I know their names — Adam Brown, Chris Kemp, Christine Peterson, Gaia Dempsey, Metaculus and Robin Hanson — but I don’t understand why anyone would listen to them babble about subjects they can’t possibly know anything about. So I started listening to this video of a panel about The Far Future & Space Tech Tree: Space & Longtermism, only to have to frequently yell, “how do you know that?” at the screen. None of it made any sense. They’re building castles in the sky on weird presuppositions.
The first guy is Robin Hanson, certifiable whack job, babbling about the risk to his vision of the far future. He’s worried that we’re going to get a world government that is too centralized and too darned successful at making people happy, and that means we’ll lose interest in taking risks, so we won’t expand to fill the galaxy out of fear of encountering big bad aliens.
Think about that. 1) There’s no evidence that a government is taking over the world, and 2) he has no grounds for psychoanalyzing trends over millions of years (yeah, he’s extrapolating over a span that’s probably longer than our species will exist), and 3) he doesn’t like the idea that humans might develop contentment and stability. That would be bad.
It’s nice in a theoretical, principled sense that the professoriate allows people to lounge about and daydream about humanity’s fantasy future, but sometimes you feel like there ought to be at least a token grounding in, you know, evidence of some kind. How could this happen? Hanson is at George Mason University, a place that has been bought lock, stock, and barrel by extremist capitalists of the very far right. The Kochs basically own the place, and it’s become a locus of power for the Federalist Society. You know, the wellspring of the very worst sort of judicial influence.
Documents obtained by alumni and students through the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) over the past year and one half reveal that George Mason University’s public law school has been taken over by the conservative Washington DC based Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy. Since April 2016, the Federalist Society has been influencing faculty and student placement, recommending and establishing legal programs, redirecting large amounts of scholarship revenues to support the Law School’s most-politicized centers for the “Study of the Administrative State” and “Liberty and Law,” and even reorienting the Law School’s judicial law clerk program to place “conservative” law students associated with the Federalist Society as clerks to the nation’s judges.
Two years ago, on March 31, 2016, George Mason University announced that as a result of a $20 million donation from an anonymous donor and $10 million donation from the Charles Koch Foundation, it was changing the name of the Law School to the Antonin Scalia Law School. This generated intense controversy about renaming a publicly-funded state law school after one of the most ideological and polarizing Supreme Court Justice in history. Accompanying that controversy were concerns about inappropriate influence by an anonymous donor and the Charles Koch brothers who have long exerted control over George Mason and its affiliated Mercatus Center and Institute for Human Studies. Less known outside of legal circles is that Justice Scalia was the founding faculty advisor to the Federalist Society in 1982 and its highest-profile member and frequent speaker for the next 34 years, with four speeches at Federalist Society events in 2015 alone.
And that, in turn, reflects a distortion of our political economy by the existence of the obscenely wealthy, the billionaires who can use all their money to promote their personal, idiosyncratic beliefs and bloated egos.
One man has donated $1.6 billion to a nonprofit group controlled by a conservative activist who has crusaded, with startling success, to transform the country’s politics. The only reason the public knows about it? An insider tip-off to the New York Times.
The Times reported this week that electronics mogul Barre Seid last year gave 100 percent of the shares of surge protector and data-center equipment manufacturer Tripp Lite to a group called Marble Freedom Trust. The group is led by Leonard Leo — who has helped bankroll right-wing advocacy on abortion rights, voting and climate change, among other things. His chief focus for a time was reshaping the judiciary as executive vice president of the Federalist Society, including by advising Republican presidents on Supreme Court nominees. The tale of how his group got such a lavish gift underscores the sad state of this country’s campaign finance system.
That kind of money means they don’t have to touch down on reality ever, and it shows. They are not very smart people, they only know how to manipulate the system and maximize profits from their inherited wealth, and that allows them to distort the perception of reality to their advantage.
My only question is…why are really rich people drawn to longtermism? It makes no sense. It’s bad science. Maybe there’s some germ of wish fulfillment there — they imagine living forever and becoming Spaceman Spiff, and going off and dominating the universe in the same way they currently dominate the United States and UK. They want to imagine a world where rich idiots get free rein, like they Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. And the best way to get that is to put buffoons like Hanson in positions of intellectual influence.
‘Free rein’. But, yes, all that. Sigh.
