I’ve been thinking lately about the attractors that develop when a person or community has spent some time thinking on something (enough to grow attached to their thoughts). It takes real effort to just waveat concepts you’ve seen before and then keep driving, whenever something you’re thinking about might roundto something more familiar.
Especially if the conceit of one’s inquiry is ‘I suspect we are very wrong about very fundamental things’, there are many alternatives and objections that lie along the path, which themselves dead-end in unsatisfying places. Walking down each once is fine, but I find it wearying to trod down the same handful of knee jerk off-ramps over and over again, every time I share an idea with a new interlocutor.
The slower feedback loops of academic life seem to help here; once you have some cache, you can more or less hole up and work on your maybe-insane idea for the rest of your life, with very limited accountability. This, of course, creates other problems, the enumeration of which is its own well-worn off-ramp.
I think that the rapid advance of AI is correctly prompting a taking of inventory, a moment of circum/introspection, to get a sense of whether or not we’re ‘ready’, and most people who’ve genuinely engaged with pre-existing literature that attempted to grapple with these possibilities answer that question with a resounding ‘NO’, but we’ve not yet seen a shift to a more butterfly-nurturing temperament, and we’ve not yet reached consensus on quite how far we ought to back up, which makes a lot of people who consider themselves to have backed up wince a bit when someone later says ‘no, further’.
It seems like you’re the person who’s over and over again saying ‘no, further’, and many people just hear the local ‘no’ to their particular idea, struggling to think that there’s any further to back up.
[fwiw, I currently think that we need to back up/zoom out/pass off-ramps, and then uh… keep doing that for a long while]
I’ve been thinking lately about the attractors that develop when a person or community has spent some time thinking on something (enough to grow attached to their thoughts). It takes real effort to just wave at concepts you’ve seen before and then keep driving, whenever something you’re thinking about might round to something more familiar.
Especially if the conceit of one’s inquiry is ‘I suspect we are very wrong about very fundamental things’, there are many alternatives and objections that lie along the path, which themselves dead-end in unsatisfying places. Walking down each once is fine, but I find it wearying to trod down the same handful of knee jerk off-ramps over and over again, every time I share an idea with a new interlocutor.
The slower feedback loops of academic life seem to help here; once you have some cache, you can more or less hole up and work on your maybe-insane idea for the rest of your life, with very limited accountability. This, of course, creates other problems, the enumeration of which is its own well-worn off-ramp.
I think that the rapid advance of AI is correctly prompting a taking of inventory, a moment of circum/introspection, to get a sense of whether or not we’re ‘ready’, and most people who’ve genuinely engaged with pre-existing literature that attempted to grapple with these possibilities answer that question with a resounding ‘NO’, but we’ve not yet seen a shift to a more butterfly-nurturing temperament, and we’ve not yet reached consensus on quite how far we ought to back up, which makes a lot of people who consider themselves to have backed up wince a bit when someone later says ‘no, further’.
It seems like you’re the person who’s over and over again saying ‘no, further’, and many people just hear the local ‘no’ to their particular idea, struggling to think that there’s any further to back up.
[fwiw, I currently think that we need to back up/zoom out/pass off-ramps, and then uh… keep doing that for a long while]