: What's the ONLY difference to me between the Xtians constantly predicting, being wrong about, and then changing the date of the Rapture and Ray Kurzweil constantly predicting, being wrong about, and then changing the date of the Singularity?
Nowhere near enough people call him and his adherents out on that bullshit the way they do the Xtians about theirs. Different species, genus, and family, yes. Same order and class.
True-Believers (class)
Wrong AF (order)
Most folks don't see Ray...
: ...as a danger the way they see the Xtians (and other doomsday religions), but I do. Ray's all about hope and progress, sure, but so what? Lots of people are. He's done a LOT of useful tech stuff, absolutely. Why is it so deeply unfashionable, even oft seen as, I'm told, mean or even immoral to call him out and down on obvious bullshit? We all routinely call total strangers, coworkers, celebrities, family members, etc. on theirs? Why not Ray? Is it because his is a "nice" message, one we like?
: Kurzweil isn't a danger like Steve Bannon, Vladimir Putin, Alex Jones, etc., but once upon a time they were thought of as harmless cranks, too. That recently orange President was, too. Remember? So was Elon. Joe Rogan was "just a comedian" and a "big, dumb jock", too. "Nobody'll listen to [them]." Reminds me of when I warned of what I saw coming in 1990 in re: US politics and specifically political rhetoric, the parties, the media, and the GOP.
I was only one Senate term off, really, and...
: ...back then I was told "Nobody will let it ever get to that" and stuff. Kurzweil drives a lot of the fringe nutjobs, as sometimes does Michio Kaku, to believe shit that isn't gonna happen within any of our lifetimes. (I'm going with the odds, because look back. How many world-changing techs in the past two decades were gonna change the world by today? China's colossal carbon scrubbers. Low-energy, cheap desalinization of ocean water. Carbon credits. Lithium-ion powered cars. Loads more, too.)
: While woefully unexciting, unfashionable, embarrassingly unhip/square, and seen as unprofitable, living in reality with optimism based on what's doable, practical, etc. is the best arrangement. Just because someone's wrong, like Ray, doesn't mean they're evil. They're juat wrong, and sometimes the best thing, really, is for someone to speak up and call the baby ugly.
@thedisasterautist I would argue, not strongly, that the downsides might be outweighed by the upsides. Much of it depends on who's reading the optimism and the societal and geopolitical state of the world. Think back to Star Trek. Along with other scifi, it spawned an entire generation of engineers and dreamers. The caveat of course is limiting progress by insisting on your vision alone. But once the spark arrives, that's hard to control.
@hallmarc: The comparison to Star Trek, while admirable and understandable, no not an address of the statement or point I was making. Star Trek didn't make real-world predictions, push them very hard, proselytize them, and then when none of the predictions came to pass simply hand-waved it away and said, in effect, "Well, maybe next week; see, I just found a new interpretation of the Inerrant Word". Star Trek was fiction that gave hope. That is not what Kurzweil does.
@hallmarc: Whenever I make this the point of this thread, Star Trek and "it inspired kids to do math and go into engineering" is almost invariably the counter. It's an emotional answer and wholly understandable and one to which I am not unsympathetic in the slightest.
@thedisasterautist I will say this is a bit personal for me. I went to college in the late 80s as someone with incredible optimism around AI, VR, etc. SciFi and the microcomputer revolution and teachers had instilled that in me. I spent two years studying everything I could about the technologies that might be required for AGI. It was hopeless to me because those technologies seemed decades off. Ultimately the biggest problem was that I didn't know what I didn't know. Today, I'm amazed...
@hallmarc: Understandable. The same went for me with audiovisual (tv and film). I came in too late for Super 8 and too early for affordable VHS camcorders and way, way earlier than computer video and editing technology. Everything became cheap and easy and "everyone could do it" *and* get it out to millions of people online. By that time, in my mid-30s, I was seen as "too old" and "too behind the times" to get in. Also, geography had some to do with it, but primarily it was the rapidity of...
@hallmarc: ...the changes. That said by the two of us, I will formally ask:
Do you honestly, candidly believe it is actually going to happen by 2040 or 2050 that humans will no longer require physical bodies and will be able to upload their conscious minds to a kind of internet and live forever, no more need for organic physical bodies?
(That's just a tech variation on The Rapture.)
@thedisasterautist I agree in general but I think you're making a mistake in your original analogy. Religions are dangerous because they point to unfalsifiable foundational premises. Kurzweil's false hopes are greatly more limited in their reach and potential targets but can be, if not falsified, probabilistically indistinguishable from such. Most who are casual readers are just having a good time with futurism. Most of the others who are for or against his ideas are probably critical thinkers.
