How To Eradicate One Of Our Deadliest Enemies

Increasing Rationality In Political Thinking

Increasing rationality in political thinking: bad thinking about politics is a source of irrationality as well. At this point in history, while it may be less directly harmful than religion, it's total indirect effects are arguably more consequential than irrationality from religion, due to the unprecedented influence federal governments of large nation-states have on the lives of billions of people, affecting most aspects of their well-being. The importance and neglectedness of this cause will be more obvious to the LessWrong crowd than perhaps other rationalists and skeptics.

There were times in history when this was much more important than it is now. Raising the rationality waterline, or at least having the knowledge of the world we have now in the 1930s and 1940s, could've prevented WWII. It could've prevented the public from following and giving rise to ideologies and parties giving rise to catastrophic regimes. This would've been incredibly important in Russia in the 1910s, China and East Asia in the 1930s through 1960s, much of Europe during the Cold War, and South America, the Middle East, and Africa during the post-colonial era. The Cold War could've been mitigated much better or ended much earlier if hatred and mistrust were replaced with more attempts to coordinate and cooperate between the United States/NATO and the USSR/Warsaw Pact. Mass paranoia, excessive mistrust and fear, and irrationality not only in communist countries, but the extremity of anti-communist sentiment in the West, such as the Red Scare, made the world much more dangerous for everyone than in any point in history. It's difficult to imagine how the world would be both radically different or better if the sanity waterline had been higher at any of these periods of the twentieth century. Personally, I expect this cause may be the most important one in this focus area, as irrational thinking about global catastrophic risks like climate change, Artificial Intelligence, and technology arms races could lead to human extinction.

Another reason to work on this area is simply we're again seeing increasing political division and rancor among the public, which could lead to dire consequences like we saw in 20th century. Illiteracy of economics among the public gives credence to counterproductive policy, or elitist misunderstanding of social science can lead to awful policy or economic recessions. International sectarian conflict such as seen in the Middle East at present, dominating headlines, is a result of both religious and political irrationality. Making this cause tractable, however, seems difficult. First of all, while the skeptics and rationality movements have a consensus on what science we can and should use to spread scientific and religious skepticism, there is much less consensus to on what from science, especially the social sciences, we can use to increase rationality about political thought. Additionally, opinions on what constitutes 'good thinking' in politics are more divided and less scientifically informed, merely because much of the science which would lead to consensus doesn't exist. This can make it very difficult to coordinate groups to pursue a single set of best practices or strategies.

Update on Upcoming EA Podcast: Format Choices

I've been thinking about the sort of EA podcast I want to produce. Firstly, it might include recording the EA newsletter, but I hope for it to be more in-depth. That is, if reading the newsletter is like watching the local evening news, the podcast I have in mind is like a segment on 60 minutes. It wouldn't be like an audio equivalent of investigative journalism. I don't intend to use the podcast to broadcast original research inspired by the podcast.

I myself sometimes write blog posts on the EA Forum. So, other work I myself do in EA wouldn't be mentioned on the podcast unless the community deems newsworthy. I'd infer this from a project receiving something like a couple dozen votes on the EA Forum, or being shared in the EA Newsletter, or somesuch.

Secondly, the intended audience of the podcast is for people who are already familiar with effective altruism. Unlike Peter Singer's TED talk, TEDx or other talks by EA community leaders on YouTube, or the sort of radio interviews Will MacAskill has done in the past, this podcast will assume you've spent some time engaging with the foundations of effective altruism. The objective of the podcast will be to inform people of what's going on as the scope of activity under the umbrella of effective altruism expands.

I want to get started without having to learn how to do much editing. That would take a while, and I don't want to wait before I get started and after everyone loses excitement for the project. So, I'm going to write scripts for the episodes on EA policy work I'm doing. Being able to rehearse and read from scripts should reduce how much I stutter or pause during the podcast. I've heard this can be a problem in podcasts. I hope to start tomorrow.

My original idea was to record a podcast summarizing the policy work being done in and around the EA community. I thought something like this might take around an hour to listen to. However, I underestimated the amount of EA policy work being done. I think there is content on this topic alone for a couple hours worth of podcast. That's a bit long to start off with, so I'll be breaking down my summary coverage of EA policy work into multiple episodes. I'm breaking it down by the policy work done on respective object-level causes (e.g., poverty alleviation, animal welfare, etc.).

