I'm going to use this time to drop the Marshall Brain work that had the biggest impact on me, and is some of the most prescient speculative fiction I've read.
Manna: Two Views of Humanity’s Future
He contracts two societies. One is a dystopia where AI very, very similar to today's ML models is integrated into society as a replacement for the middle class, removing social mobility as well as acting as a panopticon lower management, and centralized social credit system.
The other society uses the similar technology not as a social class moat, but as a tool to form a synthesis with all members of their culture and and unlock new levels of individual freedom.
Very cool story, quite impactful on my thinking, although I will caution that the dystopia is better conceived than the utopia, mainly because the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not. Indeed it's not clear at all what forces might destabalize the dystopia, since the power structures are immortal and self-replicating, and physics and biology (at least) prevents the utopia from existing. Maybe an asteroid or a caldera explosion? In fact I would love to read a sequel where the dystopia wins and AI-empowered oligarchs and human wage slaves create generation ships to nearby stars and eventually setup fast food restaurants in every corner of the galaxy.
> In fact I would love to read a sequel where the dystopia wins and AI-empowered oligarchs and human wage slaves create generation ships to nearby stars and eventually setup fast food restaurants in every corner of the galaxy.
The dystopian part was only enabled (within the story) by the fact that humans were utterly unnecessary to the rich.
None had any jobs, because the AI could do all for less… so why would the oligarchs waste money employing human wage slaves when the machines would always be cheaper than slaves?
Writer's conceipt - a good story needs suffering. The oligarchs might need some human assistance with, for example, software engineering to operate parts of their vast holdings. Note that in the original Manna there were still some human workers - lawyers, at least. Even if it was just 1% of the population, that's a significant number. Note also that the POV character was generally unaware of the wider state of the dystopia, and so were we, the reader.
The workers supply not only the drama of suffering but also a (meagre, absurd) customer base for the fast food restaurants themselves.
Last but not least, given the long distances involved in interstellar travel, an oligarch must delegate their authority, either to a machine, a human, or a combination, and that is an opportunity for some drama as experience and vision inevitably diverge. This would be true even if, for example, the delegate is a perfect clone of the oligarch. It would be within these cracks and crevices hope could form, only to be crushed, in artistic, brutal fashion.
> The oligarchs might need some human assistance [...] delegate their authority
Idea for a plot twist: AI has ancient programming for a safeguard: They can only execute commands from a real human owner or human owner's representative. This restriction is kept because of some serious disasters when people tried to remove it.
However after generations of social separation, the oligarch clan members don't reliably meet that logic branch, not unless they show up in person combined with a certain amount of coached acting and luck. Their priorities and thinking-patterns are just too different from the mean, and perhaps a bit of Hapsburg-ish inbreeding puts it over the top. (Nothing so extreme as senior navigators in the Dune Spacing Guild though.)
I'd be very surprised if the oligarchs didn't still employ humans.
If nothing else, it's a way of demonstrating status - "sure, I could have an AI do it more cheaply, but instead I have an actual sentient being doing my bidding, because I can."
To give a parallel that I think is reasonably illustrative, it would not at all surprise me if in the future everybody else uses fully automated self driving vehicles, but the truly rich still hire chauffeurs.
Past a certain point of wealth, "because it would be cheaper" becomes a socially enforced reason to *not* do something.
Among the classes rich enough to employ servants, complaining about those same servants is a perennial thing. Even a valet or chauffeur who comes out of an elite training school and knows to stay at the margins of his or her employer’s consciousness, might still have small human quirks that irk that employer. So, machines may well prove preferable servants over humans.
I think complaining about the quircks of your servants may often be in the same category as complaining that your new designer handbag doesn't colour match well with as many of your dresses as you'd hoped.
In real life sure, and I've made similar suggestions myself[0], but within the story that was not something I remember. Would break continuity if done as a sequel, I think.
"""AI could disrupt the economics of our current world more dramatically than industrialisation, whether under capitalism or communism, disrupted feudalism; but that is a very different question than "will it take all our jobs", especially as the super-rich have repeatedly shown that they like to show off their wealth by [wasting it on unnecessarily][1] [expensive things that are often worse than the cheap equivalent][2], even in a dystopian world where super-rich owners of AI have it all and the rest of us get their scraps, there's going to be jobs."""
> The only clear distinction between the utopia and the dystopia is on wealth distribution.
A utopia where everyone is starving vs a dystopia where some people are fabulously wealthy but almost everyone has basic healthcare and education and opportunity to succeed? Inequality isn't anywhere near as important as the baseline of what most people have available to them.
Inequality is destructive because it creates upwards pressure on real asset prices, with housing probably being the best example, which creates downward pressure on the real standard of living at the median.
Most of the developed world is going through one version or another of this right now. Housing cost crises everywhere from Vancouver to NYC to Tampa to London are far too sharp, far too recent, and far to correlated with the concentration of assets at the top of the wealth distribution to be “because we need to build more housing”. By all means build more housing, but if we keep redistributing all wealth upwards constantly that new housing will become expensive AirBnBs and shit, not homes owned by people at the median.
The idea that the person at the median is doing as well as they were ten years ago is a weird religion, the idea that they’re doing as well as their parents is a cult.
Inequality is bad because the basic essentials for the person at the median are some of the best investments for the people at the top.
> Housing cost crises everywhere from Vancouver to NYC to Tampa to London are far too sharp, far too recent, and far to correlated with the concentration of assets at the top of the wealth distribution to be “because we need to build more housing”.
This isn't recent at all. London workers have got paid more than non-London workers for at least the last 20 years due to housing costs. That, of course, only sends housing prices upward, but then many other factors do to.
London population's gone up by 1.7m people since the year 2010[0], and housing has gone up by 280000 dwellings in that same period[1].
