Notes: Objections and Responses

Chapter notes for “Objections and Responses”

Notes

¹ Feynman, R.P., “Cargo Cult Science,” commencement address, California Institute of Technology (1974). The address appeared in Engineering and Science 37(7), 10–13, and is preserved in the Caltech Archives.

² Benatar, D. (2006). Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. Oxford University Press.

³ YouGov/Economist Poll (2023). Survey of American adults on existential attitudes. The specific figure has been reported across multiple survey iterations with variations; the trend is consistent.

⁴ DESI Collaboration (A.G. Adame et al.), “DESI 2024 VI: Cosmological Constraints from the Measurements of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations,” Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics 2025:02 (2025). arXiv:2404.03002. Using baryon acoustic oscillation measurements from over 14 million galaxies and quasars, DESI finds that the dark energy equation of state is inconsistent with a cosmological constant at 2.5–3.9 sigma (DR1) and 2.8–4.2 sigma (DR2, March 2025), depending on which supernova dataset is combined. The best-fit model has dark energy strengthening over cosmic time, with the expansion’s acceleration potentially asymptoting rather than compounding indefinitely.

⁵ Bratton, Benjamin H., “After Alignment: Orienting Synthetic Intelligence Beyond Human Reflection,” lecture at Central Saint Martins, London, June 28, 2023; lecture film distributed by Antikythera / Berggruen Institute. Bratton argues that “alignment overfitting” (making AI reflect human desires as its North Star) is itself an existential risk, and that computation’s value as an “existential technology” (in Lem’s sense: one that changes how we understand the universe) depends on preserving space for “productive disalignment.” The slot machine observation is from Bratton, “A Philosophy of Planetary Computation,” Long Now Foundation Seminar, January 2025. See also Bratton, The Terraforming (Strelka Press, 2019), ch. “Black Star,” for the broader framework; and Bratton, “A New Philosophy of Planetary Computation,” Noema Magazine, October 5, 2022.