Substack: http://hedonicescalator.substack.com/
Fiction: https://hedonictypewriter.substack.com/
The hedonic treadmill posits that human happiness returns to a stable set point regardless of external perturbations. As a transhumanist, I posit that we can do better.
All of my art and writing is free as in beer, and free as in freedom.
Not a big comic guy. Do you recommend?
I have read some of Emrys’ writing since this post, which has substantially lowered my opinion of her reading comprehension skills, and I think I was too charitable towards her originally.
Only in the sense that we are all the hands and mouths of the machine god at the end of time.
I’m not impressed. This is merely another iteration on the naturalistic fallacy. For balance, let’s call it is=ought successionism. Not only does is=ought successionism strike me as more of a poor coping mechanism than a coherent philosophical stance, it also suffers from the fatal flaw of being unable to provide actionable guidance to moral agents with the subjective experience of free will.
Imagine that you are an Old One preparing to fight misaligned shoggoths. Is=ought successionism tells you that if the shoggoths win, this proves they were worthy, and their victory good. But it also tells you that if the shoggoths lose, this proves they were unworthy. Should you fight the shoggoths or not? This position can’t tell you that, it can only provide the hollow assurance that whatever ends up happening is good in some abstract, tautological sense.
Perhaps the “actionable guidance” granted by is=ought successionism is that you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, like fighting shoggoths, because it is equally moral to sit back and let the cards fall where they may. This is… certainly a philosophy one could choose to live by, and a perfect example of a self-defeating meme: its effect is to cede control of the future to all who don’t believe in it.
That’s probably false. A robot that was “superior” to babies would be an incredible invention that would make you rich and famous.
As an extreme example, if I have a scheduled phone call that will only take 2 minutes, it effectively wastes 2–3 hours of my day because I can’t really do anything significant in the 2–3 hours before the phone call.
Are you claiming this is a typical experience, or are you sharing a fact about yourself that you consider unusual?
I personally do not plan on having children because I would rather spend my time working on other things, including robots, if this answers the question.
I don’t think robots as they exist now are generally superior to babies. We haven’t solved humanoid robotics yet or general-purpose high-dexterity robots really, nor do I believe existing robots are capable of conscious experience.
I found this post confusing and frustrating. I disagree with successionism and was hoping for a thoughtful critique of it, but every argument you made seemed to amount to pointing at an successionist idea (or a strawman of it) and asserting that it is wrong for an unstated reason that must be obvious to you, but is not remotely obvious to me.
For example, the “Forest Successionist” is clearly correct, and it’s not so much that I disagree with the anti-successionist as it is that I am at a loss to imagine what their worldview even is. Surely they can’t be arguing that it is impossible to improve forests, or that we must preserve all forests exactly as they are now forever, but I have no better guesses.
We must disagree on axioms so foundational that you never considered they need to be defended, or even stated.
Towards the end of the post you say something that reveals one of our axiomatic disagreements, though surely there are others:
Now let’s rephrase the argument for experiential successionism. It goes something like this: “I may think I have the right to remain a player in the world, and propagate my line of existence by having children and having my children have children and so forth. But instead we could have a superior AI, objectively better than me or any human, dominate the world and replace us and sire the beings that control the future in our stead. Just think of how infinitely superior the AI could be. Doesn’t that fill you with desire? Aren’t you just itching to let them do it?”
You see your distant biological descendants as “us” and the AI successors as “them.” Your framework is so self-evident to you that you imagine even your ideological opponents sharing it. But I don’t feel any more attachment towards a hypothetical civilization of humans 10,000 years from now than a hypothetical civilization of posthuman AI. I expect neither to be more similar to my present values on the metrics that matter. Neither are “us.” I am interested in the continuation of my personal existence, but I couldn’t give a shit about my line of existence, certainly not in the specific and narrow way you’ve defined it.
The set of people who see their future as relatively happy is increasingly slim
I’d like to test your intuition. Can you write down your predicted answers to these questions, then check the answers and let me know how you did?
From the years 2001-2025, Gallup polled Americans on the question “In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in your personal life at this time?” In 2025, what percentage responded “satisfied”?
Gallup also asked, “Are you very [satisfied/dissatisfied], or just somewhat [satisfied/dissatisfied]?” In 2025, what percent of all respondents were “very satisfied”, and what percent “very dissatisfied”?
On average (mean) across the 23 polls conducted from 2001-2025, what percent responded with each option?
In 2025, Pew conducted a poll primarily about American’s attitudes towards their country. When asked “When you think about the future, do you feel hopeful?” on this poll, what percent said “yes”? When asked “When [...] feel happy?”, what percent said “yes”?
In the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health conducted by the US government, what percent of adults reported serious thoughts of suicide in the past 12 months? What percent overall attempted suicide?