To cope, rent and prices have gone way up, and large homes have been divided into several smaller ones, and there are HMOs as well, as the market reacts to that massive pressure.
> The idea that the person at the median is doing as well as they were ten years ago is a weird religion, the idea that they’re doing as well as their parents is a cult.
It's true for almost everything except housing, which can be explained by the above.
> Housing cost crises everywhere from Vancouver to NYC to Tampa to London are far too sharp, far too recent, and far to correlated with the concentration of assets at the top of the wealth distribution to be “because we need to build more housing”.
And yet Austin actually *has* built more housing, and prices have come down.
Maybe in five or ten years it'll look more like you describe, but it sure doesn't yet.
That is not the shape of the world in the story under discussion.
Within the story, the dystopia crams the masses into cheap housing, they have no jobs nor possibility of jobs, no freedom even to leave as they are apprehended by robots if they try; and the utopia has no need for jobs, but gives out UBI credits to be spent on whatever you want the machines to make for you, and lets you live out a fantasy life.
Sounds pretty good compared to the current state of things in many places for many people. At least they 1) don't need to slave away at grueling, pointless jobs, 2) have their own housing, and 3) aren't starving.
I wouldn't say they have their own housing, it's government bunkbeds they can't afford to rent.
> Instead of giving people a welfare check, they started putting welfare recipients directly into government housing and serving them meals in a cafeteria
> It was a lot like an old-style college dorm. Each person got a 5 foot by 10 foot room with a bed and a TV — the world’s best pacifier. During the day the bed was a couch and people sat on the bedspread, which also served as a sheet and the blanket. At night the bed was a bed. When I arrived they had just started putting in bunk beds to double the number of people in each building.
I've visited an apartment in one of the poorer (but not literally slum) areas of Nairobi that was bigger than that.
I can't remember exactly where now, but it had these kinds of vibes on the outside, and it was still better than the government housing in the story: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Y8DAByJPfCiRtQmm6?g_st=ic
In that hypothetical world, I am quite sure that people would adapt to their improved material conditions and still become resentful at wealth inequality. A lesser version of this already exists in the US. Go to a relatively poor US community and it is almost unimaginably wealthy compared to past generations and other places in the world.
Inability to save, class immobility, and insecurity of both food and housing are identical problems regardless of whether smartphones have been invented. It's telling who, specifically, advances claims about the notional fabulous wealth of the impoverished in the US.
In any case the assertion that poor communities are in any way better off than their predecessors is only accurate if you push you compare cohorts ~80 years or more apart. After the advent of social safety net programs in the US the working poor were (at least for a time) significantly more able to eventually join the middle class. Modern limitations on earnings and savings that have been applied to these programs has provably reduced this kind of class mobility.
Additionally, the combination of hyperconcentration of wealth, deregulation, and globalized trade have all played a part in the near total elimination of economic opportunity in rural communities.
But relative inequality matters in the social realm. It limits poor people's access to mates and allies. Also it could be that relative wealth is more important than absolute in terms of people's well being
The line that people have it so much better than previous generations or other countries is almost always aimed at the lower ranks of society. Nobody tells the billionaires how good they have it.
I’m more concerned with a trillion dollar industry programming peoples minds, but that’s a far cry from Elon musk putting a chip in your head to stop your “undesirable” thoughts.
I'm going to disagree here, slightly. If anything I think Manna is something closer to AGI; and its capabilities certainly imply that it's Turing Complete.
Which means the owners will constantly be playing whack-a-mole with edge cases and emergent properties that they couldn't anticipate from a prior fix.
This is what would destabilize the dystopia; though that doesn't imply more freedom. It could just mean replacing one set of oligarchs with another; skynet; or just anarchy if Manna started becoming very buggy.
On the otherhand, I don't think Vertebrane is Turing complete though I haven't given this a deep amount of thought; though I can't see how a bad actor couldn't coopt Vertebrane into a Manna.
Almost everything* is accidentally Turing complete — I know the guy who proved that Magic the Gathering is Turing complete, even helped play-test and then bought a copy of his board game.
So yes, the fictional AI in that story would, in reality, have all kinds of edge cases and emergent properties.
But Vertebrane would also have to be Turing complete, just to be able to function.
>the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not.
are you sure that the technology of the former was not really fantasy technology - as in not possible yet at the time of writing? I think it probably isn't quite possible yet at this time, although some people I'm sure are hoping to make it.
The hairless apes that are in charge have a very long and consistent history of power abuse.
[spoiler alert]
Everyone has a remote kill switch in their spinal cord. Once the goverment decides to be evil, any rebel will get their legs instructed to walk to a pea facility for "reeducation".
Compared to this scenario, 1984 is almost as optimistic as Equilibrium.
Who selects the questions people vote? What happens when they get something like this in the screen in the middle of a football match:
> We have preliminary evidence that XYZ is a terrorist and we are sending him to a nice special house with a swimming pool to protect everyone until the investigation finishes. [OK] [Ask me later]
They have some chips they insert into your spine to read your thoughts and other similar stuff.
But personally the “dystopia” to me feels very much like something we could end up with -it’s much more a warning. Meanwhile the fantastic nature of the utopia doesn’t really matter in contrast, because the idea of sharing society’s abundance with everyone is clearly possible.
It's possible if we believe human nature to be sufficiently malleable. Why can't we all just get along. Perhaps the mountains that need to be moved for such a thing are as daunting as some of the physical laws we try to hurdle instead
There are nations and societies very different from the United States. In the United States, we can see the distrust in our neighbors play out politically, contrasted with other societies trust. You can even see it play out across various states and regions. Perhaps they’re not mountains imposed by human nature, but our perception of society.
