The reasoning here is simple. If ideas within the group consensus could solve this existential threat, the problem would likely already be solved.
First offâthis isnât necessarily true. There are ideas within the group consensus that could at least take steps towards solving nuclear war (advocate for nuclear disarmament), climate change (advance the state of carbon capture technology), and reduce global poverty. (Basically everything GiveWell does) The reason we havenât solved them yet is that executing these ideas is still very hard due to problems around logistics, co-ordination, and they simply require a hell of a lot of work.
That said, I do agree with you that looking at the root cause of exponentially increasing x-risk capable technologies is not an idea that is currently discussed much. But that should actually move you towards thinking inside the boxâif people arenât thinking about it, thereâs low-hanging fruit to be picked, and you donât need to go straight to the most radical idea you can think of. Maybe there are some good ideas within the Overton window that havenât been popularised yet, just waiting to be found!
This is an understandable critique, which is welcomed. But to be more precise, what is really being said is that Iâve shied away from solving the problem in the manner preferred by those who make their living serving an out of control knowledge explosion. If such folks can solve the problem in the manner which they prefer, thatâs great, Iâm all for solving the problem. Letâs hear their solution...
No, thatâs not whatâs being said. What I am saying is that youâve shied away from solving the problem. âSolving the problemâ means coming up with a solution that has a chance of actually working giving the constraints of the real world. In the real world, I cannot see any sort of realistic path towards your solution, and coming up with such a path is a requirement for a valid solution. It is not enough to describe a possible state of the world that solves a problemâyou have to have some path to get from our current world to that world.
I also gave you two ideas for the limitation of knowledge developmentâban all research in any areas deemed to be prone to existential risk, and find a way to remove the tendency for highly aggressive men to seek power in world-threatening ways. Donât get me wrong, these still donât count as solutions in my definition above, but they seem at least as plausible as removing the male gender entirely. It seems âprobably impossibleâ rather than âdefinitely impossibleâ, and limiting research even suggests some possible next steps, like banning biological gain-of-function research (even though these are still very hard and Iâve heard people make decent arguments for why it canât be done, largely around the difficulty of international co-operationâbut this is also an argument that applies equally well to your proposal)
Yes, the argument Iâm making seems strange to you. It seems strange to most people. Thatâs what I like about it. Weâre exploring outside the limits of a group consensus which has a proven record of failing to successfully address these existential threats.
Being outside the box doesnât guarantee success, agree completely there. But where else would you have me look?
You seem to have the idea that people are disagreeing with you because your ideas are strange and outside the box. This is from the same forum that has wild animal suffering as a small but real cause area. When I said your argument seemed strange, I was being polite. What I should have said was that your argument seems bad. Not because itâs outside the box. Not because I disagree with it morally. Because I donât see how it could actually work, and there seem to me to be options that are simultaneously less radical and also closer to the set of things I would describe as possible solutions. The reason to think out of the box is because nothing else has workedâyou should be aiming for the least radical solution that is necessary to solve the problem.
Finally, while I donât think this point is necessary for my core argument, Iâll address it anyway:
Also, why should men resist the idea of their being fewer men??? The fewer men there are, the more valuable the remaining men become in the dating pool. This is another obvious point critics always ignore in their rush to rejection.
Firstlyâa society that wants to eliminate the male gender probably isnât going to be very nice for men to live in. You canât have a society dedicated to the extinction of men that also respects, appreciates, and is kind to them. Any attitudes society adapted that would allow them to even consider such a radical act are going to be opposed by men for precisely this reasonâwhich, by the way, is an extremely good reason and has my full sympathy. There are people right now who advocate for the extinction of men, and they are not the kind of people I would feel safe around, let alone being ruled by.
Secondlyâletâs say I donât care about the future of men, and I donât care what people think of me, and Iâm certain that societyâs newfound attitudes that allow for the intentional extinction of men definitely wonât turn into violence, and Iâm willing to throw away my entire gender to increase my chance of getting laid. Even then, Iâm thirty years old now. How does this help me? If youâre not going to commit violence, which youâve previously claimed, the only way you can reduce the number of men is to stop new ones from being born. That means that if you could start having statistically relevant effects a mere ten years from now, Iâm still going to be in my sixties by the time the dating pool starts shifting in any sort of meaningful way, and thereâs still just as many 30+ year olds as there ever was. That doesnât seem like it benefits me.
Finally, if most humans were willing to consider twenty years in the future when deciding on what policies they support, we might not be in this mess in the first place.
Hi again Jay, Iâm enjoying your responses, thanks.
