Thomas, thanks for taking the time to read and an honest critique!
Aligning everyone’s beliefs won’t solve conflict; you need to fix structural problems too.
I don’t think so. Aligning everyone’s beliefs solves conflicts but, indeed, doesn’t fix structural problems by itself. However, if a single person is able to see structural problems (while unable to fix them alone), the society with aligned (around everyone’s well-being) interests and pro-social attitudes would be also able to see them and cooperatively fix these problems.
If you could communicate obvious true beliefs and get people to internalize them properly, everyone would be an EA. A general method of communicating non-obvious true beliefs about the nature of reality to people, and getting them to act on it, sounds implausible.
Well, I guess that most educated people of the 17th century would find the claim of extracting huge amounts of energy from small man-made devices (nuclear weapons) implausible. But this tells nothing about physics. If I say that communicating non-obvious true beliefs about the nature of reality to people sounds plausible to me it constitutes the same argument, actually. So I doubt this argument is valid.
I think, the reason you see it implausible is that you imagine some process of common education and this is really a hard way, even for obvious true beliefs. I use the concept of TK to show that there’s a way to learn some things fast from personal experience (in contrast to the traditional education process of conveying intellectual knowledge).
You say “At some critical point a positive feedback loop will emerge so that every human becomes supersapient over time.” If this is the natural result of some small critical mass of people becoming supersapient, why has Buddhism not taken over the world with its millions of enlightened people over thousands of years of existence?
How did you get an estimate of millions of enlightened people? What percent of enlightened people do you account as a critical mass? I think that’s not a case with Buddhism because it didn’t deliver enough “supersapient” people. Maybe there were times and places when it did but they were isolated in monasteries until death (e.g., from invaders) so it had no effect on the global population.
Actually, I don’t consider Buddhism as an enlightening machine. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn’t. But because it works sometimes there’s something we can learn.
I would still be skeptical due to the prior implausibility and lack of a clear, plausible plan for increasing the world’s empathy levels 10%.
Indeed, I don’t have a clear plan. However the aim of the manifesto is rather to
provide some framework for further thought. I also understand that my idea can’t be examined from cost-effectiveness perspective (at least now).
Hey, thanks for the comment. I updated the post with a more detailed synopsis.