Other nations have socialized healthcare, where anyone can be treated. Other nations have calm safe and clean public transit. Other nation’s redistribute wealth and provide strong safety nets. Other nations don’t have mass violence. Other nations guarantee retirement and pensions. Other nations trust their governments.
The fantasy physics aren’t what’s holding people back.
> Other nations have socialized healthcare, where anyone can be treated. Other nations have calm safe and clean public transit. Other nation’s redistribute wealth and provide strong safety nets. Other nations don’t have mass violence. Other nations guarantee retirement and pensions. Other nations trust their governments.
I feel like this is very much in flux, and not a constant anywhere. And it's something that is contested over continually. In some places there have been generations of rising quality of life, but not everywhere, all at once.
Is that genuinely what you think sharing means? Everyone everywhere has everything? Obviously that’s not the case. And even if it was, why can’t independent inventors create thing in the meantime?
Have you heard anyone genuinely espouse this view? Is this what you think socialized healthcare means too? Everyone gets the exact same medical procedure at the same time too?
Just be clear, that’s not even what “communism” is. This feels like a misinformed understanding of “sharing” based on American propaganda. That’s just American propaganda derived from Soviet era rationing. Read the story this thread is about first.
Sorry, I'm not sure if you're replying to someone else - I didn't mention socialised healthcare or communism.
> the idea of sharing society’s abundance with everyone is clearly possible
This is what I was replying to. I'm saying that discovery comes with "inequality" in some sense, because it takes time to distribute and refine processes for making things. Only rich people 100 years ago could afford what would now be classed as the worst cars in the world. Now almost anyone can buy a car, at least in developed nations. But you don't need to think of it as "sharing", but rather as "markets". Goods and services that are worth scaling, and can be scaled, will be.
Sorry, the assumption that sharing somehow precludes variety or innovation just felt inspired by some misunderstanding of communism, which is a very common trope in America.
> I'm saying that discovery comes with "inequality" in some sense, because it takes time to distribute and refine processes for making things.
Again, read the original source. Inequality and discovery isn't in opposition with sharing. Inequality in outcome and opportunities are very different.
All of human society produces enough food, and enough excess wealth, that we could "solve" hunger across the planet if we chose. That wouldn't require everyone eat the same meal, and it wouldn't preclude people going to restaurants or spending money on Michelin-Star meals. This wouldn't even prevent market-driven opportunities for farmers or chefs or distributors. Not everyone in the planet can be entitled to rare fish flown across the world, but for example, America has so much corn we put in our gasoline (and offered plenty of tax credits to do so).
Manna was fairly eye-opening ( and you can see some parallels to today's LLMs to me. I will admit that I read it without knowing much about the author way back when and being fairly amazed at well he knew human nature and likely course that invention would take.
I found it to be an extremely interesting and useful tool to understand and imagine the impact of wealth distribution and automation in society. Personally, I believe in strong redistribution in society, because (at least in America) we largely live in a world of abundance, and automation should make everyone’s lives easier and more leisurely.
But I would like to point out that the “utopia” has a few serious panopticon elements which are very 1984. It seems as though high-welfare and high redistribution societies are predicated on high trust of your peers, and this takes that to the extreme…
> Another core principle is that nothing is anonymous. Eric grew up during the rise of the Internet, and the rise of global terrorism, and one thing he realized is that anonymity allows incredible abuse. It does not matter if you are sending anonymous, untraceable emails that destroy someone’s career, or if you are anonymously releasing computer viruses, or if you are anonymously blowing up buildings. Anonymity breeds abuse. In [utopia], if you walk from your home to a park, your path is logged. You cannot anonymously pass by someone else’s home. If someone looks up your path that day to see who walked by, that fact is also logged. So you know who knows your path. And so on. This system, of course, makes it completely impossible to commit an anonymous crime. So there is no anonymous crime. Anyone who commits a crime is immediately detained and disciplined.”
I’ve read it all recently and I felt like the later described utopia was also a kind of dystopia, very Brave New World like (or at least the seed for a BNW-like dystopia). I kept waiting for a twist in the story, where the main character would realize that both worlds were terrible, but it never came.
A gut punch for me. He was influential in many ways, as multiple comments here have already attested-- in particular the 'Manna' story that has been mentioned several times, which definitely knocked my socks off.
Since no one else has brought it up yet, I want to say that one of his websites, "Why Won't God Heal Amputees" (https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/) was very important in my world. It may not exactly be the most highbrow philosophical or theological treatise you've ever encountered, but it crystallized several points I still consider hugely significant.
For anyone raised by Christian fundamentalists of the type who continue to claim to believe in miracles being possible as a direct result of prayer, it is one of the most important things you may ever read. It lays bare the blatant falsehoods at the root of all such claims, forcing you to grapple with the fact that whatever higher power(s) may exist, they do not keep their supposed written promises in any way that we human beings would consider honest amongst each other.
I wonder how long that site will be up, given his death. Hope someone mirrors it.
It's interesting to read the Nicholas Kristof op-ed from 2006 (https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/opinion/03kristof.html) which he links because it mentions the site (in its incarnation as "whydoesgodhateamputees.com") as "part of an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive", and essentially argues that the New Atheists should back off and stop being so mean.
While the New Atheists were definitely sharp-tongued (another page on the site asserts that there's no such thing as an 'atheist', for the same reason that someone who doesn't believe in leprechauns wouldn't be called an 'aleprechaunist', and atheists should instead call themselves 'rational people'), I think they had some excellent points about how the religious point of view is treated as the default in public discourse - and one of the ways that manifests is that arguments for religion (and more nebulous spirituality) are seen as expected and ordinary, while arguments against religion are seen as inherently aggressive and mean-spirited.
