This Failing Earth

This is almost assuredly due to the lack of a sound institutional structure which is needed for a market economy to develop. An invading country may be able to bring this structure to Somalia.

It's worth noting that before Ethiopia invaded with tacit US permission*, Somalia was being incrementally conquered and pieced back together by the Islamic Courts Union. The impression of them I got early on, before the US media began to consider them dangerous for being Islamic and fell in line behind the Ethiopian invasion, is that they did a pretty good job of governing - and certainly a better job than either the warlords or the government the Ethiopian installed.

• Arguably a major fuckup by both parties

This is almost assuredly due to the lack of a sound institutional structure which is needed for a market economy to develop. An invading country may be able to bring this structure to Somalia.

Said institutional structure would probably have to involve very few Somalis; broken governments and broken cultures tend to go hand in hand. The current attempt to introduce "rule of law" in Afghanistan is failing miserably in the face of widespread corruption. For example, local judges frequently rule in favor of whomever provides the largest bribe.

One would probably have to use Stalin-esque levels of oppression in order to successfully install such institutions in a lawless land. In the distant past, most rulers had no problems with ordering a few good massacres to keep the local population in line; it's much harder to get away with that today, although the leadership of countries like Syria and Sudan don't seem to be suffering very much.

Ports certainly are valuable. Ethiopia doesn't want to depend on the Eritrean ports. But it's a lot cheaper to pay taxes for Djibouti to maintain order in its port than for Ethiopia to create order in a Somali port. And to create order on the roads. Also, it's probably expensive to cross the Ogaden plateau. Which brings us to the Somali rebellion in Ogaden, which would surely escalate if Ethiopia annexed Somalia. Maybe if Ogaden gained independence, it could annex Somalia.

But mainly, it's Ethiopia's failure to claim the ports that makes me doubt their worth. I dispute Eliezer's claim that anyone would care. But some sense of propriety, perhaps Westphalian, prevents other countries from recognizing Somaliland.

Yeah, it's a shitty army, but, as you said, it can still fire artillery shells. :(

As for your example of East Germany, the unification of Germany was voluntary. I don't think the average North Korean would be too happy to be conquered by, say, Japan. (And I don't think the people in East Germany would have been happy to have found themselves becoming part of France.) And insurgents don't have to be supporters of the previous regime; they could simply be out for themselves, or follow some other cause opposed to that of the occupying forces.

Mostly, though, invading North Korea just isn't in anyone's interest. There simply isn't enough wealth to steal to make it worth the billions of dollars it would cost to send an army to invade and occupy it.

then how did colonialism work?

It's not obvious that colonialism was ever profitable other than as means of grabbing natural resources (especially arable land) in conquered countries.

"Convert to your ideology" is the key here, I think... It's damn hard to wipe out a religion, especially those, such as some variants of Christianity and Islam, that push "your religion is the only thing that matters" up to 11. If all you care about is taking their money, I suppose you could emulate what the Mongols did in Russia and let the locals mostly govern themselves as long as they pay you your tribute.

it takes a generation and a half to pacify a country and convert it to your ideology by force.

then how did colonialism work?

While I would dispute that it necessarily takes a generation and a half to pacify all countries, it has become easier to organize and carry out insurrection in this technological era, with mobile phones and high explosives.

Maybe on the successful Earths, mass genocide is acceptable in the case that the country involved is an obvious failure, such as north Korea.

This is a confusion of terms: "acceptable" is a cost-benefit calculation, and the cost of genocide is determined by human nature, by how much we value lives, independent among the Earths in this construction. If a certain variant of Earth considers genocide acceptable, it points to an epic failure of rationality (possibly due to something along the lines of scope insensitivity), and so can't be "successful".

I think the high rating of the comment is a reflection of the problem that Eliezer's post was sub-par (especially taking into account that he's, you know, brilliant). Voting up a (partial) rebuttal, even if it isn't great on its own terms, is a reasonably polite way to express this.

(But I'm very new here - this is my fourth comment - so maybe I have no idea what the dynamic is.)

I'm surprised, too...

There are two other reasons why it's harder to conquer countries now than then.

1. people are more squeamish now; using Nazi levels of brutality in putting down rebellions would attract consideral moral opprobrium

2. wealth now comes from highly skilled information workers, who must be at least partly free if they are to be productive; whereas in the past wealth came from farmland, raw materials, and unskilled labourers. The level of repression necessary to hold a territory (and people) against its will is likely to make the acquired terroritory unproductive.

But the relative value of knowledge is falling. If I knew calculus a thousand years ago, I'd have been the most brilliant mathematician alive. A hundred years ago, it'd have been more than I'd need to know for almost any profession. Today, calculus is the beginning of serious math. I need significantly more specialized math education to really be functioning at the top (even in fields that aren't pure math).

