Today we'll wander a bit around a central question... can human beings and/or their civilization improve?
Of course, this is a premise of Futurespection -- a word that I just coined. So let's launch this session with a piece on Gizmodo by George Dvorsky ranking the “20 Crucial Terms Every 21st-Century Futurist Should Know," including coveillance, eroom's law, the proactionary principle and more...
Okay so has progress occurred? Harvard professor Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of our Nature discusses how one could quantify the degree of human progress: “Most people agree that life is better than death, health better than disease, prosperity better than poverty, knowledge better than ignorance, peace better than war, safety better than violence, freedom better than coercion. That gives us a set of yardsticks by which we can measure whether progress has actually occurred.”
Backing this up, here's another optimist looking at the big picture. From The New York Times: Is Humanity Getting Better? "The world now is a thoroughly awful place, compared with what it should be. But not compared with what it was. Keeping both eyes open gives depth to our perception of our own time in history, and makes us better able to see where paths to more progress may be open," writes Leif Wenar.
Criticism & positive reinforcement
A fascinating observation: educators have long opined that positive reinforcement is better than negative, Sometimes liberal types take this obvious truth to an extreme that gets downright silly, emphasizing feel-good praise-for-nothing and shiny trophies for attendance.
Still, such PC absurdities aim in better directions than traditional methods that are still used all over the world, hammering kids with punishment for failure. Indeed, experts in animal training will tell you that negative reinforcement is iffy, at best. Creatures ranging from otters to dolphins to horses react much better to praise than to rebuke. Dolphins will throw tantrums when told they were wrong, much like a human 4 year old. Think Billy Mumy in that chilling Twilight Zone episode.
This provoked in me an interesting thought… that human beings may be exceptional in our ability to grit our teeth and accept “no!” as useful feedback. (Dogs, after 50,000 years of selection, can do it, too, though very grudgingly.) We hate criticism! And human leaders do everything they can to avoid it, which explains the horrid governance of most feudal societies. Yet, many of us are capable of clamping down and listening - actually listening - to unpleasant but useful feedback.
CITOKATE … Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error.
So. Are we all similarly capable of doing this? Of course not. Indeed, I’ll wager it is related to positive-sum thinking, of which dogma-drinkers in both today’s far-left and entire-right are clearly incapable, helping to explain our current civil war.
In order to benefit from useful criticism, you must first admit the sacred mantra of science: “I might be (at least partly) wrong.” And to be clear, even scientists, who are raised and disciplined to be able to recite that holy catechism have to struggle, daily, to live by it.
No, to me the miracle is that any of us can do this, at all! Gritting teeth and paying real attention when someone else credibly rattles your favorite notion with: “No! You’re wrong and here’s proof!”
Then adjusting to that critique, and adapting and improving till it all pays off with ideas, inventions, policies, attitudes that are better for the battering.
It is the way to win. Let me reiterate: it is the way to win, over the long run. And we appear to be a species that is capable – if barely – of using this greatest of all delusion-piercing tools.
Threats and worries
Some examples of "oops!" criticism?
The British medical journal The Lancet reports state-level data correlating gun-related deaths and 25 state-specific gun laws.
Researchers identified three laws that were most strongly associated with reductions in overall gun-related mortality. These state measures were: laws requiring firearm identification through ballistic imprinting or microstamping, ammunition background checks, and universal background checks for all gun purchases.
Federal implementation of all three laws would be projected to reduce the national mortality rate -- 10.1 per 100,000 people in 2010 -- to 0.16 per 100,000, the study says.
Gadzooks. This is astonishing in several ways. First. that such modest measures have such large effects… I’d wager there’s also at least a small average psychological and social and cultural difference in the states that have such laws – a calmer mentality perhaps – that I wonder how you’d control-for. Still, what I find most astonishing is simply that these “Canadian” style measures would be so adequate to reduce the plague of firearm deaths by 80%.