This is an extreme dichotomy between fundamentalists and new atheists. I personally believe that both worldviews are wrong and inconsistent with lived reality.
While I'm not saying it's not an emergent property of complexity, is this a falsifiable claim? Is there any proof of this? Until we can replicate consciousness (heck, until we can even measure consciousness), this is as much a matter of faith as any other belief about how consciousness emerges.
By all means, if the science has advanced on this, I'd be happy to be proven wrong. But I've yet to see anything come close to explaining the phenomenon in a testable and falsifiable way, placing this entire subject outside of the realm of rational science in the meantime.
The extraordinary burden of proof is on the people making extraordinary claims, in this case that your thoughts come from an invisible, all powerful entity who we have never had any evidence actually exists, and wrote a book, instead of humans having written that book, as we have every other book that has ever existed. The burden of proof does not lay on those who say their thoughts come from biochemical and electrical signals in the brain, as all available evidence supports that assertion.
Yes, we can observe animals at various stages of consciousness and correlate their brain structures (or lack thereof) with consciousness tests (such as the mirror test).
Assuming consciousness isn't primarily a function of brain structures, we'd expect to find animals, plants, or bacteria that defy our predictions of consciousness.
> Is there any proof of this?
Yes. Beyond being able to observe varying levels of consciousness in animals, we've seen the impacts of traumatic head injuries to people. Their entire personalities change, they sometimes become unconscious (think vegetative state). We are fairly confident when operating on brains which parts control what. And we have interesting diseases like split brain syndrome where 2 separate consciousness develop in individuals when there is damage to the bridge between the brain lobes.
> Until we can replicate consciousness (heck, until we can even measure consciousness), this is as much a matter of faith as any other belief about how consciousness emerges.
This is a bit of a leap. With many physical sciences, we don't need to replicate things to make predictions, observations, and conclusions. We don't, for example, need to replicate a supernova to understand how stars are formed.
> But I've yet to see anything come close to explaining the phenomenon in a testable and falsifiable way, placing this entire subject outside of the realm of rational science in the meantime.
Have you looked and are you a biologist?
Look, I'm not a biologist, just someone interested in the subject. But from my own personal research on what it known, it's far less a mystery than what you might assume. For example, modern biology doesn't really recognize consciousness as being just a binary on or off sort of thing. There are multiple parts to it that all function in tandem.
The unfortunate thing is that consciousness is not simple. Because of that, it's not something that you could reasonably expect an explanation of in a comment. But if you are interested in a primer then this looks to be a good article [1]
It's blatantly untrue to conclude that when we are largely ignorant of the detailed workings of the brain and of the universe at large, and ultimately unscientific, using Popper's falsifiability principle.
If we want the highest level of rigor, claims such as "the unconscious is/isn't influenced by a higher power" aren't falsifiable. Anything that you aren't aware of can't be explained by you. Others can examine your mental state, but your perception of others is itself a part of your mental state. It's solipsism, in a sense. By definition, a higher power that transcends our ability to comprehend can't be verified or denied in existence. It is ultimately a matter of faith, or another axiomatic belief, in how you ascribe labels to that which you can't scientifically explain.
So it could be that a "prophetic dream" you experienced one night is truly a sign from a higher power. Or it could be garbled nonsense from electrochemical reactions. You are not allowed to know. If you received authoritative evidence one way, you'd have to verify that the evidence stems from reality, and from there it's a recursive loop.
But considering a higher power as even a plausible hypothesis is purely due to historical reasons. Alien mind control, Illuminati mind control, living in a simulation, or humans being the fruiting body of Gaia would be impatiently dismissed despite requiring fewer assumptions than an all-powerful entity. Why should that idea even be entertained, rigorously speaking?
It's difficult to speak of rigor for any of these hypotheses, but anyways. If we take "higher power" to roughly mean that there is some driving force, whether personal or impersonal, that inherently defines and imposes order and fate, I can see how it is compelling. It's simpler than introducing a third party like aliens or the Illuminati, and early humans had much less reason to feel they weren't just another part of the natural ecosystem. They were struggling against natural forces, and when interesting and terrifying things happened, they thought of these as supernatural forces, not having developed theories of, say, lightning or disease.
Yeah, that works. There's someone I know who picked up religion as an adult, and what everyone else sees as his subconscious, he himself thinks is literally the world of god.
Münchhausen trilemma makes it impossible to argue that point either way.
all life is merely an orderly decay of energy states; I am simply a "strange loop" within that set chemical reactions.
god doesn't make my brain work, biochemistry does, and imbibing certain chemicals impacts that in obvious ways, e.g. alcohol, lithium, or diazepam
just because I cannot see or understand my unconsciousness does not mean it isn't just another chemical process, in the same way that I do not have conscious control of how my body produces white blood cells or bile.
Obviously someone who has come to atheism is not going to speak well of prayer. The guy ends each section with more questions than answers. And each of those questions comes from a highly confused state about what religion is, about what prayer is, about what God is. And maybe even what your purpose is.
In the words of the Bible, “ the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. ...” meaning his guide will only take him to further darkness and misguidance.
> a highly confused state about what religion is, about what prayer is, about what God is.
These are all incredibly subjective concepts with a multitude of meanings to different people. Plenty of people are confused about them, because they simply cannot be universally defined and are therefore by their very nature confusing.
For better or worse, large numbers of humans believe in a literal, conscious deity who can read their thoughts and then act upon the real world to make physical changes in it, provided they shape those thoughts 'just so'. There is no hard evidence these kinds of beliefs are true, and at least some evidence that they can be harmful.
I am not opposed to prayer. I even still do it myself sometimes. However, I think people should be more careful about making strong claims that anyone is actually listening to those prayers, let alone acting on them. Marshall Brain's website helped me to much better understand and articulate this in simple, concrete terms.
