One of the great challenges we seem to face today is that the world is more complex than any of us can completely reason about. This was probably always true, but it used to at least be possible to limit the scope of what counted as the world in a way that let us pretend we could understand everything, but today there’s so much complexity we all have to live with not knowing everything. How do we deal with all this uncertainty?
Many responses are possible that engage with the rising uncertainty rather than hide from it. Bayesianism and LW-style rationality offers one, if we can manage to not get confused about our confusion and become conceited and overconfident. I find another one in Zen, where we train ourselves in how to dwell in not knowing and then allow compassionate and effective action to arise spontaneously to the best of our bounded abilities. Others are possible.
These are some of the ways we are working now on answering your question about what we will do then.
One of the great challenges we seem to face today is that the world is more complex than any of us can completely reason about. This was probably always true, but it used to at least be possible to limit the scope of what counted as the world in a way that let us pretend we could understand everything, but today there’s so much complexity we all have to live with not knowing everything. How do we deal with all this uncertainty?
Many responses are possible that engage with the rising uncertainty rather than hide from it. Bayesianism and LW-style rationality offers one, if we can manage to not get confused about our confusion and become conceited and overconfident. I find another one in Zen, where we train ourselves in how to dwell in not knowing and then allow compassionate and effective action to arise spontaneously to the best of our bounded abilities. Others are possible.
These are some of the ways we are working now on answering your question about what we will do then.