Is there any public money going to this University?
In that case, cut it loose. Make it completely private.
Predicting the future is impossible. For longtermists the future is a Rorschach test they project their hopes and fears onto. Then they maximize their profit and sense of importance in the short term using their hopes and fears as rationalization.
These aren’t deep thinkers. They aren’t even shallow thinkers.
.1. Those big bad aliens might not even exist. Our knowledge of the galaxy is such that I can’t really say they probably don’t exist.
But the old question is, “where are they then?”
AFAWK, we are the only intelligent, tool using species in the entire galaxy.
.2. If the big bad aliens do exist, if we don’t develop interstellar space flight and find them, eventually they might…develop interstellar space flight and find us.
The hypothetical existence of big bad aliens isn’t a reason to not develop space flight. It is a reason to…develop space flight.
.3. Why do these aliens have to big bad aliens anyway? Given the distances and resources needed to travel the galaxy, war seems rather pointless.
They are likely to be just…aliens.
.4. Besides which, we already deal with big bad aliens.
These days we call them the GOP and Russian genocidal invaders.
You deal with them when you have to.
(This is sarcasm but just barely. It does explain a lot.)
That doesn’t sound out of the ordinary at all, even at public universities. Do most have at least one asshole like him? Probably.
Anyway, Hansen’s been a weirdo for a long time and didn’t seem to need any help from shadowy figures elsewhere. From the NYT link there:
Ironically, he’s a big fan of prediction markets. Go figure. (Or don’t.)
Also, he’s econ, not law, so the Federalist Society stuff isn’t explaining anything about how this could happen.
Hanson has a Masters in physics. You’d think he’d know that, barring some big surprises, fast interstellar travel is impossible. And without fast interstellar travel spreading humanity outside our solar system is pretty much impossible.
#6
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And without fast interstellar travel spreading humanity outside our solar system is pretty much impossible.
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Heck, until we figure out how to protect from cosmic rays and solar particles once we are away from the earths magnetic field, we can’t even safely travel to Mars.
Räven @ 4
Anyone interested in astronomy will be familiar with the “rare Earth ” concept.
There were a lot of things that had to line up perfectly to allow life to flourish, and to keep Earth a stable biosphere for 4.5 billion years.
If each positive factor has a frequency of one in ten, soon even a galaxy with 100 billion stars will not be big enough. För all we know, we may be the only psychozooikum in the whole Local Group.
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Agreed, a party that regards a global climate chrisis as a minor inconvenience for their corporate donors is a bigger threat than a whole tribe of blood-sucking Martians in tripods. If real tripods turned up, they could probably buy up the Republicans the way Russian lobbyists have done.
I’m looking forward to the creation of the Chapo Guzmán school of law funded by “annonymous” donations.
@ whywhywhy
This is a job for our general intelligence AI descendants (yes, I know they are distant in time).
As they can adjust their clock frequencies they will not suffer boredom en route Proxima or Barnard’s Star, even if travelling at just a few % of C.
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Since most Earth-like planets will have been stuck in runaway greenhouse or icehouse conditions, I hope our descendants will revive a lot of lost biospheres.
I repeat; If the university has been digested by John Galt fans, let it be privatized.
How is privatization supposed to help? Isn’t this exactly what is argued for by the “John Galt fans” themselves? Suppose it were assimilated into the glibertarian hivemind, since resistance is futile and so forth…. Then what? Step 3 is “profit” I guess?
If it is mainly financed by public money, present an ultimatum: either gain intellectual credibility by distancing yourself from vested interests, or go to your oligarch friends for 100% of your funding.
…and if the oligarchs will not step in, good luck financing the shortfall by selling underpants.
That $1.6 billion donation to the Federalist Society was from Barre Seid, a Chicago-based billionaire, who is somewhere around 90. For some reason, the donation went through a strange convolution, perhaps to hide Seid’s involvement. Seid was sole owner of a company named Trippe Lite which he gave to a political advocacy group called Marble Freedom Trust. Marble Freedom Trust sold Triple Lite to another company, Eaton Corporation, for $1.6 billion and then donated the money to the Federalist Society.
Marble Freedom Trust is headed by Leonard Leo. Leo is a lawyer, vice president of the Federalist Society and co-chairman of the organization’s board of directors along with Steven G. Calabresi. Leo worked in the Federal court system. He’s an old friend of Clarence Thomas and heavily promoted him to the Supreme Court. Anton Scalia was also an associate.