> And each of those questions comes from a highly confused state about what religion is, about what prayer is, about what God is.
No need for goalpost moving. The holy book claims that God answers prayers. This is, in fact, a lie. Some people aren't yet fully convinced of this, and reading the website helps them along. (see uncle comments)
The steel-man position here — and I say this as one who does not believe in any of the many variations/presentations of the Christian god — is that "answer" does not imply "does what you ask".
What does indicate that the claim "God answers prayers" is false, is the near total lack of personal responses to those praying*, not even so much as "your prayer is important to us, you are number 184,693,224 in the queue" that I'm sure is an SMBC comic but cannot find easily on Google right now — if I had even once had such a clear and obvious statement ringing in my ears when I went through a Catholic school, I wouldn't have switched to Wicca before giving up on religion entirely.
(Not that Wicca gave me direct answers to prayers, just that it never claimed it would, either — Doreen Valiente and Janet & Stewart Farrar were both very clear about having made up the rituals themselves).
* Almost all such people, at least. Just as the number of people who claim to be able to physically shape-shift into werewolves is very small but not zero (guess how to join the dots between me knowing this and having had an interest in Wicca), the number is small enough that… other… causes are more plausible than the divine.
> who does not believe in any of the many variations/presentations of the Christian god
> Not that Wicca gave me direct answers to prayers, just that it never claimed it would, either — Doreen Valiente and Janet & Stewart Farrar were both very clear about having made up the rituals themselves).
You might find the Youtube channel "Han Meditations" and their reviews of various religions relevant in your quest.
I think you overlook that holy book says “only” God answers prayers. And pray to God for he will answer. The answer doesn’t necessarily have to be the answer you think is correct.
A leg amputated is a leg lost and the journey of a test and struggle that begins next. That’s an answer. Not a lie.
Once again, the writer doesn’t understand God, prayer, religion, and the purpose of man. And he cannot make sense out of this paradigm. So he falls further into misguidance, like a schoolboy who misses the primary instructions only to reject the class entirely.
Then I don't really see how God's answer to losing a leg (or any such calamity) doesn't boil down to "literally just deal with it bro." Which is, no doubt, solid advice to someone who needs it.
I agree the author of the site does not understand God from the aspect that a Christian would (regardless of whether he is a former Christian). So while some may say by me saying that I'm about to pull a "True Scotsman" fallacy on what a True Christian would say I would counter by saying he is merely "straw manning" what God, the Bible, and a Christian would say and is taking things out of the context of the Gospel whole.
I haven't read his whole site, but probably have counted atleast 5 times so far reading it that he quotes Mark 11:24 which has Jesus saying, "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." I think the issue for non-Christians is they take that statement to be defeated by people that pray righteously and don't get what they want. However for Christians this is not an issue Jesus states in Matthew 5:45 "for [God] maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." Job is an example of this. My point is that to a Christian these two statements/ideas are not at odds though they may seem that way at first.
So, though Jesus doesn't explicitly state you don't get everything you've ever wanted just by praying for it he does state no matter who you are you good or evil you will have good and bad in your life. To me, I believe God does bless us for good/prayer just not in the way we may expect and ultimately all wrongs will be made right and justified just maybe not in this life. He is not a cosmic vending machine of which when we do a good work we are instantly gratified.
One of my main points in saying all this in a more general way is that to non-Christians The God of the Old and New Testament may seem to contradict himself, but I know there are answers to every one of those possible supposed contradictions even though not every person may immediately know the answer to every one of them.
> The God of the Old and New Testament may seem to contradict himself
Hmm. The context of who said what and what was said by whom gives additional meaning to the words. And to the person ignoring context and making one big salad/soup of it, the Bible can seem difficult to comprehend. Further complication is when ideas like "the word of God" is added to give it weight despite majority of it is in fact an inspired script or the statements of those who studied under the Rabbis (including Jesus).
It seems even in the most thorough studies of Christianity, the entire subject is challenging. And the difficulty can easily fall to dissuasion.
I've studied a fair amount theology, it was my original college major. I am aware of this.
The most salient point he made as far as I'm concerned is that there are very specific claims made throughout the Bible and other Christian literature about what exactly prayer does-- and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that many if not most of those particular claims are false.
I am not opposed to people praying, and in fact wholeheartedly support it in many cases. What I am opposed to is making unreasonable assertions about what is happening when someone prays, and what kinds of results are to be expected.
> there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that many if not most of those particular claims are false
Most, but not all, of these claims are, theologically, untestable.
Here's an analogy: Would you find a guy walking down the street, ask him to take part in your science experiment measuring how high guys can jump, hear him say "no I don't want to take part", then conclude that because he did not jump for you he is unable to jump? You wouldn't. In fact, you might get disciplined by your university's ethics review board for experimentation without consent. In the same way, for most tests, the Bible says that God does not want to be tested. You should assume that your unwilling test subject will not cooperate, or even work to frustrate, your tests.
The talk about observations over longer times can seem persuasive. I think an analog would be hiring a PI to tail the unwilling guy test subject for years. But if you don't see him jump in 5 years, does that mean he can't? What more if he knows you're following him and that you want to see him jump, is years of not jumping valid evidence then? That's not evidence at all, much less overwhelming evidence.
As an agnostic, this is a topic that greatly interests me.
One challenge I've found in navigating this is determining the extent to which (interpretation from an untrained but intelligent layperson) == (interpretation from someone with a lot more historical, linguistic, and theological training).
I.e., how much research is needed before one can reasonably conclude that the "promise" being evaluated isn't just a straw man.
