Yesterday, hacker-turned-Tantric-priest-turned-global-resilience-guru Vinay Gupta went on one of his better rants on Twitter. I've Storified it for your pleasure here. The gist was roughly

1. We don't have enough resources to give everyone a Western lifestyle.
2. Said lifestyle isn't actually very good at giving us the things which really make us happy.
3. ( Read more... )

A couple of ideas for vaguely Singularitarian short stories that I've had kicking about for a while, but which I can't see how to take from "idea" to "completed story". If anyone wants to write them, be my guest. There are no doubt lots of reasons why these ideas are stupid, and I'd be grateful if you'd point them out to me. On the other hand, if ( Read more... )

[Having just watched the notorious WikiLeaks Collateral Murder video, I worry that this post is probably in very poor taste. But on the other hand, a stupid blog post in poor taste is hardly the worst of the world's problems, and writing this out is the only way to get it out of my head. So: go, watch, and see what's being done in your name; donate ( Read more... )

Last night I made a serious strategic error: I dared to suggest to some Less Wrongers that unFriendly transcendent AI was not the most pressing danger facing Humanity.

In particular, I made the following claims:

1. That runaway anthropogenic climate change, while unlikely to cause Humanity's extinction, was very likely (with a probability of the order ( Read more... )

Historians sometimes talk about the "long 19th century", which covers the period from the French Revolution to the start of the First World War - the idea being that (in the West, at least) international relations, warfare, social structures and technology in the periods 1789-1799 and 1900-1914 were more typical of the 19th century than of the 18th ( Read more... )

What if the US collapses? Lessons every American needs to knowSummary: the Soviet Union, by luck more than planning, was much better prepared for economic collapse than the US is currently. They lived in dense cities, well-served by public transport, in rent-free government apartments, close to their families; all their technology was designed to ( Read more... )

I wrote this in a comment to a post on atreic's journal, and thought I'd repost it here.

If you don't have a friendly climate scientist you can ask, you can still get a good idea of whether climate change is real by following the money and asking yourself the following questions:

1. Is there much money to be made by convincing everyone that climate change ( Read more... )

Meme, as invited by michiexile.

Comment on this post and I will pick seven of your interests. You then explain them in your journal and re-post. ...if you want to, of course. No pressure. And you can ask me about my interests, too.

The seven that Michi picked for me were autechre, b/h=(d+f)/(d+e), grim meathook future, punting, spinnwebe, universal algebra ( Read more... )

Sorry for the lack of updates and replies to comments - I was caught up in the flooding.

( Like rain on your wedding day )

I've been reading George Monbiot's new book, Heat: how to stop the planet burning. It's an excellent book, and I urge you all to read it. He ( Read more... )