Made an account just to comment on this post. I really enjoyed it. And I have a rather green orientation, I believe.
This passage in particular struck me as the crux of green-ness:
Suppose, for example, that I meet a super-intelligent emissary from an ancient alien civilization. Suppose that this emissary is many billions of years old. It has traveled throughout the universe; it has fought in giant interstellar wars; it understands reality with a level of sophistication I can’t imagine. How should I relate to such a being?
Obviously, indeed, I should be scared....
From my perspective, fear is neither an obvious reaction, nor something that I should feel in the face of a highly anomalous encounter with a superintelligence. I would feel blessed, overcome with graditude, and to the extent that I would recognize the stakes of my interaction, I would summon courage to maintain calm, poise, and concentration. Obviously, I would like to return from the interaction with a learning, a nugget of wisdom from this entity who, in its great intelligence chose to spend some time with me. But if it decided to kill me — “it really do be like that sometimes”. Fearing that outcome would do nothing to prevent it.
I don’t mean to frame this as merely “it’s better to be fearless”. Because I well understand that sensitivity to danger is protective. Rather, I claim that in general, green feels better. Green, with its aesthetic attachment to nature, actually enjoys nature, as well as nature-inspired humanities, like gardens and paintings and wabi-sabi. And this includes an appreciation for death, for struggle, even for suffering or war in the right context.
It’s not that green argues that these things are good. But rather, since we have them, we might as well make the most of them. Feeling bad is not a solution. It just compounds the problem.
More generally, the ethos of green is the ability to see the silver lining. That which is transparently bad is opaquely good.
Even more generally, green sees paradox and irony as essential and fundamental. For instance, Yudkowsky has inspired more smart people to passionately devote their lives to building superintelligence than anyone else. While e/acc, a movement of twitter addicts with views that are easily interpreted as pro-extinction, gets little done and provokes regulation that would slow down AI progress.
The irony that you mention in the last paragraph reminds me of another LW post that was already on my mind while reading this one: Slack matters more than any outcome. It points at the funny way that systems fight back in predictable-yet-in-practice-unexpected ways, all the way up and all the way down, and is I think an attempt at a more precise expression of the kind of Green wisdom referred to around “harmony with the Way of Things”.
Made an account just to comment on this post. I really enjoyed it. And I have a rather green orientation, I believe.
This passage in particular struck me as the crux of green-ness:
From my perspective, fear is neither an obvious reaction, nor something that I should feel in the face of a highly anomalous encounter with a superintelligence. I would feel blessed, overcome with graditude, and to the extent that I would recognize the stakes of my interaction, I would summon courage to maintain calm, poise, and concentration. Obviously, I would like to return from the interaction with a learning, a nugget of wisdom from this entity who, in its great intelligence chose to spend some time with me. But if it decided to kill me — “it really do be like that sometimes”. Fearing that outcome would do nothing to prevent it.
I don’t mean to frame this as merely “it’s better to be fearless”. Because I well understand that sensitivity to danger is protective. Rather, I claim that in general, green feels better. Green, with its aesthetic attachment to nature, actually enjoys nature, as well as nature-inspired humanities, like gardens and paintings and wabi-sabi. And this includes an appreciation for death, for struggle, even for suffering or war in the right context.
It’s not that green argues that these things are good. But rather, since we have them, we might as well make the most of them. Feeling bad is not a solution. It just compounds the problem.
More generally, the ethos of green is the ability to see the silver lining. That which is transparently bad is opaquely good.
Even more generally, green sees paradox and irony as essential and fundamental. For instance, Yudkowsky has inspired more smart people to passionately devote their lives to building superintelligence than anyone else. While e/acc, a movement of twitter addicts with views that are easily interpreted as pro-extinction, gets little done and provokes regulation that would slow down AI progress.
The irony that you mention in the last paragraph reminds me of another LW post that was already on my mind while reading this one: Slack matters more than any outcome. It points at the funny way that systems fight back in predictable-yet-in-practice-unexpected ways, all the way up and all the way down, and is I think an attempt at a more precise expression of the kind of Green wisdom referred to around “harmony with the Way of Things”.