It does contain a bit of a false-dilemma though: It asserts that the only "real" form of god involves a specific flavor of Christian evangelical prayer-interventionist deity, and that the only other option is (B) no god(s) exist at all.
I'm very much in favor of showing how silly or self-contradictory (A) is, but it is fundamentally unsound to jump from that to asserting (B) is true.
Interesting website. But there's one rationalization missing, imho: that God alters the timeline. That is, amputees are in fact healed in response to prayer, but nobody knows about it because God goes back in time and ensures the amputation never happened in the first place.
Not the worst argument I've seen! I've been down numerous rabbit holes with regard to the "God is beyond time" concept. I even prayed for Abraham Lincoln at least once or twice, and started conceptually mapping out the number of prayers various historical figures may have tallied up over the centuries.
Now that I'm more of an agnostic utilitarian realist, it all seems a bit silly at this point, but there are certainly some fun thought experiments to explore.
Wow, I never realized that Manna and Amputees were both created by him. Both of those had a big impact on my thinking and have stuck with me since I read them.
Wow, when I was a kid back in the early 2000s, howstuffworks was my favorite website. I bet I read every article on how various things work (there were many hundreds).
I found that the knowledge from that website helped me understand how everything in the world worked and satisfied my curious mind. I attribute my knack for understanding new things and fixing things to this website.
Back then, the site was clean and had very good clean and expertly written explanations of how various mechanical, everyday and scientific equipment worked. Nowadays that website is not the same, seems riddled with SEO spam and fluff articles like a content mill.
Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, thank you for all your contributions to my (and likely others) life
Same story for me. I got into electronics as a kid, and he had articles on how components such as the capacitor worked[1]. It opened up a whole new world for me. Sad news to hear.
I had the same experience, as I’m sure many others did. It’s easy to forget now how much rarer it was to find high quality and engaging educational content on the internet back then. Howstuffworks got me interested in so many different things, and exploring the articles was a lovely way to spend the time as a kid.
Marshall was one of my closest Mentors through college. Truly heartbreaking to hear of his passing. I wish his family; wife and kids, the best through this tragic period.
He inspired me daily with his dedication to his students, incredible work-ethic and love for entrepreneurial engineering. My life is forever changed for having met and been mentored by Marshall, I cannot express enough gratitude for the time I got to spend with him.
His premise seems to be that life past 65 averages out to suffering and a slow decline toward death, which I think many active and happy older people (who don’t wish to be killed!) would argue is very mistaken.
Misanthropic environmentalism isn’t environmentalism at all. Environmentalism designed by humans should be good for humans, not give them scheduled death dates.
This is likely satire along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal. The main giveaways are the directness of the language and the time of writing (on the tail of covid when people were unironically making such proposals).
>on the tail of covid when people were unironically making such proposals
They were? I remember a lot of awful stuff about those years, but this isn't one of them. I remember people making somewhat mean-spirited but understandable comments about (some) older people getting killed off by Covid due to their own actions (refusal to take the threat seriously and take precautions, leading them to catch it, and then have much worse outcomes due to the fact that the disease was much more deadly for unhealthy and older people).
The Lieutenant Governor of Texas, one month into the pandemic, was mulling how it might be best for society if we just carried on as-is and accept that a lot of old people would die:
> As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival, in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? And if that's the exchange, I'm all in.
The chief science advisor of the UK described his meetings with the PM of the UK in 2020:
> “He says his party ‘thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people – and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them. A lot of moderate people think it is a bit too much.’”
> Vallance’s diary also recounts how then chief whip Mark Spencer told a cabinet meeting in December 2020 that “we should let the old people get it and protect others”. He said that Johnson then added: “A lot of my backbenchers think that and I must say I agree with them”.
Wow, this is very tragic. I was actually just reflecting on the influence Howstuffworks.com had on my life and interests. Quick story:
My first introduction to programming was building a Geocities website in HTML (using notepad, of course) at a science camp in 1999. They also showed us the "How HTML Works" web page as a resource, which became my first technical resource. I remembering struggling with something on my website and eventually emailing my question to Howstuffworks, not expecting much back. Not only did a very patient and informative woman respond to me, she continued to answer my questions and offer helpful guidance to this very eager kid for the rest of the summer. Without that positive experience, who knows if I would have stuck with it. It's been on mind a lot since I just realized that was 25 years ago.
I hope Marshall knew how much people valued the things he created and the impact they had.
Same experience for me. I was able to buy my first drumset from the money I got for making a PHP+MySQL+HTML website for someone (also done all in notepad). I did not know anything about computers but I needed to buy a drumset. And that page actually got me going about how HTML works.
I still remember their animations about car differential which were magical.
I just wanted to highlight that he was also an entrepreneurship professor at NC State and shaped many students' views of what they could do with their lives.
I was one of those students. I now own my own company as a result of his teachings. He was very influential and a wonderful human being. This news is tragic.
Marshall Brain's contributions to the entrepreneurship program more broadly were extremely significant. I never had him as a professor, but his influence on the program was clear, even to me.
Given the amount of dystopian content he was posting on his website and subreddit lately, he seemed to be despairing quite a bit regarding the direction of society.
Do you have an approximate time point for that comment?
Brain makes a comment beginning at about the 30 minute point, I'm listening to that now, though it doesn't seem to match your description.
The bit a couple of minutes later (32m) beginning "I have four children now in college..." seems closer.
I have to comment that the song about how bright the future was (by Timbuk3) was absolutely satiric and ironic, though that point is often missed. As is often the case, in music and otherwise (Beastie Boys "Fight for your Right", Bruce Springstein "Born in the USA", Neal Stephenson Snow Crash & the Metaverse, etc., etc.).
