Jasnah Kholin

There's an argument I sometimes hear against existential risks, or any other putative change that some are worried about, that goes something like this: 'We've seen time after time that some people will be afraid of any change. They'll say things like "TV will destroy people's ability to read", "coffee shops will destroy the social order","machines will put textile workers out of work". Heck, Socrates argued that books would harm people's ability to memorize things.

Note 1: This was originally published in 2021. I'm now re-publishing it in 2023 as the penultimate post in The Nuts and Bolts Of Naturalism, as a demonstration of the method. I intend to publish a collection of much-more-complete demonstrations in the future, and I plan for them to explicitly discuss each step as I've described it in the sequence. For now, though, I hope that this partial demo will give you a taste of one way the overall process can go.

I want to write a longer version of this in the future, but I'm going to take a while to write a comment to anchor it in my mind while it's fresh. Many social decisions are about forming mutually advantageous teams. Bob and Charlie want to team up because they both predict that this will give them some selfish benefit. If this is a decision at all, it's because there's some cost that must be weighed against some benefit.