Note that Canadians can still have firearms, and unregistered ones! None of the three laws in question inconvenience legal gun owners a scintilla or lead to registry or confiscation, even in theory. None of them lead to a “slippery slope.” In other words, the absolutist, never-compromise-a-bit NRA mentality is exposed for what it is… both impractical and insane.
See elsewhere my own proposal for a positive sum, win-win way that gun rights believers could better protect those rights while treating personal weapons more like cars.
Transitioning thru technology
Speaking of cars... This article asks about self-driving cars and profound effects on the economy – for example “truck driver” is the most common lower-middle class job. And the first to be rendered obsolete. Worrisome. Except that Safety Backup Driver could wind up being the ideal job for painters and artists and novelists who want to work on solitary creative projects, only taking over from the auto-drive robot only at long intervals.
Speaking of drives... Gene drive is a molecular technique that slips a new gene into an organism and guarantees that it will be inherited by offspring and by subsequent generations, by destroying competitors of that gene. Thus, the new trait is “driven” through a population. Potential positive uses would be to push into mosquito populations a trigger for their immune systems destroy the malaria parasite. Alas, all such techs are “dual use,” meaning they might be applied to malignant ends.
Speaking of malignant users... I’ve been talking about this sort of thing for years… how we absolutely rely upon the ratio of good tech users to evil ones steadily rising across time. This ratio can be measured and the good news is that it does indeed rise, in open societies where smart people both have access to information and in general feel vested - that they are better off with a functioning civilization than without one. Heaven help us, if that confidence is shaken.
And. Speaking of faulty predictive coding... Virginia Postrel offers an interesting riff on why “wearables” will remain pretty much vaporware (vaporwear?) for a while yet. Oh, you’ll get all the keen stuff I showed you in Existence. After a while.
Okay though. Speaking of cool things we want… jetpacks are just a little closer.
And that, even all by itself, will make us better!
Our genes speak
Are smarter people nicer? Here's an interesting article on IQ and strategic "cooperation" - why do subjects who score higher also behave much more cooperatively or generously in "prisoners' dilemma" type tests? I think this author zeroes in a bit too much on the "IQ" aspect. But the variety of test-games he describes is fascinating, as well as how the more strategic player generally winds up being warily and guardedly... "nicer."
Aging researchers found that by killing senescent (aging) cells, middle-aged mice lived 24-27 percent longer. The only drawback is that senescent cells are a part of wound healing, so any therapy that targeted aging cells would need to cease if the person needed to have an operation or was injured.
Epigenetics — the study of inheritable changes in gene expression not directly coded in our DNA — has resurrected the long despised Lamarckian notion of passing down acquired characteristics. Our life experiences may be passed on to our children and even further! Studies on survivors of trauma suggest stress may affect subsequent generations. Now scientists think they’ve spotted the “how” of it. Your life experiences may be passed on to your children and your children’s children. Studies on survivors of traumatic events have suggested that exposure to stress may indeed have lasting effects on subsequent generations. In future, people under stress may take a drug to inhibit the passing on of consequences.
Fascinating. Human jaws and teeth got small at least a million years before we had fire to tenderize meat, which is very hard to swallow raw. Apparently though, simple stone slicing tools made a crucial difference.
What is the minimum number of genes that can control a fully functioning and self-replicating cellular organism? Researchers at San Diego’s Venter Institute started with a very spare bacterium then started throwing away genes to see which ones qualified as absolutely essential. They announced a single-celled organism that has just 473 genes — likely close to the minimum number of genes necessary to sustain its life. They still don’t know what 200 or so of them do. That’s next.
And finally...
This fossil revealed a wonderful pre-insect life form that hauled its young around at the end of tethers, like kites of balloons… a first for sci fi!
A story about a math problem on a standardized test should not inspire laughter and admiration and anger all at once. This one did. And while the father-author is at one level a hero, and a paladin for the rights of his exceptional whiz daughter… he’s also an arrogant prick. Ah well. We need to have the kind of society that we do. Where this kind of tale is viewed as reinforcing our love of exceptional excellence and equilibrium disturbers.