There is a tremendous urge among intelligent people to reduce things to ‘first principles.‘ And, of those first principles, to think of them as maths, or applied maths.
On this topic ‘e/acc’ I’ll stick more to epistemology, ontology, and even taxonomy.
Personally, I enjoy that people are even getting excited about this concept socially, since, chaos or long-term planning aside, activating people to push things to be faster, simpler, etc. is a strong win while we work out everything else (please stop enabling anything that is related to physical paperwork).
So I’m going to look the other direction, for example at the table filled with Bank/Credit card machines at any point-of-purchase-brick-and-mortar-retail-store, and all the horror of waste (time, money, complexity) this represents, and continues to cause.
...and juxtapose that to curing cancer, et al.
I ended up here on LessWrong today and finally (after watching it from birth, signed up) because I was curious why people were adding ‘e/acc’ to their Twitter (=X=) profiles.
All said… Cool, finally a movement I can at least appreciate.
So, and also, let’s go backwards in time and ask ‘What would you try to accelerate first if you were offered the chance?’ #timetravel
My answer is always the same for this ‘teach more faster to younger.’
“Teach more faster to younger”: We have had such a time in our history before: it was called the Cold War, and especially the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. I studied physics during that era, and it was way too fast with too little reflection. Some of the spirit of that age is captured in Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics.
About the thermodynamic basis for e/acc more generally, it always interests me how people ascribe such authority to thermodynamics. The Laws of Thermodynamics are usually framed in an adiabatic regime, i.e., one where the time rate of change is very slow. The “laws” are silent about the rate of reactions. E.g., some people try to frame exhaustion of fossil fuels in thermodynamic terms, as exhaustion of “low-entropy resources,” but in fact fossil fuels are renewables—it just takes a very long time.
Rates of reactions are covered by kinetics, not thermodynamics. I haven’t yet seen any e/acc discussion framed in terms of kinetics. Here, too “faster” is not necessarily desirable. In chemistry, too-fast kinetics in an energy-releasing reaction can literally blow up in your faces. I suspect the same will be true at a metaphorical level: “explosions” of creative “energy,” too, often have unforeseen and unwelcome results.
There is a tremendous urge among intelligent people to reduce things to ‘first principles.‘
And, of those first principles, to think of them as maths, or applied maths.
On this topic ‘e/acc’ I’ll stick more to epistemology, ontology, and even taxonomy.
Personally, I enjoy that people are even getting excited about this concept socially, since, chaos or long-term planning aside, activating people to push things to be faster, simpler, etc. is a strong win while we work out everything else (please stop enabling anything that is related to physical paperwork).
So I’m going to look the other direction, for example at the table filled with Bank/Credit card machines at any point-of-purchase-brick-and-mortar-retail-store, and all the horror of waste (time, money, complexity) this represents, and continues to cause.
...and juxtapose that to curing cancer, et al.
I ended up here on LessWrong today and finally (after watching it from birth, signed up) because I was curious why people were adding ‘e/acc’ to their Twitter (=X=) profiles.
All said… Cool, finally a movement I can at least appreciate.
So, and also, let’s go backwards in time and ask ‘What would you try to accelerate first if you were offered the chance?’ #timetravel
My answer is always the same for this ‘teach more faster to younger.’
“Teach more faster to younger”: We have had such a time in our history before: it was called the Cold War, and especially the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. I studied physics during that era, and it was way too fast with too little reflection. Some of the spirit of that age is captured in Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics.
About the thermodynamic basis for e/acc more generally, it always interests me how people ascribe such authority to thermodynamics. The Laws of Thermodynamics are usually framed in an adiabatic regime, i.e., one where the time rate of change is very slow. The “laws” are silent about the rate of reactions. E.g., some people try to frame exhaustion of fossil fuels in thermodynamic terms, as exhaustion of “low-entropy resources,” but in fact fossil fuels are renewables—it just takes a very long time.
Rates of reactions are covered by kinetics, not thermodynamics. I haven’t yet seen any e/acc discussion framed in terms of kinetics. Here, too “faster” is not necessarily desirable. In chemistry, too-fast kinetics in an energy-releasing reaction can literally blow up in your faces. I suspect the same will be true at a metaphorical level: “explosions” of creative “energy,” too, often have unforeseen and unwelcome results.