David Deutsch: uncertainty

Transcript context

…When I had Tyler Cowen on my podcast, I asked him why he thinks that humans are lazy and are only going to be around for 700 more years. I gave him your rebuttal or what I understand as your rebuttal that is “creative, optimistic societies will innovate ways of safety technologies faster than totalitarian static societies can innovate with disruptive technologies.” And he responded, “maybe, but the cost of destruction is just so much lower than the cost of building.” That trend has been going on for a while now, what happens when a new bomb costs $60,000? Or what happens if there's a mistake? Like the kinds that we saw many times over in the Cold War? How would you respond to that? First of all, we've been getting safer and safer throughout the entire history of civilization. There were these plagues that wiped out a hot third of the population of the world or half, and it could have been 99% or 100%. We went through some kind of bottleneck 70,000 years ago, I understand from genetics that all our cousins and species have been wiped out so we were much less safe. Now, also if a 10 Kilometer asteroid had been on target to hit the Earth at any time in the past 2 million years or whatever it is history of the Genus Homo, that would have been the end of it. Whereas now, it will just mean higher taxation. That's how amazingly safer we are. Now, I would never say that it's impossible that we will destroy ourselves. That would be the contrary to the universality of the human mind. We can make wrong choices, we can make so many wrong choices that will destroy ourselves. On the other hand, the atomic bomb accident thing, would have had no zero chance of destroying civilization, all they would have done is cause a vast amount of suffering. And, but I don't think we have the technology to end civilization, even if we wanted to, all we would do if we just deliberately unleashed hell all over the world is we would cause a vast amount of suffering. But there would be survivors, and they would resolve never to do that again. So I don't think we're even able to let alone that we would do it accidentally. But as for the bad guys? Well, we are doing the wrong thing largely in regard to both external and internal threats. But I don't think we're doing the wrong thing to an existential risk level. And over the next 700 years, or whatever it is, well, I don't want to prophesy, because I don't know most of the advances that are going to be made in that time. But I see no reason why if we are solving problems, we won't solve problems. There’s another metaphor by Nick Bostrom about a jar with white balls, and there's one black ball and you take out a white ball, and then you pick the black ball, and that's the end of you. I don't think it's like that, because every white ball you take out and have reduces the number of black balls in the jar. So again, I'm not saying that's a law of nature, it could be that the very next ball we take out will be the black one, that will be the end of us. It could be but all arguments that will be are fallacious. I do want to talk about the Fun criteria. Is your definition of fun, different from how other people define other positive emotions like eudaimonia, or well being, or satisfaction, is “fun” a different emotion?…

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