"skyscrapers literally miles high" - this sounds awful!
"trees that have been bioengineered to light the streets" - so does this!
"people who are eternally youthful and disease-free" . . .
If I could be eternally youthful and disease-free, that would be great, I think. But if everyone were eternally youthful and disease-free the human population would rapidly grow to a point where what is left of the natural world would be wiped out. Then what? Soylent Green? No thanks.
I'm glad I'm not living in the world you want to build. The god of sterility and lifelessness can't also be the god of lack of technology. Sterility and lifelessness is what technology does - weedkillers and chainsaws and concrete and plastic grass.
Lack of technology is perhaps the best example of lack of coordination. Why isn’t our science better (eg why don’t we have RT superconductors?). One big reason is we haven’t put that much effort into it. We spend more on apps. Why don’t we put effort into it? One major reason: the value would be largely captured by other people, including mostly future people.
It’s really hard to coordinate with those future people because it’s hard for them to send value to us (I think?). So we rely on relatively weak motivations like love of Truth and love of our descendants.
this is a dumbass post when compared to Scott Alexander‘s. What, you‘re going to complain about a lack of technology and this is instrumentalized as a god now? Bro read the original from Alexander again and you will find that he talks about coordination failure and how it‘s unresolvable structurally. That‘s why it is a god. We can literally just build more tech
"skyscrapers literally miles high" - this sounds awful!
"trees that have been bioengineered to light the streets" - so does this!
"people who are eternally youthful and disease-free" . . .
If I could be eternally youthful and disease-free, that would be great, I think. But if everyone were eternally youthful and disease-free the human population would rapidly grow to a point where what is left of the natural world would be wiped out. Then what? Soylent Green? No thanks.
I'm glad I'm not living in the world you want to build. The god of sterility and lifelessness can't also be the god of lack of technology. Sterility and lifelessness is what technology does - weedkillers and chainsaws and concrete and plastic grass.
Lack of technology is perhaps the best example of lack of coordination. Why isn’t our science better (eg why don’t we have RT superconductors?). One big reason is we haven’t put that much effort into it. We spend more on apps. Why don’t we put effort into it? One major reason: the value would be largely captured by other people, including mostly future people.
It’s really hard to coordinate with those future people because it’s hard for them to send value to us (I think?). So we rely on relatively weak motivations like love of Truth and love of our descendants.
this is a dumbass post when compared to Scott Alexander‘s. What, you‘re going to complain about a lack of technology and this is instrumentalized as a god now? Bro read the original from Alexander again and you will find that he talks about coordination failure and how it‘s unresolvable structurally. That‘s why it is a god. We can literally just build more tech