@hallmarc: I would agree for you but for the effect of the internet and the madness of crowds. The problem with information, even opinion, is that once communicated there is no control or context beyond the capabilities and limitations in both understanding, processing/digesting, incorporating, and then ultimately communicating forward the information. Who Kurzweil intends his message for is wholly irrelevant, as is who we might want to think consumes it.
@hallmarc: As we have seen, especially in the last two centuries, there is zero difference between religion and science/philosophy when it comes to people and behavior. The only difference is in theory, purely. That's why I made the clear distinction and labeling of both sets of True-Believers, people who believe something as a matter of personal emotional and intellectual identity. I would never express any manner of certainty of what audiences might ever see any ideas. IMO, that is folly.
@thedisasterautist if I'm not mistaken you're saying that there's no difference in human behavior between true "believers" of religion and those of science (though I wouldn't use the term believer because science is a self-correcting process not an ideology or belief system). For the religious it's a matter of emotional identity and for scientists, intellectual identity?
@hallmarc: Correct. That is my assertion. Science is not scientists. Scientists are humans. Science is a self-correcting process, yes. Scientists try to be and not infrequently are, but many are not. Ask particle physicists. Ask the string theorists who can't let go of the notion of a Grand Unifying Theory of Everything of Strings. There are debates going on in various hard sciences over the very topic of dogmatism.
There are True Believers in string theory who haven't produced any advances...
@hallmarc: ...to their theory's iterations in 10+ years, and that's because experiment after experiment after experiment after experiment comes back No. It's that or peer review finds holes big enough to lose grants through. So they've gone to supplementing their incomes by going on Joe Rogan and other podcasts and even labeling themselves as "mavericks that Big Physics is trying to silence" or some such. They're the guys (usually guys) "enlightening" dudebros and kids with effectively junk...
@hallmarc: ...science.
Do string theorists inadvertently find equations useful in other areas of maths and physics? Yes, but none of it goes anywhere within a thousand light-years of supporting string theory.
What sort of behavior is that? They can't let go of their work because it's what they've put their professional lives into since the '80s or '90s, and they keep claiming "One day, though!" and "If we just have a big enough collider, we'll find them!"
That's a True Believer Scientist.
@thedisasterautist your argument here is that if scientists hold onto something because they already believe it to be true or believe in their "souls" or what have you that it can be proven true, they are dogmatic in a way that is similar to religious believers. But science doesn't command them to give up unless there is contrary evidence. You picked a good one because string theory is really difficult to refute via observation and many of its predictions are not testable. But that's a small /1
@hallmarc @thedisasterautist just joined the convoy...holy Hannah I am not reading all of that...but I will say that religion can only accommodate science, it cannot predict anything more than a random number generator can. Science can reveal things that nobody could have predicted.
@thedisasterautist (relative) part of the sciences. I'm not sure which particular "experiment after experiment" you're talking about. There is good evidence to support the theory that the closer we get to the energies of the early universe, the more predictions will be verified. That's not dogma, it's math. The Higgs boson is a good example. It took 50 years of successive experiments and discoveries to arrive at the results of the LHC.
@thedisasterautist I should note that there have been plenty of reasonable and reputable physicists on Joe Rogan, mostly ones that already have a strong media presence and are good science communicators. If you watch segments with NDGT or Krauss or Cox, you see that they are mostly "teaching" Joe and the audience, albeit in a more riveting fashion.
@hallmarc: You seem to be conflating science as a methodology with scientists and taking for granted that scientists therefore must also be reliably and consistently self-correcting.
@thedisasterautist I don't think I am. Allow me to clarify. Scientists are human, with all the biases, hopes and dreams, and emotional baggage that entails. But scientific processes and methodologies put a check on the reach and duration of unsupportable or questionable claims within the scientific community. In society at large, conclusions from science are guidable but ultimately uncontrollable. Is there dogma in the scientific community? Absolutely. Do voices get squashed by that dogma? .../1
@thedisasterautist from what I've studied of biology, physics, and computer science, no. Not by those dates and maybe, like teleportation, not ever (although I wouldn't underestimate the desire of soon to be trillionaires trying to extend their lives in any way possible). I do expect with little doubt that once we create an AGI, which *will* happen, its evolution will be so rapid as to make tech advancement in the last 50 years seem like babies playing with toys.
@hallmarc: "No" would suffice. My post wasn't about hope.
@hallmarc: That's the heart of my concern/problem. I find that Xtianity and other religions can and do instill hope, at least in some sects/denominations, the leap into obvious absurdity and fantasy does no one any good. It's unnecessary, and not unoften it winds up dangerous. it sets up a certain intransigent for and against different ideas and avenues, which stifles or worse. There's plenty of hope to be had without making promises, backtracking, and then repeatedly making them.