I'm not sure our education system is getting worse in absolute terms, though it may be (math and science seem to have lost a lot of gravitas). But, in that it's not getting better, it's getting worse, because demand for highly educated workers is much higher. As compared with a "better" education system, the demand for grad school (especially in math and science) is much lower than it otherwise would be, lowering student quality and student volume in some combination, and probably increasing the average cost of training, as it fails to take advantage of returns to scale that might otherwise be present.

Not to mention public policy is generally constrained by the ignorance of the masses. If your average voter had a college (or postgrad!) level of understanding of economics, do you think policy would look like it does?

Surely the relevant educational standards of those of grad school, not high school. Scientists can use calculus, but maybe they're spending too much time mastering the same tools ("conformity").

Flynn is a good retort to environmental toxicity and dysgenics. (maybe there's increased environmental toxicity 1910-1960, and Flynn is measuring that going away)

The Flynn effect (higher IQs across time) is entirely compatible with the observation that educational standards are falling, which does appear to be the case, at least in some countries for some subjects. For example http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/do-you-see-with-you-eyes-ears-nose-or-mouth/ or http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/gcses-are-dumbed-down-and-getting-worse/

Vassar makes the argument that science funding is increasing exponentially, so mean intelligence scores should be increasing exponentially as well. Personally I'm not sure that science funding is increasing exponentially.

Lithium is being used because it's practically the only thing that works.

Seriously, everything else that's been tried has been useless. And lithium is a terrible, terrible treatment - the blood serum levels associated with gross toxicity is only about twice the effective levels. The old sleeping pills were banned for being too dangerous, and they have a much, much greater safety margin. A twofold serum increase can occur just from dehydration. Furthermore, a significant percentage of people who go through lithium overdoses show clear signs of brain damage afterwards - presumably there're subtler forms of impairment.

Lithium treatment is thus almost certainly exploiting the very early stages of metal poisoning, rather than being a truly beneficial effect. The reason it's still used despite those disadvantages is that manic depression is so extraordinarily destructive - the mania more than the depression, even. Manic-depressives can ruin their entire lives in a few days if they go through a severe bout. And nothing else works.

The only thing research has really done for mental illnesses is rule out some of the more obvious hypotheses. We know what they aren't - we really have no more idea of what they are than we ever did. There are a few exceptions, and they belong to neurology rather than psychology.

• I know more about the US than about the rest of the world

• According to some statistics I've seen (which were brief, and I don't know how accurate they were), the US is, today, responsible for about as much basic research as the rest of the world combined. For instance, 309 out of 789 Nobel laureates are American; the non-American winners are dense in Literature and Peace.

You ought to cite the text you are quoting.

Doesn't Somalia simply have lots of mini-dictators in the form of local warlords and strongmen, instead of actual anarchy? In other words, something more like the feudalism that evolved in Europe after the fall of Rome, or Japan's Warring States period? (At least, that's what I'd assume you'd have, in the absence of a central authority: lots of little, local authorities.)

They were doing deliberate breeding with a notion of heredity?

Nearly everyone was doing that.

Eugenics always plays at sophistication, but it's rooted in very old (false) folk intuitions.

I hope I understood your question correctly..

Defenders of the caste system say that the system began just as job segregation, but that doesn't explain the endogamy that is prevalent in the system.

A majority of the people in India still have issues in marrying outside their caste.

The breeding may not have been deliberate as in blood type matching, but the duties of every caste and how a person matched the ideals of his caste were factors in deciding marriage.

Brahmins give their daughters away in marriage to learned pundits. Kshatriyas gave their daughters away in marriage to soldiers who achieved victories and kings who had territory. Vaishyas gave their daughters away in marriage to rich merchants and so on..

Deliberate notion of heridity, yes I think that is true. We match for the patrilineal and matrilineal lineage and avoid marriage with someone who is of the same patrilineal lineage for more than 3 generations and matrilineal for 1 generation.

Respectfully, you're making a very big assumption there - that anything at all was "got right".

Before concluding that the eugenic forces the molded the Ashkenazi were beneficial, you should ask yourself: What did they lose?

It's very rare indeed that a population-level genetic change can take place without some tradeoffs being made.

One that permits the evolution of intelligent agents - not necessarily one that permits them to easily spread throughout the universe.

Well, that went down well.

This is not a new phenomenon:

http://bringontheendtimes.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/end-nigh.jpg

Are there any other plausible explanations for the cult of the apocalypse?

The end of the world is, after all, probably the single most repeated incorrect prediction of all time. The world has repeatedly stubbornly refused to end for thousands of years now - and yet for many the clock always seems to stand at five-minutes-to-midnight.

