I don’t see how you can frame these as exploits or value shifts. If someone had told me I was going to get really into AGI alignment I would have said “uh I don’t know about that” (because I didn’t know about that), but I would not have said “that would definitely be bad, and it shouldn’t be able to happen”.
As far as I can tell, most cultural conversion processes are just boundedly rational updates in response to new evidence.
Goths are just people who have realised that they need to be able to operate amid gloom and sadness. It is an extended confrontation of the world’s most difficult aspects. They clothe themselves in gloom and sadness so that others recognise that they are serious about their project and stop saying unhelpful things like “cheer up” and “stop being so weird”. They have looked around and seen that there are many problems in the world that no one will face, so they have decided to specialise and give voice to these things. There isn’t really anything wrong with that. Many societies had witches. They’re probably a crucial morph in the proper functioning of a tribal superorganism.
Kinks are just distorted reflections of unmet needs, and exploring them can help a person to work through their problems.
If you are afraid of potential future identity shifts, that might be a problem. You should expect profound shifts in your worldview to occur as you grow, especially if there are (and there probably still are) big holes in your theory of career strategy, metaphysics, or self-knowledge. I know there are still holes in mine.
I didn’t address the converting to religion example. It is a correct example, probably… Maybe. I can think of plenty of adaptive reasons an epistemic agnostic might want to be part of a church community. But even if you can get me to agree that it’s correct, conversions like that are fairly rare and I have no idea what it would feel like from the inside so it doesn’t seem very informative. I’m sure there are books we can read, but.. I must have looked at accounts of naturalist→christian conversions in the past and I couldn’t make much sense of them. Maybe that means I should look closer, and try harder to understand. Maybe I should be more terrified by those stories than I am.
Judging by the kinds of attitudes I see in myself and in elders, I think humans are evolved to get stuck somewhere eventually. We were not evolved to be able to live through so much change and adjust to it. Presumably there are some design benefits to this. Specialisation, commitment. In this era those are probably outweighed by the costs.
I don’t see how you can frame these as exploits or value shifts. If someone had told me I was going to get really into AGI alignment I would have said “uh I don’t know about that” (because I didn’t know about that), but I would not have said “that would definitely be bad, and it shouldn’t be able to happen”.
As far as I can tell, most cultural conversion processes are just boundedly rational updates in response to new evidence.
Goths are just people who have realised that they need to be able to operate amid gloom and sadness. It is an extended confrontation of the world’s most difficult aspects. They clothe themselves in gloom and sadness so that others recognise that they are serious about their project and stop saying unhelpful things like “cheer up” and “stop being so weird”. They have looked around and seen that there are many problems in the world that no one will face, so they have decided to specialise and give voice to these things. There isn’t really anything wrong with that. Many societies had witches. They’re probably a crucial morph in the proper functioning of a tribal superorganism.
Kinks are just distorted reflections of unmet needs, and exploring them can help a person to work through their problems.
If you are afraid of potential future identity shifts, that might be a problem. You should expect profound shifts in your worldview to occur as you grow, especially if there are (and there probably still are) big holes in your theory of career strategy, metaphysics, or self-knowledge. I know there are still holes in mine.
I didn’t address the converting to religion example. It is a correct example, probably… Maybe. I can think of plenty of adaptive reasons an epistemic agnostic might want to be part of a church community. But even if you can get me to agree that it’s correct, conversions like that are fairly rare and I have no idea what it would feel like from the inside so it doesn’t seem very informative. I’m sure there are books we can read, but.. I must have looked at accounts of naturalist→christian conversions in the past and I couldn’t make much sense of them. Maybe that means I should look closer, and try harder to understand. Maybe I should be more terrified by those stories than I am.
If identity shifts are good, can an identity shift to an unchanging state be bad?
Judging by the kinds of attitudes I see in myself and in elders, I think humans are evolved to get stuck somewhere eventually. We were not evolved to be able to live through so much change and adjust to it. Presumably there are some design benefits to this. Specialisation, commitment. In this era those are probably outweighed by the costs.