22 karma · joined June 4, 2017
This is the root of the problem. The fact that his content is on YouTube does not imply that it will proliferate.
> How are we going to solve it
Critical thinking skills are apparently undervalued. This is a problem that is hopefully solvable by education and public debate. Even if not, the situation in which a small part of the population believes in David's ideas seems preferable to me than one in which a small group of (non democratically chosen) people decide what is acceptable content and what is not.
> It's implied in the concept of a marketplace of ideas that some ideas will have value over others.
I agree, but different people will have different definitions of value.
> And so it seems implicit to the concept of free speech that one should have the freedom to accept or reject an idea, or try to disabuse someone of an idea you deem fallacious.
I agree, but censoring someone goes much farther than to disabuse. Too far, in my opinion.
'Another reason for believing that terraforming would involve hubris is to consider how we treat Earth, a place we might call our “proper place” or “home.” If we think of our home as a place which nurtures us and in which we grow to maturity, then a case could be made that until we learn to treat our own planet better, any attempt to reshape another planet and call it our “home” would be hubristic.'
Whenever we apply technology people talk progress. Intuitively I would say that progress implies a destination and that progress is about getting closer to it. But can we really say we're making progress if we do not know the destination: how should people live together? When we agree to terraform Mars we do so in the belief that it's a good idea. But 'good' implies an answer to the question. It's very interesting to try to find these implicit answers and see if we can turn them into an explicit answer. Maybe then we'll find that often technology looks like progress, while it's not getting us closer at all.