Phil, I'm sorry if this sounds negative, but I don't understand this attitude at all. Intelligence is how accurately you can mine the information of the past in order to predict the future. You can't possibly think that all of our problems would go away if you gave everybody in the world a lobotomy? Or is there just some preferable lower-limit to intelligence we should engineer people to?

I think the historical problems with intelligence is an uneven increase in different fields or typical misuse. This isn't a problem with the tool, but the protocols and practices surrounding it.

Dude, climate change doesn't even register on my radar except for the effects that it has on discourse, such as people sadly assuming that any talk of "global coordination" is about climate change. If all humanity had to worry about was CO2 in the atmosphere...

More like http://lesswrong.com/lw/c4/go_forth_and_create_the_art/98f

I dunno about 10^-30, but top 5% seems easy. After all, if you posit that it only took about 10K years for civilization from scratch (and long periods of that were stagnant or in reverse, so I think it's actually much less), and if we take 200K years as the total of human span so far, then we have only about 1 in 20 of the 10K periods we know of in which civilization was developed. If you consider Neanderthals and other hominids separately, it's lower, and that's just technological development. I think it's really peculiar that nuclear weapons and weaponized bio agents haven't been used more, either one of which has the potential to erase civilization, in theory.

In spite of Eliezer's apparent optimism about how much better was possible, I think it's likely that we're clearly in the successful group.

i appreciate the interesting response. here's how I think of it. If you have a one in a million event happen every day you might suspect that something is up with probability. But you can't neglect the fact that there could very well be a million different one in a million events. I dont think observing unlikely events makes it more likely that something weird is going on with your particular universe. just that the search space of unlikely events is large enough that you'll wind up seeing quite a few of them.

Assuming that you are typical may turn out to be as bad as assuming you are special. Any "assuming" is approximation, and depending on the problem the approximation may be either adequate or infinitely disastrous. That's what happens with doomsday argument, for example.

The values of probabilities of specific situations don't particularly matter if you don't approximate. The preference is for actions (i.e. areas in state space) with highest average utility (according to probability measure), independently of the probability measure of those areas as whole.

That is, if you have a huge event, something that can be predicted to happen very likely, with a certain average utility (weighted by probability), and a tiny event with significantly higher average utility, the tiny event is preferred. Ignoring the tiny event because of its tiny probability measure leads to losing that opportunity.

According to Wikipedia North Korea had positive population growth even during the famine, so this cannot be the explanation. Even if life expectancy figure for North Korea is too high for some reasons, it still seems to be far better than for most real failed third world countries, especially in Africa.

CIA and WHO life expectancy estimates of poor countries differ a lot, I have no intention of arguing which is correct, however by both estimates of life expectancy, and by most other quality of life estimates, North Korea is far above most of Africa, in many cases including rich African countries like South Africa.

I think the reasons you and many other people think North Korea is so bad come from exposure to media. American and Western European media have political reasons to dislike North Korea, and no reason to care at all about most failed countries like Sierra Leone or Lesotho. And "evil oppressive government" is much easier to turn into a good sensational story than run of the mill "thousands of children died of diarrhea because they didn't have access to clean water" - in North Korean story there's a clear evil villain, in Africa there isn't.

As far as I can tell, government oppression tends to be focused on small number of people who are considered (truthfully or not) politically dangerous, and quality of life of most people isn't strongly affected - due to information scarcity I cannot be sure if that's true about North Korea, but it was definitely true about European Communist countries.

Typical third world economic oppression (low GDP + high income inequality + no social safety net) affects larger number of people, and as far as I can tell causes a lot more suffering. And these are pretty much the standard living conditions of humanity for most of the human history, so considering them some sort of spectacular failure would seem rather weird.

This might be hard to reliably estimate but the WHO gives North Korean life expectancy as 66 years. That doesn't confuse me or make me particularly suspicious.

I wouldn't be surprised if life expectancy on North Sentinel Island is significantly lower but it's possible that average happiness over there is higher. Which society would you prefer your child to be born into, if you had a choice between those two?

We've located enough planets nearby to infer that there are a large number of planets somewhat nearby that could support life.

I didn't downvote your comment, but for me, "they don't seem to have failed after achieving AI, so I don't know if that really tells us much" is an overwhelmingly strong objection to drawing any conclusion about existential risk from the Great Silence.

But a lot didn't.
Most notably, Aristotle's school and most of the pre-Socratics were empirical. So were the Epicurians, and in their own way the skeptics, cynics and stoics. Aristotle and his followers failed to actually BE empirical because they propounded beliefs on everything and only had time for a few experiments, but you know, the Greeks had good enough data to need lots of epicycles.