor of prolonging their current predisposed position? ..is this equivalent to discounting the present or discounting the future?

This is where creativity and risk taking comes into play. Most humans tend towards safe strategies that follow the crowd, but some humans are more willing to go against the grain of the crowd. Maybe this is an evolved "searching algorithm" for new adaptations. Schizophrenia is prevalent in 1% of the population; this is a persistent effect, it has a high reproductive cost, and it is complex on the genetic/regulatory level. All of this indicates that it is an adaptation beyond random chance. Schizophrenic-like traits are dependent on the underlying culture/language. Perhaps individuals that ignore the meaning-making mechanisms of their population help their in-group in some way (or did in the past). Tribes that had a recurrence of such traits could have developed language more rapidly, or maybe the traits promoted tribal fragmentation, competition, and innovation.

[BRUTE]

As to who won the "real debate", let reality decide. We'll see who lived best after we're all dead. Also see the original Greek (Aristotle) definition of happiness.

sounds like scientific nihilism or even determinism
if the planet explodes, humans will know that it definitely happened.

[daylen]

Sounds more like application of the Lindy effect; time judges expertise.

I have been reviewing Taleb's work, and I think I have been under-utilizing his agglomeration of ideas.

@Jacob Have you ever considered being more provocative, like Taleb? He does seem to have a point that irritating people you disagree with has more upside than downside when it comes to the survival of ideas (like ERE). Maybe you value a certain degree of privacy more than the survival of ERE?

[daylen]

People are dumb in isolation, but there is a crowd wisdom effect.

I am totally wrong here, . The crowd wisdom effect only works for simple questions(*) when everyone is asked in isolation and the answers are averaged. Socialization actually makes people mad (crowd madness effect), because the individuals have no skin in the game (or punishment symmetric to consequences) and subordinate their reasons to "fit in".

This leads me to revise my thoughts on how science works. @brute was ahead of me on this one. The most important discoveries have been made by people who were somewhat decoupled from the scientific institution! The "scientific method" doesn't actually work for innovation (great for filling in details). Technology helped people discover science; the reverse is not as true as I was lead to believe.

Conversation and commentary only work to discover truth if it is mixed with intermediate testing. Competition or debate implies that the audience is the final judge, but in reality, time is the final judge. The future survival of an idea is proportional to its age.

(*) Like how many beads are in this jar?