What bugs me about your perception of this community is that you seem to conflate goals with beliefs. What I see on LessWrong is the idea that artificial general intelligence, if done properly, would be a powerful invention that could solve the most important problems of humanity and that therefore we should pursue the goal of inventing and building it.
What you seem to see is the idea that because we thougth of a way in which future could be awesome, therefore it will be awesome and we can feel good about it just like other people feel good about religion. I just don’t see it. Maybe it’s because I used to have that kind of vague feel-good transhumanist beliefs and then I stumbled upon Eliezer’s writings and got convinced that no, I have no reason to relax and believe that powerful, abstract forces of technological progress will make everything work out in the end. So it’s surprising to me that anyone could end up with that kind of overly enthusiastic beliefs because of LessWrong.
This discrepancy of perception extends to your depiction of community-building efforts. Once again there’s the goal of doing everything better, having the most fun and being awesome and the belief that we are already there and can feel good about ourselves. But here I’m far less willing to trust my percepions. I don’t really interact with the community beyond reading the website and I tend to ignore things that don’t appeal to me so I might have filtered out this unfortunate aspect of the local memesphere.
What bugs me about your perception of this community is that you seem to conflate goals with beliefs. What I see on LessWrong is the idea that artificial general intelligence, if done properly, would be a powerful invention that could solve the most important problems of humanity and that therefore we should pursue the goal of inventing and building it.
What you seem to see is the idea that because we thougth of a way in which future could be awesome, therefore it will be awesome and we can feel good about it just like other people feel good about religion. I just don’t see it. Maybe it’s because I used to have that kind of vague feel-good transhumanist beliefs and then I stumbled upon Eliezer’s writings and got convinced that no, I have no reason to relax and believe that powerful, abstract forces of technological progress will make everything work out in the end. So it’s surprising to me that anyone could end up with that kind of overly enthusiastic beliefs because of LessWrong.
This discrepancy of perception extends to your depiction of community-building efforts. Once again there’s the goal of doing everything better, having the most fun and being awesome and the belief that we are already there and can feel good about ourselves. But here I’m far less willing to trust my percepions. I don’t really interact with the community beyond reading the website and I tend to ignore things that don’t appeal to me so I might have filtered out this unfortunate aspect of the local memesphere.