This guy is excellent. I recommend his first novel, "We the City," and you might also want to check out a literary form he renamed and whose revival he spearheaded, "small fates."
Well, that's not entirely fair. Sure, civilization has largely made mankind more peaceful, but Progress is still driven by violence. There was even a link on here recently about how the relationship between war and civilization.
Thanks for clarifying his position. I didn't mean to suggest that he intended it to be anything other than a backup plan, but my wording might have been ambiguous because others, like Martin Rees, have suggested similar things and tend to regard them as one of the more likely outcomes of humanity's future, if the species is to survive.
> However many people die on SpaceX spaceships,
Maybe you misunderstood me. I mean that the people who don't go on SpaceX spaceships would die in a situation where that is critical to the survival of civilization.
Your choice thing doesn't convince me, but I do understand and think it is an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.
I don't mean that communism worked, but that Lenin achieved what he wanted as far as actual revolution is concerned. What you said is true though, and I think it has to do with the problems inherent in trying to "plan a society."
But many people don't realize that this kind of idiosyncratic asshole-ishness is how a lot of successful rebels / revolutionaries work, cultural and political.
Lenin is a great example, and the most illustrative for me because I spent so much time studying him. The man was factionalistic to the point of absurdity. Always he was dreaming of a new epithet to throw: economism, leftism, opportunism, etc. But because of this he insulated a radical minority and made them disloyal to anything but the ideology he was using to direct their political action. And in the end it worked.
Steve Jobs did a similar thing, but I'm sure I don't have to explain that one here.
I'm pretty critical of technology and modernity in general, and this Cult of Elon is a large part of the reason I dislike the man and his endeavors.
It has nothing to do with his intelligence or person. He's clearly intelligent, and I'm not quite sure he's a person (ha) but I don't know the dude.
It's just that he has revived so much technological optimism in a time when skepticism is pretty important, at least imo. He seems to bandy about these technical solutions that are dazzling, for sure --- and extremely interesting --- but just don't cut it, or come with a slew of potentially unintended consequences, or simply aren't putting the focus in the right place.
For example, his talk of Mars colonization as an escape hatch to our degradation of biodiversity / carbon emissions / etc. is just awful. What kind of idea is that?
It's infuriating because when I say things like, "I'm not convinced that collapse or technical decline would be a bad thing," people can immediately see the criticisms, chief among them being "Won't a lot of people die?" Which is fair.
But there is little to no skepticism when Musk presents his idea, when there certainly should be. How many people do you think will make it on those spaceships, and who do you think those people will be? At least in a case of economic or technical decline, many people will have a fighting chance at it not being totally awful.
I've also seen a fair amount of people actually cognizant of the dangers our technological society poses. It's not the majority, but there are far more people here than most discussion-centered places on the internet.
How was Deep Springs? A friend of mine told me about it and visited the campus ("campus"?), because he considered going, but he never did. I'm interested in hearing what someone who actually lived there thinks about it.
I've heard this a lot and first just dismissed it as a conspiracy theory. Is there actually any substance to these thoughts, or are they only speculation?
Maybe we're speaking past each other or using terms with different definitions. Either that or you're arguing from a sort of Cartesian standpoint. Because you're question has obvious answers: dolphins, trees, literally everything underneath the umbrella term of "biosphere"...
And if you only mean conscious life, (1) I'm not sure why that is a special consideration, but I am familiar with the discussions around this point; (2) it is more than possible that certain animals, like other primates, dolphins, whales, etc., have some degree of conscious experience, and it is also more than possible that we won't find anything more obvious than that on another planet.
Edit: Ah, I see. You were saying there is no life in space. I was thinking more along the lines of, "what about all the environmental damage we will do in order to travel to outer space." I just didn't realize that I should have included that concern in my initial comment, since for some reason I thought it would be obvious.
> Note, in advance, that I am not saying these should not be free, they absolutely should, this is a problem on the level of the philosophical framework and of strategy -- not a factual mistake on the value level
It seems like this critique rests on one central premise: Stallman is too ideologically pure. He's a zealot. And this is true, no doubt.
But I do wonder, hasn't every successful movement been spearheaded by a zealot, by someone who refuses to compromise? The work of outreach generally falls on these people's followers.