We have a long way to go until everyone on the planet can grow up in conditions where you turn out 'default good/well-meaning towards others'.
Is it ethical to create a sentient AI that might suffer? -> we already make similar decisions millions of times per day
Don't treat humans as means to an end, instead treat them as ends -> we create other humans to satisfy our current needs in a world characterized by struggle
And of course as you have pointed out, some groups consider that it's better by default for a child to exist in adverse starting conditions (whilst also negatively impacting other people) than to not exist
We know the great mass of humans will carry on as before and there's little we can do to change that, but we are also aware that we have this responsibility that we can act on in our own life. Every person in the position to reproduce has a choice laid out before them. For the majority of us, it's the single most impactful ethical decision we will ever make.
Population explosion also began with agriculture, since more offspring meant more people to work your lands. Hunter-gatherers breastfed longer (so more years between ability to become pregnant again). Plus they were relatively mobile, so more having more children was not a practical goal.
Many of the diseases and other problems we have now are related to population increases in small areas (bad sanitation, etc.).
> The Younger Dryas (c. 12,900 to 11,700 years BP[2]) was a return to glacial conditions which temporarily reversed the gradual climatic warming after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, c. 27,000 to 20,000 years BP). The Younger Dryas was the last stage of the Pleistocene epoch (c. 2,580,000 to 11,700 years BP) and it preceded the current, warmer Holocene epoch. The Younger Dryas was the most severe and long lasting of several interruptions to the warming of the Earth's climate...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
Everything was good for a couple of million years, and then everything got really really bad for over a thousand years.
What we think of as human history is the story of our recovery from the trauma of the YD?
Think of it as the most extreme form of poverty. No clean water, no shoes, malnutrition, limited protection against the weather. Every day going about basic tasks carries the risk for death, disease and disablement.
There is a reason that human population didn't rapidly increase until relatively recently in our collective hundred-thousand-year history. It's because most humans died before reaching reproductive age. Even in the few pockets of the globe with conditions favorable to survival, periodic events (weather, disease, rival groups, over-hunting, etc) wiped out entire tribes in terrible ways.
I've read arguments in both directions and I'm extremely suspicious that they are almost all basically politically-driven. It goes like this:
If hunter-gatherers are predisposed to more or less gender or economic equality, or certain social structures, then that should perhaps inform how we construct our own modern societies.
In order to escape the clear appeal to nature fallacy, it then becomes necessary to argue that not only were prehistoric societies constructed in a certain way, but they were also extremely well-off. Therefore we clearly must "reject modernity, retvrn to monke", and embrace True Human Nature embodied by some cultural tradition or ideology.
The exact inverse would obviously imply that we must embrace a certain idea of technological or social progress in order to escape the "natural state of humanity" as fast as we can.
However, was the human hunter-gatherer experience was ever all that stable or predictable such that we can obviously draw out either of those major conclusions? I think a decent null hypothesis might be that all the extremes of human experience and social structure had to have occurred to some degree and that the overall average and distribution would fluctuate quite a bit over time according to weather, migration patterns, and accidents of cultural evolution that humanity at any level had basically no control over.
I find it really hard to believe that we can possibly have enough evidence in any relevant discipline to rule this out.
I already knew that. I even know the percentage roughly. According to the Pareto principle, 80% of people are not totally fucked up, but the 20% that are cause 80% of the problems.
No, you don't. This "principle" is not a law of physics, it's just a rule of thumb that may or may not be wildly off the mark for an arbitrary distribution. Its common usage is like statistics horoscope.
I still haven’t found one company where this principle didn’t show up.
Very scientific.
This is where the internet fails.
>the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Hobbes, like many philosophers, did not have much faith in human nature.
"The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?" - Jeremiah
"Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." - Moses, about man before the flood.
"This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil." - the Gospel of John
I don't know how accurate that 1 billion number of users is exactly, but it's probably in the right ballpark. In reality there are probably a few million "serial posters" of horrible stuff. Either way, with numbers like that it's very easy to get millions of undisputedly horrible videos.
