You have defined “Terminal Cynicism”, but I don’t think you’ve justified the claim that it is a “serious problem” or a natural category. You list some examples, and have framed them in a similar way so that their similarities stand out, but that is different from showing the same root psychological need is being met by each of them.
Secondly, assuming Terminal Cynicism is indeed responsible for many of the bads you claim, its still unclear to me whether it’s on-net bad. If that is driving most of the AGI companies, sure, but barring that, I’d imagine many good things are caused by Terminal Cynnicism too.
Concretely, civil rights, anti-smoking advocacy, the Open Source movement, the startup ethos more generally, gay rights advocacy, government (and industry) whistleblowing, low trust in government (leading to more permissive regulation), and many more goods seem to come from people staying cynical and fighting for their rosey-eyed view of their favorite future.
More abstractly, contrarianism seems a much more appealing failure-mode for a culture to fall into than conformism. People are highly conformist by default, and need to be kicked into being more contrarian.
Maybe we need marginally less Terminal Cynicism, but that claim should be specified.
You have defined “Terminal Cynicism”, but I don’t think you’ve justified the claim that it is a “serious problem” or a natural category. You list some examples, and have framed them in a similar way so that their similarities stand out, but that is different from showing the same root psychological need is being met by each of them.
Secondly, assuming Terminal Cynicism is indeed responsible for many of the bads you claim, its still unclear to me whether it’s on-net bad. If that is driving most of the AGI companies, sure, but barring that, I’d imagine many good things are caused by Terminal Cynnicism too.
Concretely, civil rights, anti-smoking advocacy, the Open Source movement, the startup ethos more generally, gay rights advocacy, government (and industry) whistleblowing, low trust in government (leading to more permissive regulation), and many more goods seem to come from people staying cynical and fighting for their rosey-eyed view of their favorite future.
More abstractly, contrarianism seems a much more appealing failure-mode for a culture to fall into than conformism. People are highly conformist by default, and need to be kicked into being more contrarian.
Maybe we need marginally less Terminal Cynicism, but that claim should be specified.