I imagine each of those episodes will be around 20 minutes in length. I don't imagine an episode will be less than 10 minutes or more than 40 minutes, for this first series of episodes.

Friends of DEAM

With the rise of memes, we've seen the rise of other meme pages on Facebook. Be sure to follow them if you want more hilarity!

Clippius Maximus is an AI agent trying to maximize the expected number of paper clips in the universe. "Clippy" shares details of his attempts to maximize the number of paperclips as it relates to ongoing research in machine intelligence and covers paperclip-related events happening around the world.

Marvin the Malicious Mosquito is a mosquito locked in a zero-sum competition with the human species, to see who can wipe out who first. He hates us all, and constantly shitposts to this effect.

Radical Rationalist Memes is a meme page inspired by LessWrong and the rationalist community, and shares memes related to its tropes and core ideas.

Trolley Problem Memes is exactly what it says, and is very popular. Here is an interview between Linchuan Zhang and the creators of Trolley Problem Memes on what inspired them to create the memes, and their own philosophical and ethical inclinations. 

Geoengineering Is a Variant of Terraforming

This morning, I've read about both terraforming and geoengineering. Terraforming is essentially converting other planets to livable conditions for humans. That is, we could live on them unaided by advanced technology, as humans have lived on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years. Eventually, the ultimate goal would be for fine-tuned terraforming to make other planets not just livable, but ideal for human conditions. Geoengineering is the practice of altering the Earth's climate to make it more livable for humans, assuming anthropogenic climate change may or will make life harder for many, many millions of people later this century.

So, first of all, if you zoom in real close, it seems geoengineering is a form of terraforming. That is, humans have the power to transform a planet's superterranean conditions, Earth, Mars, or other, at rates astronomically faster than what would happen naturally. We can do this in a way that makes such planets either more or less livable for humans, in terms of matters of degree. The condition of the climate, of the land, air, and seas, for the thousands of years over which humans evolved, could be considered more-or-less ideal conditions for our survival.

Projecting into the future, making the conditions on other planets a climactic paradise, as once was the case in the human past, goes beyond ideal into the idyllic. This is an ideal version of any planet humans could live on, including Earth, based on a past version of Earth. Call this human vision for a planet: "Terra". In this sense, Earth is, not now, Terra. Earth isn't like the ideal conditions it once was for humanity, for all the species we've lived with for our entire history and prehistory. It won't be like that in the future. If humanity disappeared from the Earth today, the climate won't return to those conditions for thousands of years. With geoengineering, Earth may return to those conditions faster, but it will probably take much longer than a typical human lifespan for that to happen. So, geoengineering seems to be a relatively minute, early version of terraforming. This also implies, depending on how the future goes, that one day Mars will be more livable than Earth. This seems very unlikely, but, in something like 2,000 years, if terraforming Mars goes very well, and geoengineering and climate change on Earth go very poorly, Mars could have the better climate, and be the world you'd prefer to live on. I'll leave you with that to ponder.

Is This How Elon Musk Thinks Spacex Will Get Us To Mars?

Until recently, I've sense an indiscrepancy between how Elon Musk is running Spacex on a day-to-day basis, and his lofty ambitions for the commercialization of space exploration to precipitate the colonization of space. The latter only comes out in interviews. I haven't been able to connect the dots between, impressive as it is, launching rockets to supply the ISS leads to colonizing Mars.

Then I saw the footage of Spacex's rocket successfully landing on the drone ship. I think I have a greater sense of Musk's vision.

Everything Spacex has done so far, just sending rockets to the ISS? That isn't their business plan, or their business model, for the long-term. That isn't the final stage. The final stage won't be, either, just sending all manner of satellites up to space, or sending rockets up for asteroid mining, even though that too may come to pass. No, in landing a rocket on an automated drone ship, I realize Spacex is trying to not only go from 0-to-1, but then also from 1-to-n. Spacex is trying to do it all.

However many years from now, when everything they do is perfected, Spacex is going to scale, marvelously. When there are dozens of rockets taking off and landing on drone ships year after year, it's really going to expand our imagination and ambition of what can be done with ships taking off from Earth. Things that might still strike most people as too lofty a goal today, like getting so many rockets beyond the moon, or Earth's orbit, will become common-sense extensions of what Spacex does. Then, the process of expanding what human space exploration is really capable of, as a commerical, scientific, and humanistic endeavour, will be iterated, again and again, until we're landing ships on Mars.