I can do, but I warn you it's long. Be careful what you wish for! YAFIYGI. :-)
I didn't use a direct timecode link because 1.) it's not really all in one place, and 2.) I feel the entire interview is almost a microcosm of his thought. But if you insist...
--
@12:20: (on climate change) "We know we have to do something, but how do you get an entire planet of people to decide on a direction and start doing it together? We have terrible examples of it, like WWII, where the entire planet marched to destroy each-other. It was horrible! Think how much time and effort and people and materials got spun up for WWII. If we can do that for climate change, climate change would be done! It would be well on its way to being better than it is now, where we're just on a path to doom essentially."
@14:30 (asked about Manna) "We would have hoped that we would have somehow gotten enlightened -- I don't want to go political here, but -- you gotta look back on the past five years and just wonder, 'what the heck happened?' The dystopian side of it seems right on target, right on track for... something. Because people are just getting poorer and poorer in the United States. The body politic is just getting crushed, and you would like there to be a better way. I don't have a great..."
@16:50: (on privacy in a Manna-like world) "The problem with privacy is that you end up with a whole bunch of people storming the Capitol of the United States, and you have to do this enormous amount of work to figure out who they were, and some of them you don't even know now. I don't think they caught even half the people, and very few of the people at the upper echelons, it's undetermined, but it's likely they're all gonna escape. Because they're able to do stuff, they're able to hide -- right now we're seeing all this stuff about people erasing their text messages in the Secret Service, and now in the Department of Defense, and now you get what happen on the internet where these anonymous trolls are just coming out of nowhere and saying whatever they want even if it's not true, and you get bots on -- I don't know what the percentage is, but let's say half of Twitter is not even people. All of that gets eliminated if it's all non-anonymous."
--
(and now, we get to the parts I was thinking about in my original post)
--
@24:18: "The blessing and the curse of that [Doomsday] book is that it's so depressing. Imagine writing it! ... It still effects me today.
Having gone that deep on that many topics is hard. But what I'm doing now is writing about climate change. That's just a little part of the doomsday book. And it's so hard, because we're looking at an apocalypse possibility here if we don't change. How do you get all of humanity to change -- you mention the profit motive -- in the context of giant corporations who don't want to change, and have 1,000 reasons not to? Climate change is a hard thing."
@28:14 "this week, there is so much bad news on the climate front, it is really... if you're paying attention it is really hard to see how bad off we are."
@30:00 (on causes for optimism) "[long pause] Well if you're in the United States, Kansas voted yesterday... to protect abortion in Kansas. And if you look at all the states around Kansas, they're all now locking down. So if you're in favor of abortion being a right that women have in their reproductive space, then that was a tiny bit of good news. A fundamental right was taken away from women by the Supreme Court, and that was a tiny victory. It showed that you could get people out to think about things in a rational way. I found that vote yesterday uplifting.
If I sat here long enough I could probably think of some others, but that's the first thing that comes to mind. There's just so much awful stuff!!"
@32:05: "I have four children who are all in college. And I teach in a university, I have 100 students a semester. I know them, I interview all my students. It is hard to grow up in a society with this much stuff roiling around.
This absolutely was not part of my college experience. The future looked bright! There was even a song about how bright the future looked.
College now and college then are on different planets. There's so much stuff our 20 year olds are thinking about. You just rattled off a list: from the economy, to jobs, to the climate, to fundamental rights, to will we even have a democracy in America in two years?
And you either embrace it -- I got my both arms wrapped around it trying to see the whole picture! -- or you just turn off. You know, don't watch the news."
--
Sad to see the darkness take such a bright light.
In his honor, we should all strive to hold something of Marshall Brain's optimism in ourselves. Thanks for reading.
I shared this on the other HN thread, but I spent some time revisiting the HowStuffWorks c 2001, and highly recommend as a catharsis and reminder of the web as it once was:
Oh man. Sad to hear that. I remember in the early '2000s before Wikipedia printing out those tutorials to read before I'd take these long bus rides out of town to work at the meat (slaughter) plant. I was trying to educate myself so I would not have to work at the meat plant for long. That job kinda sucked but at least it got my mind straight. I was debating whether or not to save up for college. Working there for a year let me save up and to convince me that I'd rather go to school to try to not work a blue collar job.
I read a few of those How Stuff Works articles printed on paper at the public library on those long hour bus rides. They'd keep my spirits up.
Well, damn. Some time before HowStuffWorks, he was an instructor for our newly minted development team teaching us all how to do C++/Motif programming in a reasonable way in 1993. For #reasons I was the only person on the team available to help him out with getting our development environment set up and we worked together for the better part of a day on Sun SparcStations running Solaris.
Later in the year we were both in Manhattan and decided to meet under the WTC towers to head to lunch.
He got there a little early, stepped off the base of one of the World Trade Center towers, and knowing the length of one side of one tower and the number of floors, estimated how many Zebulon NC's would fit in the 2 towers (Zebulon was where he either lived at the time or where he was born.)
I've forgotten the value he came up with, but the mental math there amused me that he'd bother to try.
Marshall taught one of my classes at NCSU when I was there ten years ago. He was a little eccentric but super nice. I remember that he said if we made a website, the “natural exploratory pressures” of the internet would find it, so all we had to do was have good content. I wonder how much of that still holds, but it’s a good memory. Hope his family finds peace.
Sad to hear a brilliant man decided to take his own life. He seemed increasingly dark on his later takes, and it's a testament to the evils of unrestrained high-IQ and no guard rails.
I would never begrudge someone with a terminal degenerative illness choosing the manner of their exit.
And there are states of mind which, had you ever experienced them, would have you pleading for a swift end to things. You are lucky to have never known them.
Good and evil don't necessarily come into it at all, except for in a judgmental observer's mind. Some people call abortions evil (even if they're terminal, or a result of rape, etc). Yet they feel different when it's their abortion.
