For those of us who internalized these ideas years ago, there’s not much new here. You mostly find yourself nodding along. But that’s not a criticism. It’s actually refreshing to see this kind of essay on LessWrong again. This is what made the site magnetic in the first place: staring at the actual scale of what’s at stake.
@Nick Bostrom’s line about our great common endowment of negentropy being irreversibly degraded into entropy on a cosmic scale still hits like nothing else. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Every second of delay has a cost measured in entire galaxies of potential flourishing slipping beyond our light cone forever. @Wei Dai pushed that picture even further.
The hardest part is always explaining this to people outside this corner of the world. Not because the argument is complex, Bostrom lays it out with brutal clarity, but because the conclusion feels too large to take seriously. People pattern-match it to sci-fi and move on. But 10^58 lives is not a rhetorical flourish. It’s a conservative lower bound.
More essays like this, please. It’s easy to get lost in object-level debates and forget the sheer enormity of what we’re actually trying to protect.
For those of us who internalized these ideas years ago, there’s not much new here. You mostly find yourself nodding along. But that’s not a criticism. It’s actually refreshing to see this kind of essay on LessWrong again. This is what made the site magnetic in the first place: staring at the actual scale of what’s at stake.
@Nick Bostrom’s line about our great common endowment of negentropy being irreversibly degraded into entropy on a cosmic scale still hits like nothing else. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Every second of delay has a cost measured in entire galaxies of potential flourishing slipping beyond our light cone forever. @Wei Dai pushed that picture even further.
The hardest part is always explaining this to people outside this corner of the world. Not because the argument is complex, Bostrom lays it out with brutal clarity, but because the conclusion feels too large to take seriously. People pattern-match it to sci-fi and move on. But 10^58 lives is not a rhetorical flourish. It’s a conservative lower bound.
More essays like this, please. It’s easy to get lost in object-level debates and forget the sheer enormity of what we’re actually trying to protect.