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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."
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 hear that worked really well on Miranda. No reavers at all.
Or what if testosterone levels in the developed world were reduced by almost 30% by using an insidious combination of phyto-estrogens, cholesterol-reducing statin drugs, plastic water bottles, ubiquitous soy, and birth control pills polluting recycled water.
Oh wait... We did that already.
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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.
Hawkings, one could argue is out of his league on many topics and/or issues he has opinions about. But seems to always get the media attention he doesn't deserve. There is no exception here. Move along.
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.
It makes things worse. Meddling with our precious bodily fluids is known to be one of the greatest risks for starting a nuclear war.
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.
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
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."
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.