There are ideas within the group consensus that could at least take steps towards solving nuclear war
Your point is taken on climate change and poverty. Nuclear war seems an example of conventional thinking which has failed.
That said, I do agree with you that looking at the root cause of exponentially increasing x-risk capable technologies is not an idea that is currently discussed much.
Thanks for seeing that. If I can change that a little bit, itâs worth a try. Like everybody else, Iâm just doing what little I know how to do.
you donât need to go straight to the most radical idea you can think of
Thatâs true. But it is that radical idea that engaged your interest, so sometimes it works. Iâm not claiming to have the perfect engagement system etc, again, Iâm just doing what I know how to do.
âSolving the problemâ means coming up with a solution that has a chance of actually working giving the constraints of the real world.
What I see is that many of my readers often come to hard fixed opinions on what is possible after reading two paragraphs of one of my posts, on a subject theyâve never really thought about. And then all their further effort goes in to defending those positions.
Youâve helped me think of an example from the real world that seems somewhat relevant to the âworld without menâ idea. Chinaâs one child policy. To the best of my knowledge that was pursued with financial carrots and sticks, not violence (not totally sure about this).
In the real world a great many people around the world have been prioritizing male babies over female babies for centuries. This demonstrates that when people have some population or gender agenda, they can take steps that move them towards their goals.
In the real world, I cannot see any sort of realistic path towards your solution,
How long have you been trying? Today and yesterday? I do agree that the world without men proposal faces a very large pile of challenges, I really do. But what proposal for radically reducing human violence doesnât?
What you, and most readers, are not focusing on are the enormous game changing benefits that a world without men can credibly be said to offer. Thatâs not a good enough reason to immediately agree, but is does seem a good enough reason to explore further. Thatâs all I want. Letâs explore further.
I also gave you two ideas for the limitation of knowledge developmentâban all research in any areas deemed to be prone to existential risk, and find a way to remove the tendency for highly aggressive men to seek power in world-threatening ways.
Iâm receptive to that discussion. Letâs explore that too. Iâm modestly optimistic on the first, less so on the second. My optimism will increase at the point of some real world catastrophe highlighting the problem in a manner many more people can access. It looks like it will have to be catastrophe of significant scale though. And probably something easy to understand, like a nuclear event for instance.
You seem to have the idea that people are disagreeing with you because your ideas are strange and outside the box.
Iâve been floating this idea for years all over the net. I could indeed be wrong, but that is my current working theory. The theory comes from the observation that the overwhelming majority of respondents have been focused on automated rejection, not analysis. They typically never try to solve the puzzle, preferring the easier route of immediately declaring it impossible. Itâs human nature. We want radical improvements, by doing all the same stuff weâve always done.
Firstlyâa society that wants to eliminate the male gender probably isnât going to be very nice for men to live in. You canât have a society dedicated to the extinction of men that also respects, appreciates, and is kind to them.
I must respectfully disagree here. Everybody wants to look at this through the âyou must hate menâ lens. As I see it, a society that wants to remove the male gender is taking the necessary bold action to create a near utopia (compared to today) for the human race.
What is so important about the male gender that our existence justifies unspeakable suffering on a vast scale over thousands of years? Why is such a concept rational???
The women I envision are human beings capable of making a bold, rational, altruistic decision which benefits the future of humanity in a revolutionary manner. Itâs not about hate. Itâs about reason. Civilization survival. A brighter future for humanity. Itâs about adapting to the radical new environment the knowledge explosion has created.
NATUREâS RULE: Those who donât adapt must die.
That doesnât seem like it benefits me.
You think you have problems, Iâm 70! I still look at the gals. They stopped looking back years ago. :-) Why do you think Iâm trying to save the world?? I got nothing else to do dude! :-)
Good conversation! Youâre personally making my attendance here worth the trouble, and I thank you for that. If you start a thread on the site and want engagement, let me know, Iâll do my best.
Thatâs true. But it is that radical idea that engaged your interest, so sometimes it works. Iâm not claiming to have the perfect engagement system etc, again, Iâm just doing what I know how to do.
The idea that engaged my interest was that of the exponential knowledge explosion. I thought there was a good idea there, and I replied since I had seen a lot of your posts recently and nobody else was replying to them. I replied in spite of, not because of, the proposed solution. I imagine itâs quite likely that others decided not to reply because of the proposed solution as well.
I apologise for misleading you thereâIâll focus just on the exponential knowledge explosion side of things to help correct that.
Me: In the real world, I cannot see any sort of realistic path towards your solution,
You: How long have you been trying? Today and yesterday?
