Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Why do you think that we won’t leave the galaxy? And also, even if you think that that’s improbable, just given the fact that almost all of the potential value that we can generate is outside of this galaxy because that’s where most of the matter energy is. Shouldn’t we be pretty focused on that possible scenario where, in fact, we do leave the galaxy? I see the recurrence of war in human history so frequently, and I’m not completely convinced by Steven Pinker. I agree with Steven Pinker, that the chance of a very violent war indeed has gone down and is going down, maybe every year, but the tail risk is still there. And if you let the clock tick out for a long enough period of time, at some point it will happen. Powerful abilities to manipulate energy also mean powerful weapons, eventually powerful weapons in decentralized hands. I don’t think we know how stable that process is, but again, let the clock tick out, and you should be very worried. What do you think is the probability that neither humans nor some kind of successor species exists in a hundred years or a thousand years or ten thousand years?…

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