A friend responded "better tell Bill Gates!" to my previous post "If you haven't heard of Ivermectin yet...it's time".
To which I responded "Gates has became an astute investor, he's probably heavy in BigP, and BigP is the reason no one has heard of Ivermectin. The existence of a cheap, safe, highly effective treatment for Covid pretty much destroys billions in profits and the constructed narrative in one fell swoop.
To which he responded "is Bill Gates a bad man?"
And then I responded in the context of things I've been thinking about in general, and that is the primary reason for this blog post:
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No of course not, he's a good man with the best intentions trying very hard to do good in the world. It is not a simple black and white question tho. Humans, even the best and brightest of us, have biases that create blind spots that result in unintended consequences. Every action has the potential for unintended consequences, and it's probably true that potential is usually fulfilled in some way.
Law of unintended consequences
I'm reading an interesting book at the moment, "Why Buddhism is True"
I'm not far into it yet, but it seems to be making the case that the natural state of humans is delusion, and one might say then that the primary thrust of Buddhism is to come out of that normal state of delusion. There are corollaries all over the place, for example contemporary brain science is looking at the forces that drive us, let's call them biological forces or instincts, that are invisible to us even though they dominate our actions.
We make our way out of delusion, to the extent possible, by first realizing it's pervasiveness. That does not mean we can begin to see delusion clearly, but it at least puts us on guard for it, so that we may recognize it more quickly. Meditation practice is a potential second step, as is psychotherapy.
Alan Watts, the british philosopher and promoter of Buddhism, was asked "what is the closest thing in the west to Buddhism?" His answer was psychoanalysis.
Would Hitler have been evil if he was in the practice of looking for his delusions? (Hitler the Buddhist:) Probably not, but was it even in the realm of possibility for him to have become capable of knowing and practicing this? Some humans are seemingly damaged beyond repair. Trump, for example, was a front row seat on pathological narcissism, seeing it that clearly is unusual. Once you see something you can't unsee it, and I was surprised how few saw his narcissism since it is his dominant trait. But the other odd twist is pathological narcissists are frequently charismatic and attractive.
Is Gates a pathological narcissist? Sure doesn't look like one to me. The primary trait of narcissism is lack of empathy. Using that as a filter we can begin to see degrees of narcissism in ourselves and others, and to complicate things further there are also healthy levels of narcissism. Seems to me Gates is motivated by concern, which is empathy.
It is also true that there is no such thing (in a biological sense) as omniscience. But there is some kind of state of omniscience genius attains, and it doesn't seem to be well understood yet...scientists and poets can both be struck by it.
We humans seem to be loath to admit we are at bottom biological creatures. We would have to literally be omniscient to see unintended consequences clearly, from the beginning, before they occur. But drive forces have us focus almost exclusively on potential.
In terms of species, intelligence is limited by brain size. In that sense humans are no different than any other species, and we are on the track of consuming extant resources to the point of species collapse, the same as "less intelligent" species. Collectively we seem to be incapable of halting this behavior, which is the biological imperative for growth.
In a very important sense then we humans are no more intelligent than any other species of life on earth. In that sense, it is delusional to think otherwise.
I wonder what the unintended consequences of "the singularity" will be. Particularly if the primary unintended consequence of industrialism happens to be the 6th mass extinction.