The above line by me was an invitation for you to share a path. Youâre rightâmy inability to see a path after five minutes isnât a strong indication that no such path exists. On the other hand, youâve had this idea for yearsâif you donât have a path forward, thatâs much stronger evidence for the ideaâs untenability. If you do have a path forward, this would be a good thing to add to your argument.
You seem to have the idea that people are disagreeing with you because your ideas are strange and outside the box.
This sentence was referring entirely to the EA Forumâpeople tend to be more tolerant of weird ideas here than in most places on the internet.
The idea that engaged my interest was that of the exponential knowledge explosion
Ok, great, thanks. As you can now see, Iâm obsessed with this.
The knowledge explosion idea and world without men idea are somewhat linked in my mind. Meaning, if violent men werenât creating havoc all over the planet, there would be less reason to worry about the knowledge explosion. If there was no knowledge explosion, thereâd be less reason to worry about violent men.
I do have a plan for moving forward on the world without men concept. The plan is to recognize that no single human being, certainly not me, can meet such an enormous challenge, so itâs necessary to engage many bright minds to work on the issue. That is, I have faith that once many bright minds are engaged, progress can be made. Iâm asking readers to have as much faith in themselves as I have in them. Instead of chanting âwe canâtâ we might instead choose to start believing that we can.
I have a few detail ideas, such as financial incentives to reward female babies etc. Admittedly I am no where near a complete solution. Iâm puzzled as to why anyone would think that I was, should be, or could be.
My main contribution, as I see it, is to boil down all the endless complexity in to a simple verifiable truth. The overwhelming vast majority of violence is committed by men. Itâs not human violence that weâre talking about, itâs male violence. Being clear on this creates a target of opportunity.
The other thing I hope to contribute is to articulate the revolutionary positive benefits that would flow from radically reducing male violence. If this problem could be solved, the pay day would be almost beyond imagination.
The bumper sticker version is this:
The marriage between violent men and an ever accelerating knowledge explosion is unsustainable. One of them has to go.
Well, youâll probably need to buy a big truck to get all that on the bumper.
The marriage between violent men and an ever accelerating knowledge explosion is unsustainable. One of them has to go.
I think our core crux here is that if this is true, I would rather tackle it from the âever accelerating knowledge explosionâ side or the âviolentâ side rather than the âmenâ side.
Good luck with your ideas, man. Youâve certainly given me a new idea to think about (knowledge explosion) and I hope Iâve done the same.
I think our core crux here is that if this is true, I would rather tackle it from the âever accelerating knowledge explosionâ side or the âviolentâ side rather than the âmenâ side.
Ok, thatâs cool. To each their own of course. But we donât really have to choose, we can investigate both at the same time.
Should you start writing about the knowledge explosion side of things you will find it just as challenging as the âworld without menâ side. Search for my article âOur Relationship With Knowledgeâ on this site, itâs been down voted like crazy, no engagement at all. Thatâs pretty normal.
The science community in particular (those who have the most cultural authority on such issues) will view your writing on limiting the knowledge explosion much the same way the Catholic Church viewed atheists in the 12th century. You will be dismissed, ridiculed, scorned, deleted, banned etc. But probably not burned at the stake, so thatâs good. :-)
If I was pressed to choose, Iâd probably agree the âworld without menâ idea makes people more hysterical. But a notion that we canât have never ending unlimited goodies from the knowledge explosion does not exactly delight people, to say the least.
Both of these ideas are wildly ambitious. Neither has much of a chance until MAYBE after some large historical event which undermines the assumption of the group consensus that we can somehow magically have our cake and eat it too, radical change for the better, without radical change.
First offâthis isnât necessarily true. There are ideas within the group consensus that could at least take steps towards solving nuclear war (advocate for nuclear disarmament), climate change (advance the state of carbon capture technology), and reduce global poverty. (Basically everything GiveWell does) The reason we havenât solved them yet is that executing these ideas is still very hard due to problems around logistics, co-ordination, and they simply require a hell of a lot of work.
That said, I do agree with you that looking at the root cause of exponentially increasing x-risk capable technologies is not an idea that is currently discussed much. But that should actually move you towards thinking inside the boxâif people arenât thinking about it, thereâs low-hanging fruit to be picked, and you donât need to go straight to the most radical idea you can think of. Maybe there are some good ideas within the Overton window that havenât been popularised yet, just waiting to be found!
No, thatâs not whatâs being said. What I am saying is that youâve shied away from solving the problem. âSolving the problemâ means coming up with a solution that has a chance of actually working giving the constraints of the real world. In the real world, I cannot see any sort of realistic path towards your solution, and coming up with such a path is a requirement for a valid solution. It is not enough to describe a possible state of the world that solves a problemâyou have to have some path to get from our current world to that world.
