{"id":894,"date":"2009-01-15T12:36:11","date_gmt":"2009-01-15T17:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/2009\/01\/15\/overcoming-bias-the-meta-human-condition\/"},"modified":"2009-01-15T12:36:11","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T17:36:11","slug":"overcoming-bias-the-meta-human-condition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/2009\/01\/15\/overcoming-bias-the-meta-human-condition\/","title":{"rendered":"Overcoming Bias: The Meta-Human Condition"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>My last reason is partly selfish and partly unselfish: the Meta-Human Condition thwarts attempts to fix the Human Condition.  That\u2019s the lesson of learned helplessness studies: dogs won\u2019t press a button to stop electric shocks if they\u2019ve previously come to believe the button is worthless.  Aubrey refers to a similar idea himself: the \u201ccatatonia\u201d that afflicts modern biogerontologists, preventing them from recognizing the urgency of the situation.  As Eliezer wrote, in one of my favorite quotes, <strong>\u201cif people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.\u201d<\/strong><br \/>\nToday, there are people trying to eliminate parts of the Human Condition.  Eliezer wants to build a Friendly AI, which could fix a surprisingly large chunk of the Human Condition.  Aubrey is working on the more modest, but still Herculean, task of curing aging.  Both of these guys don\u2019t get enough funding because of the Meta-Human Condition.  Most people won\u2019t pay for a solution if they don\u2019t want to believe that there is a problem.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.overcomingbias.com\/2008\/12\/the-metahuman-condition.html\">Overcoming Bias: The Meta-Human Condition<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My last reason is partly selfish and partly unselfish: the Meta-Human Condition thwarts attempts to fix the Human Condition. That\u2019s the lesson of learned helplessness studies: dogs won\u2019t press a button to stop electric shocks if they\u2019ve previously come to believe the button is worthless. Aubrey refers to a similar idea himself: the \u201ccatatonia\u201d that &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/2009\/01\/15\/overcoming-bias-the-meta-human-condition\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Overcoming Bias: The Meta-Human Condition&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-read"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}