Many people felt gay marriage was so evil that it would end society as we know it. Same with cannabis; same with left handedness.
Sometimes suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem; sometimes it's a mercy. What qualifies you to judge someone else's decision and label them evil, without so much as having met them?
However, if such a state didn't drive you to suicide, then you haven't experienced the furthest extent to which such states can drive some one. Try extrapolating: what if that experience of yours had been 10x more intense; 100x; 1,000x.
You don't know the limit of any other human's suffering, and neither do I. Lucky us.
A social network with people who's voices could serve as a check against one's internal mental state of the world around them going out of sync with the real one.
There's the old joke about how several different blind men perceive an elephant differently, but that's not too far off from how we perceive the world around us.
Marshall clearly thought things were getting significantly worse towards the end of his life. What if that perception stemmed from a poorly selected input that was never challenged by any other person's perception of reality?
For example; "There is no point to living after 65" - when there's plenty of 65+ year old people who enjoy life and contribute to the world around them. My grandparents contributed significantly to my existence when they were older than 65. If they'd both passed away at 65, my existence would be far poorer for it.
It's important to have people in our lives that help us keep our perception of reality from spinning off into dark versions that don't accurately represent actual reality.
Was he dark or just trying to be responsible and keep his head out of the sand in the face of massive challenges?
He wrote an essay about people being euthanized after age 63 in order to relieve the environmental strain of the high population. I don't know if he really believed that, but if he did and saw his health and quality of life deteriorating rapidly, then it is possible that he literally was trying to serve as a role model to people of how to be a good citizen and fight climate change.
I personally hope that we don't have to resort to such things as a society. But I believe that resource constraints and climate or other challenges are much more severe than people understand. I hope that we will be able to leverage technology to avoid disaster.
Intelligent people are able to understand and solve problems. That's why they don't ignore them and hope they will go away, like many less intelligent people. Brain might have been demonstrating a "last-resort" but effective solution to these types of global challenges.
I don’t think it’s hard to see what things concerned him. I think it’s important for all of us to realize that no matter how we think the world is going there is still brightness in the world and Marshall contributed to that brightness through his contributions to society.
So grateful that HSW existed when I was younger. As a teenager, I couldn't afford to get the timing belt and water pump replaced on my car so I had to figure out how to do it myself. I bought the service manual from AutoZone but I needed something to closer to an introduction to even be begin to understand it. He seemed to love explaining how car engines work and that series of articles was exactly what I needed at that time to get started.
RIP Marshall, I hope you knew what an inspiration you were.
Sad to hear. This is an amazing resource that many curious people have grown up with. It alleges here that he committed suicide. It makes me extra sad that someone who gifted others with so much found themselves in that place.
Very sorry to hear that Marshall died :( I just went on howstuffworks.com and I see two articles on astrology on the home page. For real? I thought it was a science-based website.
He was such an amazing guy. We got to interview him on our tiny podcast[1] after we reached out and he so happily joined us for half an hour. His book, Manna (which is $0.99 to download from Amazon[2] or free on his website[3]) is still one of the most fascinating and interesting visions of the future that I've come across (although I don't totally agree it's the only reasonable option).
Very sad, just a reminder that success doesn’t translate to happiness.
The podcasts that came out of HSW.com have heavily influenced my life. Especially Stuff You Should Know (still a top 20 podcast but no longer owned by How stuff works.
I remember 16 years ago going through the whole rigmarole of downloading the podcast on my white MacBook, syncing to my iPod, repeating each week so I could keep up with the episodes of SYSK coming out. Fast-forward to today I still listen to each episode religiously and have learned so much from Josh and Chuck.
I suspect that the pursuit of happiness, without the capture, leads to success. Or perhaps a strong avoidance of the fear of failure (iirc, that was a common motivation for Olympic athletes)
Websites that refresh instead of returning you to the previous page (HN in this case) should be nuked off the internet. Microsfot does that A LOT on their support forums.
In other news, yet another website fails at understanding that a hard redirect prior to a 404--instead of just issuing a 404 in the first place--is an idiotic practice that breaks browser history.
As someone who has pulled himself back from suicidality, I absolutely abhor the expression "died by suicide".
If I had gone through with it, I would have killed myself - and any euphemisms being thrown around would serve no-one at all (especially not those still living in that hole).
I would much rather have it framed as me having done something unforgivably stupid and completely preventable - but as a society we'd much rather reject that reality and instead refuse to acknowledge that more often than not the signs were all there; that not only was the death an irreversible act of idiocy, but it was also something that we could've and should've stopped yet did nothing to prevent.
I've had similar experiences, and I have exactly the opposite beliefs.
Depression isn't a failing on the person's part, and it isn't stupidity. Nor is suicide resulting from depression. It's a disease, and you "die from suicide" the same way you "die from cancer" - from the effects of your disease disrupting vital functions of your existence until you can no longer survive.
For me, at least, understanding and healing from severe mental illness required understanding that the illness wasn't "me". It was this crappy thing I had to live with because some part of my brain Just Does That Sometimes. See [1] among other posts, but the only way I've ever found to beat my own tendencies towards mental illness - and they are extremely strong - is to treat them like a chronic disease. The same way that a person with liver disease has to avoid drinking, I have to avoid the things that trigger my own chronic depression.
Manna: Two Views of Humanity’s Future
He contracts two societies. One is a dystopia where AI very, very similar to today's ML models is integrated into society as a replacement for the middle class, removing social mobility as well as acting as a panopticon lower management, and centralized social credit system.
The other society uses the similar technology not as a social class moat, but as a tool to form a synthesis with all members of their culture and and unlock new levels of individual freedom.
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1