{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Contra DeBoer On Temporal Copernicanism","description":"Freddie deBoer has a post on what he calls \u201cthe temporal Copernican principle.\u201d He argues we shouldn\u2019t expect a singularity, apocalypse, or any other crazy event in our lifetimes. Discussing celebrity transhumanist Yuval Harari, he writes: What I want to say to people like Yuval Harari is this. The modern human species is about 250,000 years old, give or take 50,000 years depending on who you ask. Let\u2019s hope that it keeps going for awhile - we\u2019ll be conservative and say 50,000 more years of human life. So let\u2019s just throw out 300,000 years as the span of human existence, even though it could easily be 500,000 or a million or more. Harari's lifespan, if he's lucky, will probably top out at about 100 years. So: what are the odds that Harari\u2019s lifespan overlaps with the most important period in human history, as he believes, given those numbers? That it overlaps with a particularly important period of human history at all? Even if we take the conservative estimate for the length of human existence of 300,000 years, that means Harari\u2019s likely lifespan is only about .33% of the entirety of human existence. Isn\u2019t assuming that this .33% is somehow particularly special a very bad assumption, just from the basis of probability? And shouldn\u2019t we be even more skeptical given that our basic psychology gives us every reason to overestimate the importance of our own time? (I think there might be a math error here - 100 years out of 300,000 is 0.033%, not 0.33% - but this isn\u2019t my main objection.) He then condemns a wide range of people, including me, for failing to understand this: Some people who routinely violate the Temporal Copernican Principle include Harari, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, Francis Fukuyama, Elon Musk, Clay Shirky, Tyler Cowen, Matt Yglesias, Tom Friedman, Scott Alexander, every tech company CEO, Ray Kurzweil, Robin Hanson, and many many more. I think they should ask themselves how much of their understanding of the future ultimately stems from a deep-seated need to believe that their times are important because they think they themselves are important, or want to be. I deny misunderstanding this. Freddie is wrong. https:\/\/www.astralcodexten.com\/p\/contra-deboer-on-temporal-copernicanism  ","author_name":"Astral Codex Ten Podcast","author_url":"http:\/\/sscpodcast.libsyn.com\/website","html":"