I also gave you two ideas for the limitation of knowledge developmentâban all research in any areas deemed to be prone to existential risk, and find a way to remove the tendency for highly aggressive men to seek power in world-threatening ways. Donât get me wrong, these still donât count as solutions in my definition above, but they seem at least as plausible as removing the male gender entirely. It seems âprobably impossibleâ rather than âdefinitely impossibleâ, and limiting research even suggests some possible next steps, like banning biological gain-of-function research (even though these are still very hard and Iâve heard people make decent arguments for why it canât be done, largely around the difficulty of international co-operationâbut this is also an argument that applies equally well to your proposal)
You seem to have the idea that people are disagreeing with you because your ideas are strange and outside the box. This is from the same forum that has wild animal suffering as a small but real cause area. When I said your argument seemed strange, I was being polite. What I should have said was that your argument seems bad. Not because itâs outside the box. Not because I disagree with it morally. Because I donât see how it could actually work, and there seem to me to be options that are simultaneously less radical and also closer to the set of things I would describe as possible solutions. The reason to think out of the box is because nothing else has workedâyou should be aiming for the least radical solution that is necessary to solve the problem.
Finally, while I donât think this point is necessary for my core argument, Iâll address it anyway:
Firstlyâa society that wants to eliminate the male gender probably isnât going to be very nice for men to live in. You canât have a society dedicated to the extinction of men that also respects, appreciates, and is kind to them. Any attitudes society adapted that would allow them to even consider such a radical act are going to be opposed by men for precisely this reasonâwhich, by the way, is an extremely good reason and has my full sympathy. There are people right now who advocate for the extinction of men, and they are not the kind of people I would feel safe around, let alone being ruled by.
Secondlyâletâs say I donât care about the future of men, and I donât care what people think of me, and Iâm certain that societyâs newfound attitudes that allow for the intentional extinction of men definitely wonât turn into violence, and Iâm willing to throw away my entire gender to increase my chance of getting laid. Even then, Iâm thirty years old now. How does this help me? If youâre not going to commit violence, which youâve previously claimed, the only way you can reduce the number of men is to stop new ones from being born. That means that if you could start having statistically relevant effects a mere ten years from now, Iâm still going to be in my sixties by the time the dating pool starts shifting in any sort of meaningful way, and thereâs still just as many 30+ year olds as there ever was. That doesnât seem like it benefits me.
Finally, if most humans were willing to consider twenty years in the future when deciding on what policies they support, we might not be in this mess in the first place.
Hi again Jay, Iâm enjoying your responses, thanks.
Your point is taken on climate change and poverty. Nuclear war seems an example of conventional thinking which has failed.
Thanks for seeing that. If I can change that a little bit, itâs worth a try. Like everybody else, Iâm just doing what little I know how to do.
Thatâs true. But it is that radical idea that engaged your interest, so sometimes it works. Iâm not claiming to have the perfect engagement system etc, again, Iâm just doing what I know how to do.
What I see is that many of my readers often come to hard fixed opinions on what is possible after reading two paragraphs of one of my posts, on a subject theyâve never really thought about. And then all their further effort goes in to defending those positions.
Youâve helped me think of an example from the real world that seems somewhat relevant to the âworld without menâ idea. Chinaâs one child policy. To the best of my knowledge that was pursued with financial carrots and sticks, not violence (not totally sure about this).
In the real world a great many people around the world have been prioritizing male babies over female babies for centuries. This demonstrates that when people have some population or gender agenda, they can take steps that move them towards their goals.
How long have you been trying? Today and yesterday? I do agree that the world without men proposal faces a very large pile of challenges, I really do. But what proposal for radically reducing human violence doesnât?
What you, and most readers, are not focusing on are the enormous game changing benefits that a world without men can credibly be said to offer. Thatâs not a good enough reason to immediately agree, but is does seem a good enough reason to explore further. Thatâs all I want. Letâs explore further.
Iâm receptive to that discussion. Letâs explore that too. Iâm modestly optimistic on the first, less so on the second. My optimism will increase at the point of some real world catastrophe highlighting the problem in a manner many more people can access. It looks like it will have to be catastrophe of significant scale though. And probably something easy to understand, like a nuclear event for instance.
Iâve been floating this idea for years all over the net. I could indeed be wrong, but that is my current working theory. The theory comes from the observation that the overwhelming majority of respondents have been focused on automated rejection, not analysis. They typically never try to solve the puzzle, preferring the easier route of immediately declaring it impossible. Itâs human nature. We want radical improvements, by doing all the same stuff weâve always done.
