A second year computer engineering student studying at FRCRCE, Mumbai, India.
Ashutosh
Karma: 6
Meditations On Moloch This is the dream time Forages vs farmers. Why the age of elm will happen were the posts which led me to similar conclusions as the author, needless to say AI causing painless extinction is much more bearable of a future than Moloch trap killing humans from inside. Maybe I am not hansonian enough to find these prospects comforting and I don’t think the eternal subsistence of “poor people smiling” equilibrium will last. I have lost weeks of sleep over this.
the idea of human life as the most important value.
It’s very difficult it’s sort of counter intuitive to people, they’re fine with saving lives in a vaccum, but when you have adversarial dynamics between cultures, going to war seems heroic and important. Moreover the political reality is not of lives of equal value, value of your life depends mostly on where and to whom you were born, and what power you wield.
This is what I tell people, you don’t get to have preservative less food of perfect preservation without it being economically feasible, you get to have stale food, tradeoffs to everything.
The way I experience ‘love’ the way I described above there is no clear love more or less of a particular trait.
Does that mean love has no impact on your decision making? Say you love two people equally for different traits, competence or kindess, take your example you have a trolley running towards Jack/John and you could switch it towards John/Jack, will you abstain from such a decision due to lack of preferential treatment or is love just a thing up in the air with no impact on your inclinations?
The status related emotions are quite difficult to manage, one way I like to think of it is proportionality rather than equality, I know you probably don’t want to give up on SJW stuff, but textbook case for equality was getting too unbearable for me, I live in mumbai and it’s not possible for me to stay in a “bubble”, I only judge a person’s skill level proportional to who they’re and from where they have come, it would be marvelous for an ant to use lever about a fulcrum but for a modern human being it’s quite mundane. A person coming from bottom of the barrel to top is much more exceptional and worthy of attention, rather than an elite passing on the flag in their relay race.
There’re a lot of other status related emotions that I struggle with, of course the rationalist sin of underconfidence is one of them, it’s almost as if my attempt to not be elitists cuts in the opposite direction—ranking myself as low status, which makes socializing difficult. I am still figuring this out. I am no elite by any means, but being better at some things makes you realize how horrible others are at that thing , so much so that you can start questioning yourself on grounds of social conformity (modest epistemology) that maybe it’s the other way around.
reciprocally selfish motivated by infinite drowning children and sense of duty towards oneself first would be 2?