[1] https://www.insuranceproviders.com/best-and-worst-cities-for...
[2] https://www.thecut.com/2016/03/for-80-years-young-americans-...
I think we need to move to some way to identify actual people on the internet. I don't mean that in a "use your real name and upload your passport"-kind of way, but in a "we can 100% reliably tell you've been a twat in the past, whomever you are, so no new signups for you"-kind of way that also accounts for all the various interests such as right to privacy and anonymity.
Many platforms use phone numbers for that now, which is obviously far from perfect as I can easily get 100 of those today if I wanted to.
Do we need to be way more careful with how we design our society? Yes. Does it make sense to abandon possible solutions because of a movie? No.
Ask Elon Musk to offer to buy it, then we'll see how accurate those numbers are.
In reality, I never believe people's published numbers. OF COURSE they are inflated. Their entire (maybe majority?) valuations are dependent on those numbers being as high as possible.
I find it both depressing and comforting; it's comforting to know most people aren't that bad, and it's depressing that such a small group of assholes can fuck it all up.
If I watch TikTok for an hour a day for a week, and I watch 4 videos/minute on average, I’ll watch over 1500 videos a week. If only one or two of those are VERY traumatizing (e.g. showing death), I’d think TikTok has a big moderation problem. That’s an ultra-low number of users making it seem like there is a huge issue
Disclaimer: I don’t have TikTok
Bytedance is pre-IPO. However, you are accusing Google, Facebook, snapchat, Twitter of securities fraud. What is the latest from Musk, on Twitter's alleged securities fraud?
Do you really believe TikTok as exactly 1 Billion users, or 999,990,000+ users? Anyone that says that is 1 Billion is padding the numbers. Nobody is going to call that 999 million.
If the number is anything close to being rounded, the number is padded. Unless they are showing you an exact number from the time the count was read, it is being padded.
Unless a person intentionally hides from the world, it is hard to not be aware of this. Human trafficking, cartels, pollution, there is a myriad of ways in which humans are just not "great people". Why act disillusioned by it?
It's the same kind of people who adopt[1] in order to get government subsidies but treat their charges worse than cattle --at least cattle get to graze nd do cattle things.
[1] I hope it's not necessary to state that this is a small minority of adoptive/foster parents, but they exist, unfortunately.
TikTok is much harder to censor in automated ways, clearly. People also find ways around the censors. So all that awful stuff may have found a way back onto the internet.
"Build it yourself" internet bubbles are giving people hilariously wrong impressions of society, and humanity.
These same bubbles led to many millions of people shocked and flabbergasted when Donald Trump won in 2016. There will probably be just as many flabbergasted people when Democrats get thrown out of the House in three weeks. Internet "safe spaces" and censorship of differing opinions give people that impression that society is changing, or has changed. It hasn't.
And if you're right, I hope this is all a simulation.
The fact that people are downvoting this obvious proclamation is further proof of my original claim. People are in bubbles, unaware of reality. No one should be shocked that Democrats are about to lose the Congress, and yet here we are.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/...
https://electionbettingodds.com/House2022.html
https://polymarket.com/market/which-party-will-win-the-us-ho...
yeah I think that's the theme of David Lynch movies
> It also suggests that the apocalyptic movies may not be so far off when they suggest that humanity will revert to open barbarism if we're faced with a catastrophy large enough.
I think that's disproven - I saw a study where they looked at peoples' behaviour during the WWII London bombings and it was mostly characterized by Mutual Aid
Considering how many reports there are of Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok, and other sites where content moderators are suffering from having to perform their jobs, it suggests that there's a great deal of really terrible stuff going on - and worse, that the people involved are filming and attempting to share it.
This is a serious thing, and it paints humanity as being far darker than it would seem from the surface. It also suggests that the apocalyptic movies may not be so far off when they suggest that humanity will revert to open barbarism if we're faced with a catastrophy large enough.