I must respectfully disagree here. Everybody wants to look at this through the âyou must hate menâ lens. As I see it, a society that wants to remove the male gender is taking the necessary bold action to create a near utopia (compared to today) for the human race.
What is so important about the male gender that our existence justifies unspeakable suffering on a vast scale over thousands of years? Why is such a concept rational???
The women I envision are human beings capable of making a bold, rational, altruistic decision which benefits the future of humanity in a revolutionary manner. Itâs not about hate. Itâs about reason. Civilization survival. A brighter future for humanity. Itâs about adapting to the radical new environment the knowledge explosion has created.
NATUREâS RULE: Those who donât adapt must die.
You think you have problems, Iâm 70! I still look at the gals. They stopped looking back years ago. :-) Why do you think Iâm trying to save the world?? I got nothing else to do dude! :-)
Good conversation! Youâre personally making my attendance here worth the trouble, and I thank you for that. If you start a thread on the site and want engagement, let me know, Iâll do my best.
The idea that engaged my interest was that of the exponential knowledge explosion. I thought there was a good idea there, and I replied since I had seen a lot of your posts recently and nobody else was replying to them. I replied in spite of, not because of, the proposed solution. I imagine itâs quite likely that others decided not to reply because of the proposed solution as well.
I apologise for misleading you thereâIâll focus just on the exponential knowledge explosion side of things to help correct that.
The above line by me was an invitation for you to share a path. Youâre rightâmy inability to see a path after five minutes isnât a strong indication that no such path exists. On the other hand, youâve had this idea for yearsâif you donât have a path forward, thatâs much stronger evidence for the ideaâs untenability. If you do have a path forward, this would be a good thing to add to your argument.
This sentence was referring entirely to the EA Forumâpeople tend to be more tolerant of weird ideas here than in most places on the internet.
Ok, great, thanks. As you can now see, Iâm obsessed with this.
The knowledge explosion idea and world without men idea are somewhat linked in my mind. Meaning, if violent men werenât creating havoc all over the planet, there would be less reason to worry about the knowledge explosion. If there was no knowledge explosion, thereâd be less reason to worry about violent men.
I do have a plan for moving forward on the world without men concept. The plan is to recognize that no single human being, certainly not me, can meet such an enormous challenge, so itâs necessary to engage many bright minds to work on the issue. That is, I have faith that once many bright minds are engaged, progress can be made. Iâm asking readers to have as much faith in themselves as I have in them. Instead of chanting âwe canâtâ we might instead choose to start believing that we can.
I have a few detail ideas, such as financial incentives to reward female babies etc. Admittedly I am no where near a complete solution. Iâm puzzled as to why anyone would think that I was, should be, or could be.
My main contribution, as I see it, is to boil down all the endless complexity in to a simple verifiable truth. The overwhelming vast majority of violence is committed by men. Itâs not human violence that weâre talking about, itâs male violence. Being clear on this creates a target of opportunity.
The other thing I hope to contribute is to articulate the revolutionary positive benefits that would flow from radically reducing male violence. If this problem could be solved, the pay day would be almost beyond imagination.
The bumper sticker version is this:
The marriage between violent men and an ever accelerating knowledge explosion is unsustainable. One of them has to go.
Well, youâll probably need to buy a big truck to get all that on the bumper.
I think our core crux here is that if this is true, I would rather tackle it from the âever accelerating knowledge explosionâ side or the âviolentâ side rather than the âmenâ side.
Good luck with your ideas, man. Youâve certainly given me a new idea to think about (knowledge explosion) and I hope Iâve done the same.
Ok, thatâs cool. To each their own of course. But we donât really have to choose, we can investigate both at the same time.
Should you start writing about the knowledge explosion side of things you will find it just as challenging as the âworld without menâ side. Search for my article âOur Relationship With Knowledgeâ on this site, itâs been down voted like crazy, no engagement at all. Thatâs pretty normal.
The science community in particular (those who have the most cultural authority on such issues) will view your writing on limiting the knowledge explosion much the same way the Catholic Church viewed atheists in the 12th century. You will be dismissed, ridiculed, scorned, deleted, banned etc. But probably not burned at the stake, so thatâs good. :-)
If I was pressed to choose, Iâd probably agree the âworld without menâ idea makes people more hysterical. But a notion that we canât have never ending unlimited goodies from the knowledge explosion does not exactly delight people, to say the least.
Both of these ideas are wildly ambitious. Neither has much of a chance until MAYBE after some large historical event which undermines the assumption of the group consensus that we can somehow magically have our cake and eat it too, radical change for the better, without radical change.