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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
Greedy sociopaths worldwide manipulate the aggressive en masse via the media, monetary reward and punishment systems, and if necessary, brute force to further their acquisitive nature, which has no end, and ultimately, no point.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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.
In other news a prominent scientist stated the drive of humanity's greatest advancements is aggression.
We have a stone age need to kill each other and seem to take great joy in this, but our intelligent brains have been able to come up with ways to expend great amounts of energy very rapidly.
This is a fatal combination.
Proof of the concept is how at least one Death Cult religion has adherents who actively agitate and attempt to grease the skids for their particular end of the world myth, and actually look forward to it. If that isn't batshit crazy and species eradicating, then nothing is.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Yeah, they have some shitty side-effects, but without at least some drive everyone would just sit around smoking weed all day until the winter did us all in.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Does aggression cause problems? Yes. So does complaisance. I for one am glad people have aggression, as opposed to being a bunch of complaisant, laid-back lemmings.
The problem is not excess aggression. It is insufficient self control. The inability to put off current desires in order to obtain greater rewards later on.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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."
"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."
Ok, nobody reads the linked article. But at least finish reading the summary maybe?
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
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?
This dystopia is well played out in This Perfect Day
As usual someone has to have totalitarian complete control to implement this. Attempting to de-nature humans has historically led to revolt every time. Even the Chinese eunuchs banded together to manipulate politics and stage revolts.
You attempt to da-nature humans, and humans will return to the roots. Our roots are nomadic hunting/gathering and agrarian famsteading - these are families and small groups of humans free to do what they need to to get to the next day.
Its the pressure cooker of modern society and the denaturing of family and repression of human nature that causes real issues.
I think video games have given rise to a generation of people raised on their butts with fingers on the keyboard where they think they can play the role of God making decisions for humanity like to drug us all so we act proper.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
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.
Obligatory xkcd.
I wouldn't put all the blame on him. I doubt he sees himself as an expert on computing or human behaviour, but people, especially the media, blow everything he says (even casually) out of proportion just because he is one of the few "famous smart scientists".
Just read the summary/TFA again and compare it to the xkcd comic.
Brillian minds speaking outside their realm of expertise don't impress me much. Google "Carl Sagan Kuwait Oil Fires" to see how wrong cosmologists can be when pontificating about the Earth.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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
New chapter of History Channel: Ancient Aliens: Stephen Hawking is one of the many aliens than are converting us into docile creatures as a preparation for the invasion
No major wars were ever started because of aggression. Horrible atrocities are committed because smart caring individuals want to set right wrongs and bring some form of justice. It does not matter if you are talking about Nazi moment, Russian Communist moment, or the modern day commenter/solider/general on the Israel-Palestine War. Everything is acceptable when you have right on your side.
But that is what you get when you ask an overly arrogant person something outside of their field of expertise.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
A Prozac bomb?
Legalized marijuana.
So two space-faring races meet ... who is going to come out on top, all other things being equal? The more aggressive. Aggression is a survival trait. Ask the dodo bird ...
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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
Or, you know, Ben Carson.
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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
People fail to see the endgame of a non-aggression principle as having any equitable position for the practitioner in the face of a world that does not comply with it.
If someone kills my wife, killing them back doesn't get my wife back. Indeed, it is theoretically possible that forgiving the killer actually does less harm to me than agitating for the murderer's destruction. It is also possible that a forgiven murderer reforms and becomes a model citizen.
But even if you could mathematically prove that was the case, good luck with trying to convince me that wife's loss of life and my own pain doesn't require some sort of vengeance. How would it be acceptable that someone could walk away scot free, or with just a slap on the hand?
Non-aggression also implies a courage that even some of the people who practice it don't understand. In the end, you have to be willing to accept that you can't make an attack to proactively stop a terrible outcome that you know is going to happen.
You see that dictator across the sea subjugating people, building missiles, and spreading rhetoric to prepare their people to come attack *you*. You know you could prevent or blunt their attack on you by hitting them first.
The destruction in a war happens to the defenders. The only time an aggressor takes real damage is when they are forced on the defensive themselves. Non-aggression means you're going to be fighting a just war, but you're going to be fighting it in the rubble of your own home.
That doesn't mean non-aggression is wrong, it just means that you really, really need to understand what the cost is for that theoretically superior outcome.
Actually, a more accurate translation is "thou shalt not murder". In ancient Hebrew, killing (harag) and murder (ratzah) are different words, and the commandment uses the latter. See? Point proven!
Generally, I don't perceive aggressiveness as an inherently negative trait, just... a dangerous one, akin to dynamite. If used properly, aggressiveness can propel civilization forward in healthy competition. Use incorrectly, it can indeed destroy civilization.
One could argue that the United States' moon shot was extremely aggressive, as it was a direct counter to the Soviet's aggressive move into space ahead of us. Yet I'd guess most would argue that the space race ultimately ended up being a positive endeavor. Likewise, the modern trend of building a world's tallest skyscraper could be viewed as aggressive. They're built not out of logical economics, but a desire to proclaim a region's or company's technical and cultural prowess to the world. I feel this is also a positive channeling of human aggression as well. It pushes us to expand our technical horizons and take enormous risks.
Obviously, we all know what the downside of aggression is: anger, violence, rape, murder, war, genocide. But part of being blessed with intelligence means that we can make a conscious choice about how we direct our inner aggression, and work to improve ourselves by harnessing it. Societal influence is a very key component in helping shape a civilization, and as we raise our children, we teach them to channel their inherent aggression into positive activities that can benefit both themselves and others.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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."
Go read the comments on YouTube for a day and tell me that you honestly think we should pay attention to everyone who wants to share their opinion. The nice thing about Hawking's position is that if he spouts too much half-baked bullshit, people will stop listening to him. Random Slashdot guy has no such limitation (or doesn't care about it).
We should certainly keep an open mind and I'm completely disgusted by unwarranted deference to the opinions of celebrities, but go and read the illiterate ramblings that the GP responded to. What is his argument against Hawking's claims? What valuable insight does his argument present?
There's only so much time in our lives; wasting it listening to morons would be tragic.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Too much aggression, and a species dies. Not enough aggression, and a species dies. Sure, the ideal amount of aggression changes, but getting rid of it entirely? I'm pretty sure that's not human. Heck, you're not even an animal. Heck, even PLANTS expand aggressively to fill their biological niche. What's left that's actually alive without ANY aggression?
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
Problem is, the bad guy gets at least a few shots by surprise, and then there's the next incident, and the next, and... Bad Guy With Gun is an enemy you can never beat by shooting.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
When everyone have nukes, nobody will use them.
Some nutter will.
When space is the most hostile environment known to man, being passive seems unlikely to work very well.
Like how animals fight to death in the face of a fire or flood or volcanic eruption?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
So two space-faring races meet ... who is going to come out on top, all other things being equal?
The one orbiting the other one's planet.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Non-aggression is a principle of ethics.
From the Wikipedia:
Like all ethics principles there are edge cases that create long, contentious discussions. But the basic idea is that you can use force to defend yourself (or others) against aggression as defined above. Otherwise, you leave everyone else alone.
Strangely, "We don't start things, but if you do we'll finish it and you won't like that." is probably an accurate synopsis of self-defense for a proponent of the NAP.
We don't (usually admit that we) start things, but if you do (or if we want to make it seem like you do) we'll (drag it out until we are absolutely forced to) finish it and you won't like that (but our military industrial complex and its bought-off politicians sure will.)
FTFY.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.