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What We Owe The Future: Difference between revisions
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{{a|book review|}}It took me a while to put my finger on what was so irritating about this book. To be sure there’s a patronising glibness about it: it is positively jammed full of the sort of thought experiments (“imagine you had to live the life of every sentient being on the planet” kind of thing) that give [[philosophy]] undergraduates a bad name. | {{a|book review|}}It took me a while to put my finger on what was so irritating about this book. To be sure, there’s a patronising glibness about it: it is positively jammed full of the sort of thought experiments (“imagine you had to live the life of every sentient being on the planet” kind of thing) that give [[philosophy]] undergraduates a bad name. | ||
{{Author|William MacAskill}} is, as best as I can make out, barely out of undergraduate [[philosophy]] class himself and hasn’t yet left the university | {{Author|William MacAskill}} is, as best as I can make out, barely out of undergraduate [[philosophy]] class himself and hasn’t yet left the university. A thirty-something ethics lecturer would strike most people (other than himself) as an unlikely source of cosmic advice for the planet’s distant future. So it proves. | ||
But ultimately it is MacAskill’s sub-Harari wiser-than-thou top-down moral counselling that grates: humanity needs to solve the problems of the future centrally and this requires brainy people in the academy, like MacAskill, to do it. And though the solution might be at the great expense of all you | But ultimately it is MacAskill’s sub-Harari wiser-than-thou top-down moral counselling that grates: humanity needs to solve the problems of the future centrally and this requires brainy people in the academy, like MacAskill, to do it. And though the solution might be at the great expense of all you mouth-breathing oxygen wasters out there, it is for the future’s good. | ||
We should sacrifice you lot — birds in the hand — for your far-distant descendants — birds in a bush that may or may not be there in 500m years. | We should sacrifice you lot — birds in the hand — for your far-distant descendants — birds in a bush that may or may not be there in 500m years. | ||
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Thanks — but no thanks. | Thanks — but no thanks. | ||
It is not at all clear what anyone can do to influence the unknowable distant future — a meteor could wipe us out any time — but tricksy probability calculations sure aren’t going to help. Nor does MacAskill ever say why organisms who are around ''now'' should give the merest flying hoot for | It is not at all clear what anyone can do to influence the unknowable distant future — a meteor could wipe us out any time — but tricksy probability calculations sure aren’t going to help. Nor does MacAskill ever say ''why'' organisms who are around ''now'' should give the merest flying hoot for a species which, if it survives at all, will have doubtlessly evolved beyond all recognition in 500 million years. | ||
How, or why, donating a tithe of your income now is supposed to make any necessarily positive difference to the race of pan-dimensional super beings we will have evolved into by then is not articulated. Is he ignorant of, or has he just misunderstood, the basic lessons of chaos theory? Causality may or may not be true, but forward progress in an open ecosystem of independent agents is non-linear. There is no “if-this-then-that” over five years, let alone fifty, let alone ''five hundred million''. We are in the lap of the gods. | |||
{{Quote|Quick side bar: [[Probabilities]] are suitable for closed, bounded systems with a ''complete'' set of ''known'' outcomes. The probability of rolling a six is ⅙ because a die has six equal sides, is equally likely to land on any side, and must land on one, and no other outcome is possible. ''This is not how most things in life work''. Probabilities work for [[finite game]]s. ''The future is in no sense a finite game''. It is unbounded, ambiguous, incomplete, the range of possible outcomes are not known and may as well be infinite. ''You can't calculate probabilities about it''. {{Author|Gerd Gigerenzer}} would say it is a situation of ''uncertainty'', not ''risk''. ''Expectation theory is worthless.''}} | {{Quote|Quick side bar: [[Probabilities]] are suitable for closed, bounded systems with a ''complete'' set of ''known'' outcomes. The probability of rolling a six is ⅙ because a die has six equal sides, is equally likely to land on any side, and must land on one, and no other outcome is possible. ''This is not how most things in life work''. Probabilities work for [[finite game]]s. ''The future is in no sense a finite game''. It is unbounded, ambiguous, incomplete, the range of possible outcomes are not known and may as well be infinite. ''You can't calculate probabilities about it''. {{Author|Gerd Gigerenzer}} would say it is a situation of ''uncertainty'', not ''risk''. ''Expectation theory is worthless.''}} | ||