It is perhaps useful to first offer my own description of e/acc as an outsider.
Incoherence and opacity and “muddled thinking” is a feature for these kinds of clusters of people. This statement is not a moralization of opaque cluster. Compression is useful for those who find it to be useful!
But it can serve as a Time Jail for certain kinds of nerdy people. It serves as a sales funnel for others. It serves as an Outcome Laundering facility for others (upsides are credited and downsides are washed). This would be the Triad of Downsides that I percieve in the space.
Are there funamental ideas there that are good? Yes, acceleration and regulation trade offs need to be discussed. Any community actively discussing trade offs is automatically a positive contributor to current human population (in my books at least).
But I don’t see a lot of evidence of the broader brand being used to address truly uncomfortable topics and this would be my own measure of true success of a movement. “AI safety” is easy to discuss in comparison to other topics that are just as worrisome.
For example, I recently became interested in LW and found most of the discussions a bit of a labelling/compression game without a lot of truly challenging topics (still very useful of course!). But then I found https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xqXdDs68zMJ82Dcmt/are-humans-misaligned-with-evolution and this truly impressed me. Both in it’s ability to dance around difficult topics in a kind of subtle vulgate and also interweave ideas with AI and tech problems.
Do e/acc speak openaly about human evolution and the misalignment problem or even holistically about the dual human/ai evolutionary problem? I don’t hear it a lot. For example, if one was a true e/acc believer, one should presumably worry about the worst case where it doesn’t happen before humans lose their ability to create advanced technology. And so you would be looking at human populations and cultures and their various outcomes in terms of both tech (re)production and human (re)production.
However I do not see open and frank discussions of these kind of topics so far. Perhaps I am not searching properly?
It is perhaps useful to first offer my own description of e/acc as an outsider.
Incoherence and opacity and “muddled thinking” is a feature for these kinds of clusters of people. This statement is not a moralization of opaque cluster. Compression is useful for those who find it to be useful!
But it can serve as a Time Jail for certain kinds of nerdy people. It serves as a sales funnel for others. It serves as an Outcome Laundering facility for others (upsides are credited and downsides are washed). This would be the Triad of Downsides that I percieve in the space.
Are there funamental ideas there that are good? Yes, acceleration and regulation trade offs need to be discussed. Any community actively discussing trade offs is automatically a positive contributor to current human population (in my books at least).
But I don’t see a lot of evidence of the broader brand being used to address truly uncomfortable topics and this would be my own measure of true success of a movement. “AI safety” is easy to discuss in comparison to other topics that are just as worrisome.
For example, I recently became interested in LW and found most of the discussions a bit of a labelling/compression game without a lot of truly challenging topics (still very useful of course!). But then I found https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xqXdDs68zMJ82Dcmt/are-humans-misaligned-with-evolution and this truly impressed me. Both in it’s ability to dance around difficult topics in a kind of subtle vulgate and also interweave ideas with AI and tech problems.
Do e/acc speak openaly about human evolution and the misalignment problem or even holistically about the dual human/ai evolutionary problem? I don’t hear it a lot. For example, if one was a true e/acc believer, one should presumably worry about the worst case where it doesn’t happen before humans lose their ability to create advanced technology. And so you would be looking at human populations and cultures and their various outcomes in terms of both tech (re)production and human (re)production.
However I do not see open and frank discussions of these kind of topics so far. Perhaps I am not searching properly?