Maybe one angle is clean vs. dirty? Ancient imagery brings to mind dust, rust, yellowing of paper and bleaching by the sun. If one looks at the future as the opposite of the past, we’d imagine it clean and bright.
Other future-as-inversion-of-past ideas:
The past was brutal and violent; the future is peaceful and harmonized (well, ignoring extraterrestrial space war)
The past was concerned with frivolity, the future is concerned with important things like science, technology, fairness, etc.
This is a bit of a stretch, but maybe the past was information-poor: lossy, poorly preserved, easily lost documents in ambiguous old language vs. modern, lossless, high-fidelity recordings of knowledge en masse
Good afternoon, everyone. I’m happy to be here.
I’ve been following the rationality movement for a few years now, and I’ve been going back and forth on joining for about as long. My first introduction to LessWrong was through the posts on akrasia and techniques that might help with that. I followed that with reading some of SSC’s greatest hits. Meditations on Moloch haunts me and I now see Molochian influence in a lot of places these days.
I think I’m joining now because I want to handle uncertainty better. Uncertainty gives me a knot in my chest and a buzzing noise in my mind, it makes me uncomfortable and demands my attention. I want the universe to have clear, sharp, definitive answers on everything that could be found with just enough experimentation, logical thinking, and equipment sensitivity… but that’s not the way things work. I want to learn to sit with uncertainty, to not tie myself in knots trying to find the answer.
I’ll likely read more than write. I’m just glad that a place like this exists.