Slashdot Mirror
Stephen Hawking: Biggest Human Failing Is Aggression
hypnosec writes: Aggression is the human failing that celebrity scientist Stephen Hawking would most like to correct, as it holds the potential to destroy human civilization. Hawking expressed his views while escorting Adaeze Uyanwah — London's Official Guest of Honor — around London's Science Museum. Uyanwah asked Hawking what human shortcomings he would alter, and which virtues he would enhance if this was possible. He replied, "The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression. It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory, or partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens to destroy us all. A major nuclear war would be the end of civilization, and maybe the end of the human race."
Man's biggest failure may be failing to stand up to aggression, but get RID of aggression? Not going to happen, and not a good thing if it did. Leaders are aggressive.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Well, he proposes that the people who want less aggression might want to leave the planet. Bad news - anyone out there that we encounter is very likely to be even more aggressive if they've survived longer than us. Survival of the fittest isn't just for puny earthlings.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I fear we will need to conquer greed and corruption first.
We don't make millions of guns and bombs because it's really fun to shoot them. We make weapons of mass destruction because it's profitable for someone to do so.
And we don't make just a few nukes, or a handful of bullets. No, we make enough to destroy the entire planet several times over, and stockpile ammo for decades while watching the government claim they're running low and order a few more billion rounds on the taxpayer.
Why?
Because it's profitable for someone to do so.
Greed kills. Corruption enables it.
I see on Wikipedia that he supports funding universal healthcare by aggressive government action, though, as well as government aggression towards activities that are perceived to promote climate change. It's a shame he's not more rigorously consistent about this.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
"Aggression is the human failing that celebrity scientist Stephen Hawking would most like to correct, as it holds the potential to destroy human civilization"
Without human aggression, we would have all been eaten about 500,000 years ago.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
One of the things that really pisses me off whenever anyone comes up with something utopian is that they don't fully address the second order effects, as if that's a rounding error or some shit. Pretend that every human hears and agrees with Stephen Hawking, and actually acts to reduce their own aggressiveness. What about the standing rewards for aggressiveness? They'll just be enhanced! The job that rewards aggression now has an opening if you are one of the few who were unable to reduce your aggression as much as your peers. The woman who wants an aggressive man is now more available to you (and the mirrored sex case is also true, but much less important- and remember here, we're talking about reducing aggression as a first order, being attracted to aggressive people is a second order and NOT related). The conflicts are easier to win with aggression still.
Hawking isn't giving some utopian order, of course- the headline is based on one statement where he discusses a human failing. He's not being a fool here, but any plan to act on it as a first order would.
What you need is to increase the reward for NOT being aggressive. At EVERY level. Women in the workplace already face this problem, but so do guys who aren't pushy in the mating game. Aggression is stacked full of rewards. If you hand those rewards- NOT just financial, but security based, sexual based, and status based- to rational behaving actors, that's your solution.
In the meantime, empathy is a weakness in many cases, and aggression is the correct play in many cases. Until you change that (and not just with punishments that are selectively enforced), you won't see a bit of difference- and you'd be a fool to play along in many cases.
With all due respect to his brilliance, Hawking should stick to his own subject of expertise. Without aggression we would die, pure and simple. Aggression has been a significant factor (arguably) in making us the dominant species on the planet.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
You'd be surprised. A major percentage of the posters here on Slashdot are openly hostile to the "non-aggression principle" and its proponents, mostly due to tribal affiliations of one sort or another. You'd think something like this would be non-controversial - but in human endeavors there is no such thing as non-controversial.
Even things like "thou shalt not kill" and "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" can stir up controversy. People are just a contentious lot. But then I suppose that was kinda the point, wasn't it?
the **real problem** is listening to people like Hawking
and we should listen to people like you? random guy on slashdot? i'll stick with proven genius, thanks.
Why do you think that "anyone out there that we encounter is very likely to be even more aggressive" than humans? D'you realize that a remarkable thing about people is not how aggressive people are, but rather how well people actually get along? Pretty much only colony insects are as capable of getting along as we are. It is not aggressiveness that makes humans globally dominant.
When technology has advanced to the point where an INDIVIDUAL has the power to bring down the entire planetary civilization (and I'd argue that we are at that point right now), low aggression seems like a rather key survival trait. I'd argue that a civilization that has survived longer than us is probably FAR less aggressive, FAR more willing to take the long view, and FAR more willing to work out cooperative everyone-wins solutions rather than indulging in exploitative zero-sum behavior.
