Kaj Sotala: > It’s not hard to see how [a stigma against posting any party pictures of yourself online, even harmless ones] happened. Start with a few high-profile cases of stupid people posting pictures of themselves doing stupid stuff and then getting fired (or not-hired). That draws attention to the idea that employers care about online pics, and are looking out for them, which leads to the creation of a heuristic: don’t post pictures of yourself drinking alcohol.

> The heuristic is overly restrictive; it’s erring on the side of safety (just as our knee-jerk racist errs on the side of safety by clutching their bag). That’s true of most heuristics, since humans are risk-averse and loss-averse.

> In response, the most cautious people—those who are the most anxious, and were the most hesitant to post a party pic in the first place—just stop outright. Not worth the risk, they tell themselves, even though the actual risk from their brunch group selfie is essentially zero.

> Meanwhile, employers who’ve caught the trend start paying more attention, and catching more stuff on the other end—things that might’ve slipped by before, but which are now defensibly objectionable.

> These two dynamics put pressure on the system from both ends. Moderate, well-behaved people are posting fewer party pics, and more party pics are being punished. The overall population of party pics shrinks, and it shrinks such that it becomes more extreme. Fewer of the non-objectionable pics are being posted, and so the overall impression “party pics are generally bad” gets stronger, and “correctly” so.

> Lather, rinse, repeat. The stigma is stronger, so more people who are sensitive to the stigma drop off, leaving behind only those who are oblivious or rebellious. The oblivious and the rebellious tend to post worse pictures anyway, so the stigma gets strengthened and seems to be more justified, causing more people to stop, until eventually there are approximately zero party pics that aren’t objectionable, and then everyone just goes “see?”
It’s Not What It Looks Like – Duncan A Sabien – Medium

Kaj Sotala: > As a philosopher working alongside neurologists, Thomas Metzinger focuses on consciousness and the experience of the subjective self. His evolutionary considerations involve identifying a neural function in complex mobile organisms that allows them to successfully navigate through a changing and unpredictable environment. This environmental challenge he states, requires the internal sense of self-wholeness in order to anticipate and negotiate with events in the world. The constructed “phenomenal self-model within the world-model,” involves not only a sensory impression, but a mental image of a unified center, of a self residing in a world. This self-inwardness or ego, as an inside separated from an outside, characterizes the operation of the ego tunnel. The ego tunnel is a constructed impression that the ego or subject is directly perceiving and contacting a world.

> This experience is a naive realism. If mobile organisms were privy to all of the countless neural and other “internal and external” interactive processes that occurred with the act of walking for instance, they could never function. Immeasurably complex events had to be reduced to representational images in order to make sense to the mobile organism. These representational images would of necessity, include a unified and independent subject perceiving a world separate from and external to itself. The feeling of looking directly into the world from the vantage point of a perceiving and cognizant me or self, is a neural-representational process that is most convincing. We are not aware of this duality as an adaptive function, but view it as reality. Because we are unaware of the immeasurable neuronal activity involved in the production of an image-based reality, Metzinger refers to this opacity as a tunnel.
The Myth of the Self: Neurology Weighs In

Kaj Sotala:
Inside the Very Big, Very Controversial Business of Dog Cloning

Kaj Sotala: I'm coauthor on this new paper: Long-Term Trajectories of Human Civilization.

> Society today needs greater attention to the long-term fate of human civilization. Important present-day decisions can affect what happens millions, billions, or trillions of years into the future. The long-term effects may be the most important factor for present-day decisions and must be taken into account. An international group of 14 scholars calls for the dedicated study of “long-term trajectories of human civilization” in order to understand long-term outcomes and inform decision-making. This new approach is presented in the academic journal Foresight, where the scholars have made an initial evaluation of potential long-term trajectories and their present-day societal importance.

> “Human civilization could end up going in radically different directions, for better or for worse. What we do today could affect the outcome. It is vital that we understand possible long-term trajectories and set policy accordingly. The stakes are quite literally astronomical,” says lead author Dr. Seth Baum, Executive Director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, a non-profit think tank in the US.

> The group of scholars including Olle Häggström, Robin Hanson, Karin Kuhlemann, Anders Sandberg, and Roman Yampolskiy have identified four types of long-term trajectories: status quo trajectories, in which civilization stays about the same, catastrophe trajectories, in which civilization collapses, technological transformation trajectories, in which radical technology fundamentally changes civilization, and astronomical trajectories, in which civilization expands beyond our home planet.
Long-Term Trajectories of Human Civilization | Global Catastrophic Risk Institute

Kaj Sotala: > Lurking existential risks are omnipresent in our future trajectory: Climate change, pandemics, nuclear war, risks from AI, and AGI are quite sobering and at times make me doubt whether we’ll make it through the century. While a sober assessment of risks is important, this alone could put the cart before the horse: In focusing solely on how catastrophic human extinction would be, we sometimes forget that extinction is only so bad because the alternative could be SO good: the futures that we can create if we don’t get wiped out. These are beautiful beyond imagination.

> Optimistic visions like these do something to me, they tickle a different part of my mind than neutral assessments of risks, or even the currently all too seductive doomsday propagations, or dystopias we’re racing toward. Thus, if we care about a long-term future for sentient beings, the best way to bring this about might not be by focusing only on the risks preventing us from getting there but on the visions that remind us of why we absolutely have to get there.

> This website is a pool of readings, podcasts, videos, projects, and organizations that inspire a positive long-term future for humanity, one with "existential hope" (a term first coined in this paper by Owen Cotton-Barratt and Toby Ord). The website is divided into three sections: 1) setting the vision of why we should care about a positive long-term future, and where we could be if we overcome the risks that we’re all so worried about. 2) zooming in on the focus areas we need to work on to increase the likelihood of those positive long-term futures, 3) making a toolkit that individuals can put to work in the focus areas to make progress.
Existential Hope