We Are Not Saved

I discuss Taleb's new book Skin in the Game, and how it connects to recent themes of survival and religion. But I guess you get all that from the title... I wonder if anyone even reads theses. I'm guessing not. If you do and you email me I'll give you a prize!

Every single person alive today makes a choice about how to live their life, specifically whether to believe in God and an existence beyond this one or not. Though, rather than being two choices I think it's best to think of there being four possible choices:

1- Religion

2- Athiesm

3- Transhumanism

4- Apathy

Despite convention wisdom, the data says that the first choices is far and away the best.

Most modern thinkers prioritize happiness over survival. Some take this prioritization to such an extreme that they advocate that the entire human race go extinct. Using this as a jumping off point I discuss happiness vs. survival, why survival is more important and why the recent focus on happiness is endangering it.

Show Notes

Incels, or the involuntarily celibate have been much discussed since the Toronto Van Attack in April by someone who claimed that title. Obviously advocating the initiation of violence for nearly any reason is a bad thing. And that covers the Van Attack and one or two other instances, but what about people who are frustrated and sad, but not violent? What about people who are just sad? What if they're so sad they're suicidal? How should we treat these people?

If your worried about climate change you should be a huge advocate of nuclear power, but that's actually not the case. Here we look at the case for nuclear power, and why it hasn't gained more traction, particularly in light of people's worries about global warming.

Steven Pinker makes a powerful case for progress and enlightenment, but when you look closer you see that he oversimplifies the potential challenges we might face, and calls any caution pessimism. I understand things are going well right now, historically, but that's no reason to ignore the potential risks...

The book Who We Are and How We Got Here, has up-ended some of the more recent thinking on how the Indo-Europeans spread. Since this was a subject I'd covered previously I decided to revisit it in this episode. In particular to see how it relates to what's happening with science and in a larger sense whether our ability to uncover truth is outstripping our ability to generate errors.

My prognosis is that there is cause for alarm on this front.

In my ongoing series on the Mormon Transhumanist Association, I review and comment on the conference I just attended and presented at. I speak of similarities in our view points, but most of all differences. Like Buddha and Hume we appear to have arrived at the same philosophy, but from that derived entirely different conclusions as to how to act.

If dealing with AI Risk allows us to arrive at something very similar to the LDS Plan of Salvation, what lessons can we draw from that with respect to how we should behave in this life? In this episode we dig deeper into that question as a follow-up to a presentation I gave at the annual conference of the Mormon Transhumanist Association.

Have you actually browsed the official report of Rotherham? It's pretty appalling stuff. I didn't think I was going to, but this week I ended up returning to a discussion of Rotherham, Telford, etc. I answer some of the objections which were raised in the previous post, and talk about the role of culture in the whole affair.