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People worry about how humans would rebuild after a significant apocalypse, but I wonder whether the survivors would want to. Species perpetuation is not actually an innate individual drive like plain survival or offspring protection. I don’t think I would work for it.
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In some ways, we’re already there. You don’t need 90% actual die-off to get a reality check on your species level commitments. Just an extended period of trials testing alleged species-level pro-social instincts. Preliminary results: they don’t exist.
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You realize that though humanity as an abstract concept is lovely, most of the actual humans are pretty lousy, and you become radically less willing to do anything for “the good of humanity.” Even zero-marginal cost positive externalities seem questionable.
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This is an interesting reason why writing is hard in tough times. It is nominally a “for the good of humanity” universal goodwill activity in good times. In bad times when you unconsciously think 90% of humans suck, the ideas start to dry up.
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Actually nobody knows what the world is anyway. They only know what the world ought to be. And that’s a utopian fantasy. So you’d get a lot of people trying to build utopian fantasy on the clean-sheet rubble and failing.
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Writers are the truest true believers in worlds. When you read a writer from another era you get a sense of the world they imagine exists and think they’re writing for, but they themselves are unaware of it. You, the reader from another time, see the water they’re in.
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Interesting question: how to write for a world being born? It’s like trying to write a story you think an infant might like when it grows up. Maybe the trick is to start with the humanity scale equivalent of children’s picture books. “Everybody poops. Humanity poops”
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Didn't humans kind of overcome these problems in rising to global prominence already, with mechanisms that overcame the lack of desire to "do good"? Altruism, truck and barter, etc?
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