--PM
A Prozac bomb?
Legalized marijuana.
I think Hawking meant humanity's willingness to use violence and/or deadly force to get what one wants instead of reason and persuasion.
"Aggressive in his battle to conquer cancer..." is far different from "aggressively hitting people because he enjoys other people's pain".
I think energy and determination to achieve a pro-social goal are separable from a willingness to harm or otherwise screw over other people to get what you selfisly want. And I think we can have the former without the latter.
--PM
A major percentage of the posters here on Slashdot are openly hostile to the "non-aggression principle" and its proponents
In theory it sounds obvious and logical, for about 20 seconds. Once you start introducing a variety of test cases the rule either A) Fails terribly or B) Gets stacked with so many convoluted justifications, odd definitions and tortured logic that you might as well not assert it in the first place. If we must have one sentence principles then a better one is "We don't start things, but if you do we'll finish it and you won't like that."
You have this zero sum mindset. Why does one have to come out on top?
How about, two space faring species meet, trade technology, form a conglomerate socieity which is greater than either of them would be alone, culturally richer, with every individual in both societies better off?
Why have conflict when there is so much to gain by cooperation?
And what makes you think that the aggressive culture will survive to get into space in the first place? The only target for their aggression is going to be themselves, and they're going to have some NASTY weaponry available.
--PM
Aggression is likely to be outward-facing. This makes evolutionary sense, and is even how humans have been organized throughout their biological evolution, until the last few thousand years. Aggression within a tribe of foragers is limited compared to aggression towards members of other tribes. This makes sense, as you're more likely to share genes with those in your tribe; the effect is thus just the selfish gene at work, and is mediated through emotional connection to those with whom the tribesman has a personal relationship with (as opposed to an impersonal one) -- which is essentially the everyone in the tribe to some extent. Modern civilization, however, forces us in an artificial environment where we affect the lives of, and are affected by, people with whom we have no personal relationship and often have never met. Evolution hasn't caught up, since this state of affairs has only been around since after agriculture allowed high population density and hierarchical society 10K years ago.
So what about aliens? It's likely that any advanced civilization would have had to overcome or suppress inward-facing aggression in order to remove a significant threat to its own existence, and that could be done through various means such as artificial selection, genetic engineering, tyranny, changing the substrate of the mind from a biological brain to a more easily modifiable artificial information processing artifacts, etc. But such a civilization is still faced with another threat to its longevity. In a universe with accelerating expansion (such as ours), there is only a finite amount of energy and matter within a given Hubble volume that can be used to do work (in the physics sense), for things such as supporting life processes (this is because the expansion of space itself is not limited by the speed of light, and only gravitationally bound portions of the universe -- such as our local group of galaxies -- won't be blown apart; everything beyond will eventually be forever out of reach).
Given this, advanced galactic civilizations are competing for limited resources (energy usable for work). In the very distant future, that would lead to conflict as most available resources are either allocated or contested, and few are left unclaimed. At that point, immense numbers of lives would be destroyed by the losers. It's more ethical and efficient to instead destroy competitors when they're as few in number as possible. This is why sterilizer probes have been suggested as the most likely policy of any advanced spacefaring/colonizing civilization. An advanced civilization has little incentive to suppress outward aggression. Sterilizer probes are self-replicating artifacts sent out to eliminate any life they encounter other than their original creators.
The argument against us sending out sterilizer probes as soon as nanotechnology or biotechnology is advanced enough is that our civilization will be perceived as an aggressor and more likely to be punished. The problem with this argument is that cooperation in game theory problems such as prisoner's dilemma works well as a solution in general only if there are sufficiently many rounds (and even then, only in specific circumstances; see the article that was discussed on Slashdot just a few days ago: http://science.slashdot.org/st...).
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I agree, the scenerio I propose of peaceful cooperation and conglomeration is utterly boring. War is so much more dramatic.
However, consider the history of the world since WWII. Lots of little conflicts, no big ones. The costs of the big powers going to war is just too high for everyone (rational) to bear. So instead we trade, more or less peacefully.
How much more so in space? It's very hard to defend a planet and easy to destroy one, or at least render it uninhabitable, for a space-faring civilization. Act aggressively and face terrible retaliation, where anything that could possibly be won via aggression would be less valuable than what would certainly be lost.
--PM
When everyone have nukes, nobody will use them.
Some nutter will.