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December 23 - December 25, 2019
The future is coming faster than most people realize.
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
IT IS A WELL-ESTABLISHED Achilles’ heel of human civilization that individuals are more motivated by immediate private reward than by long-term, collective future benefits. This effect is particularly evident when considering payoffs that will take longer than a generation to arrive—a phenomenon called intergenerational discounting.
The average span of a human generation is twenty-five years. Any reward occurring beyond this generational horizon creates an imbalance that undermines long-term cooperation. In short, we as a species are motivated to betray our own descendants. In my view, the only possible solution is the institution of harsh and immediate punishments for those who would be unfaithful to the future.
It has been subsequently theorized that our species’ seeming inability to focus on long-term existential threats will inexorably lead to the destruction of our environment, overpopulation, and resource exhaustion. It is therefore not an uncommon belief among economists that this inborn deficit represents a sort of built-in timer for the self-destruction of human civilization.
“What we are seeing is not impossible. It is simply an ultra-low-probability event.”
There exists a certain class of event that can technically occur, yet is so incredibly unlikely that most laymen would consider it impossible. This false assumption is based on a rule of thumb called Borel’s fallacy: “Phenomena with extremely low probabilities effectively never happen in real life.”
Of course, the mathematician Émile Borel never said such a thing. Instead, he proposed a law of large numbers, demonstrating that given a universe of infinite size, every event with nonzero probability will eventually occur. Or put another way—with enough chances, anything that can happen will happen.
Yet even with its unprecedented level of processing power and data, ALDA had always been wisely deployed with an 80/20 rule—which holds that an algorithm should be depended upon to reach only 80 percent of the solution, with human common sense and intuition applied to the final 20 percent.
There is a category of event that, once it occurs, cannot be satisfactorily resolved.
“The instinct of the human being upon contact with a foreign civilization is to flee. If that is not possible, it is invariably to attack. Only after surviving first contact is there an overwhelming urge to learn more. But do not mistake this response for altruistic curiosity, rather it is simply a need to understand the other in order to protect oneself from it . . . or, more likely, to attempt to destroy it.”
as history has proven time and again—in the hands of human beings, increasing power is increasingly dangerous.
Exposed to superior technology, these tribes are vulnerable to being exploited, killed, or enslaved. In the best-case scenario, they will covet our technology—especially our steel and guns. When they do get hold of it, they forget the traditional ways of living and become dependent on tools they can’t reproduce. Any contact, with good or evil intentions, will destroy them. Outsiders either take their lives, or their way of life.”
The divisions we have built between ourselves along the lines of race and geography are illusions. If our species is ultimately able to see past these biases, it will be our shared genetic stamp of humanness that will outlive the cultural contrivances that distract us in our day-to-day lives.
She had learned to distance herself from overwhelming feelings by treating the world like a game. Over the years, Peng had become a cool and methodical person precisely because she struggled with anxiety.
Of all the ways you can limit yourself, your own self-definition is the most powerful.