I'm not saying all this is going to happen. I just think I finally understand think from Elon Musk's point of view.

What Does Japan Think of Cultural Appropriation?

In the last couple years, much has been made of cultural appropriation, particularly of artifacts and trends from non-white cultures by white people[1]. While I remember it being an issue for years, it's only since the beginning of 2015, with a rise of contemporary social justice awareness on the internet, that cultural appropriation became a hot topic everyone was commenting on.

Anyway, one manifestation of cultural appropriation is the wearing of kimonos outside of Japan, by people not of Japanese descent. I remember several months ago some friends shared articles about this on Facebook. I also saw a a response written about how, supposedly, this isn't seen as a big issue, or as an affront to Japanese culture, in Japan. In particular, the sale of kimonos overseas is what's keeping producers in kimonos in business, as the sale of the garments has declined in Japan.

Another recent controversy, not exactly cultural appropriation, but on whitewashing in Hollywood, is about the casting and production choices for the American live-action adaptation of classic manga/anime Ghost in the Shell.

It appears the cast will largely be composed of white actors, while in the original media the characters are all Japanese. This isn't unusual though; while adapting anime is uncommon, Hollywood casting white and American actors for the American adaptation of a foreign film, for roles that were originally played by non-white/non-American actors, is common. Some people were upset about this, but it wasn't making headlines everywhere.
What's got people upset lately is there are rumours the studio behind the new film toyed with CGI effects to make the white actors cast in the film appear 'more Asian'. The rumours also purported that Scarlett Johanson, cast to play the protagonist in the film, was one of the actors for whom the effects were used on in post-production. The studio responded that the effects were never used on Scarlett Johanson in particular, only on actors playing more minor roles in the film, and that the studio immediately scrapped the idea as soon as they saw the results, as they appeared to garish at any rate.

So, now the backlash against the producers of this American adaptation, and Hollywood whitewashing in particular, is back in full force. Wanting to learn more about this, I read about the controversy on Wikipedia. The first section eminently made sense to me, from the perspective of Hollywood's critics.

The casting of Johansson in the lead role caused accusations of whitewashing, especially from fans of the original Japanese franchise. As it is still unclear if Johansson's character will retain her Japanese name, fans have argued that changing both the Japanese setting and main character's name to make the film a complete cultural adaptation would be a wiser decision. 

However, the part about Japanese fans', and the studio which produced the original Ghost in the Shell, surprised me.

In Japan, fans of the manga were surprised that the casting caused controversy with many already assuming that the Hollywood production would choose a white actress in the lead role. Sam Yoshiba, director of the international business division at Kodansha's Tokyo headquarters said, "Looking at her career so far, I think Scarlett Johansson is well cast. She has the cyberpunk feel. And we never imagined it would be a Japanese actress in the first place... This is a chance for a Japanese property to be seen around the world."

I've read the full article that quote from taken from, and it doesn't inform much more than the gist above. Reactions in Japan ranged from somewhat disappointed to nonplussed, with the sentiment from Mr. Yoshiba's quote above expanded upon with some even musing the casting of a white actor in the role, other things being equal, will give the film wider appeal than if a Japanese(-American) actor were cast in the role. Overall, it seems the reaction of Japanese fans has been rather muted compared to criticism from North America and Europe.
Now, I haven't taken the time to read about or discuss with others about contemporary discourse on cultural appropriation. It seems one of these polarizing issues where everyone feels entitled to an opinion, and it might just be a bunch of noise that won't help me form a well-informed opinion myself. I know lots of Americans of all backgrounds are upset about cultural appropriation one way or another. I don't know much about what the populations of countries in Africa, Asia, or South America think of cultural appropriation. However, the two times I've encountered what people from Japan think of cultural appropriation, it appears they're not all that outraged about it.

First, it happened with kimonos, then with the casting of white actors in the live-action Ghost in the Shell adaptation. This is only two examples, but does this trend generalize? Does anyone have insight into what the people of Japan think of cultural appropriation of Japanese culture by Americans?

[1] My perception of the topic is exclusively informed by cultural appropriation in North America, where I'm from and where I've read coverage of it. I'm not familiar with how the issue of cultural appropriation plays out or is perceived outside of Canada and the United States.