As for the Federalist Society, it is perhaps the most misnamed organization ever as it is clearly anti-Federalist. The organization is considered conservative and libertarian. They have been very successful of course as six judges on the current Supreme Court are members and came stamped with the approval of the Federalist Society. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that some 70,000 lawyers in the US are members.
these are just some of the details of what could be expected from a society that has such a high degree of inequality. They are in fact very destructive to the very society and the processes that gave rise to the inequality. The only choices we have are to correct and re-balance the society in an organized and peaceful way using democratic means or do nothing and the society will re-balance in a more violent destructive way with very unpredictable results.
the level of out of touch with realities of life on this planet in this galaxy at this time is staggering. hubris
If some of these people ever manage to get their collective heads out of their ass there will be a permanent brown ring tattooed around their necks
It was to avoid paying $400 million in taxes.
The appeal of longtermism to billionaires is this: it gives them a justification for doing whatever they want while trampling the rights of anyone who is not a billionaire. To them, it doesn’t matter how many people suffer because of their actions as all that suffering will be offset by benefits to far future humans (who will probably never exist — these fools actually posit the future colonisation of the Virgo Supercluster 65 million ly away as a reason to implement regressive policies today).
If longtermism had been around in the 1850s, you know it would have been used to oppose the abolition of slavery.
Understanding “longtermism”: Why this suddenly influential philosophy is so toxic and, for a bonus, Is Robin Hanson America’s Creepiest Economist?. Dreadful person.
Why wait, Robin, why wait?
@ raven : ” But the old question is, “where are they then?”
Yes, agreed – as you probly already know, that’s the Fermi Paradox :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
which we just don’t have enough information to answer but which certainly makes for a stack of fascinating speculation.
For whatever little its worth I think the prehistory of life on Earth tends to indicate that although life may be common; intelligent internet and rocketship building life is extremely rare. Note that for two out of four billion years the most sophisticated and “advanced” (for want of better word) living things were single-celled bacteria. Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar illustrates this powerfully :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Calendar
@10. birgerjohansson : “Since most Earth-like planets will have been stuck in runaway greenhouse or icehouse conditions, I hope our descendants will revive a lot of lost biospheres.”
Given most stars (75% or so) are red dwarfs which are generally flare stars with extreme versiosn of solar flares happening regularly that will very likely fry the atmospheres and hydrospheres off earth-like planets in their very close-in indeed habitable zones it is also possible that most of these earth-like worlds have very little if any atmosphere and are more like super-Mercuries than Earth’s. The results of at least one exoplanet studied – LHS 3844b – seem to show this to be the case :
https://insights.globalspec.com/article/12460/earth-sized-exoplanet-found-to-have-no-atmosphere
So earth-mass planets that are even icehouse or hothouse ones may be the minority with the majority being super-lunar only more extreme with perhaps oceans of magma on one side and exotic ices on the other maybe? Others might well be ocean worlds with nothing but ocean surfaces over layers of exotic high-pressure “hot ices” then a molten core (Think Neptune but with two thirds of its atmosphere removed) which also don’t seem great for developing complex lifeforms though really who knows?
@8. birgerjohansson : “Anyone interested in astronomy will be familiar with the “rare Earth ” concept.”
Yup but not everyone agrees that is the case. There is a contending school of thought that stringly opposes that notion which is well discussed & argued in my view in the book Evolving the Alien or What Does a Martian Look Like?: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life’ by biologist Jack Cohen and mathematician Ian Stewart. If you haven’t read it, I’d definitley recomend it. Whether the Cohen & Stewart side is right or the Rare Earth side is correct is something that at the moment we sinply do not know and one reason why SETI and studying exoplanet atmospheres is so vital.
Hadn’t heard that word before! Thanks.
If memory serves, the original 1898 HG Wells novel had the Martians evolve into the monstrous aliens from humanoids that they even took aboard their craft as food. I wonder if these Longtermist billioniares see themselves as evolving into such creatures on the backs and off the blood and flesh of the rest of us in similar fashion? Long term evolving thinking indeed except Wells beat them to it and showed how vulnerable such creatures might really be.
@ ^ Checking :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_(The_War_of_the_Worlds)