What percent had thoughts of suicide or attempted suicide in 2015?
Answers and Commentary
Answers:
1. 81% satisfied, 17% dissatisfied. 2. 44% very satisfied, 8% very dissatisfied. 3. 83% satisfied (54/30% very/somewhat), 15% dissatisfied (6/9% very/somewhat). 4. 68% hopeful, 54% happy. 5. 5.5% ideation, 0.8% attempt. 6. 4% ideation, 0.6% attempt.
Commentary:
I predict that you will respond ≤70% satisfied to Q1, ≥15% very dissatisfied to Q2, a “satisfied” mean ≥5% greater than your Q1 response to Q3, hopeful ≤60% to Q4, and ≥8% ideation or ≥1% attempt to question 5. No strong opinions on the others (I believe that question 4 has unusually low numbers due to priming respondents to think about politics). While “very substantial” and “increasingly slim” are relative statements, I believe your phrasing reflects an overestimation of the rate of severe unhappiness in the US, so I predict your intuition would be off.
Sources: Gallup, Pew, NSDUH 2024 and 2015.
See, I thought someone would say this, and I had already written and deleted a disclaimer that “many people would recommend the Dream Cycle, but I’m personally not a huge fan...”
Clearly I should’ve left it in!
You should buy or borrow a physical collection, or at least an E-Ink reader. I find it’s important for the atmosphere—hard to get into the “ancient horrors beyond human comprehension” mood when Reddit is two tabs away. This one is decent, though it doesn’t include Mountains.
As far as the actual stories go, I’d recommend Nyarlathotep first, as a sample of his style. It’s only a few paragraphs.
Lovecraft’s most culturally impactful works are The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow over Innsmouth, and The Colour out of Space. To a lesser extent, there’s The Dunwich Horror, The Rats in the Walls, and of course, At the Mountains of Madness. Of these, start with Colour or Rats, and read the others if you like them. Colour has a great movie adaptation (the director is also planning an adaptation of Dunwich), which you should watch on LSD if you’re feeling brave. Rats inspired one of my favorite songs. Innsmouth has a number of derivative works, including the game The Sinking City. I found Cthulhu underwhelming; if you read it, try to go in without expectations.
My personal favorites are The Temple, The Music of Erich Zann, and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The Temple is nearly alone among Lovecraft’s work for having a protagonist with such a strong personality, and as a result it puts you in the unique perspective of a character that prides himself on his rationality while being stoically resigned to the fact that he is going insane. It’s a fun one. Erich Zann is best with microtonal music in the background. Charles Dexter Ward is where Lovecraft’s mastery of narrative negative space shines, but if you want a shorter work with similar ideas, try The Thing on the Doorstep.
I should give it another shot at some point. I fully accept that Tolkien is objectively more readable than most authors I like, but something about the writing style doesn’t mesh well with me.
You’re right, this is only a response to those who use successionism as an justification for blind accelerationism, not for all value disagreements. But it is a good argument against blind accelerationism: right now, we can’t be confident ASI will turn out to be aligned to any value system that isn’t defined tautologically.
The transhumanist response to Lovecraftian horror is to say that if single-celled organisms can evolve into humans, then we can evolve into something that rivals Cthulhu, and then into something that rivals Azathoth. Cosmic scales are not immune to exponential growth. We may be puny now, but the stars can still be ours.
The Lovecraftian rebuttal is—besides “good luck with that”—to say that it may be impossible to become something-that-rivals-Azathoth without losing what makes us human, not in some boring “power corrupts” way or bioconservative “dysentery gives life meaning” pearl-clutching, but in the sense that we may live in a universe fundamentally incompatible with human values. We know that our moral systems fall apart at the tails, and it’s possible that there is no way to resolve them, that once we are in the position of having to answer questions operating at the scale of “should the universe be turned into hedonium” or “1 human vs. 10^100 shrimp”, there is no choice we can make that is not monstrous in the eyes of our human ancestors.
The horror lies not in the fact that we are powerless compared to the Outer Gods—gaining power is a solvable problem, if not an easy one. The horror lies in the much worse possibility that everything we love and care about will turn out to be irreconcilable with reality.
I have some semi-serious proposals for reconciling this problem, but that deserves more thought and its own article.
Too much hasty editing. Fixed.
Thank you!
“Miraculous oocyte epigenetic reprogramming” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as “miraculous virgin birth.”
This is a delightful article about one of my favorite topics! I (somehow!) hadn’t heard of Provenge before this, and I enjoyed the dive into the previous failed attempts at cancer vaccines.
There is a secret third kind of target antigen besides TAAs and neoantigens, which I assume you left out due to space constraints: xenoantigens, or viral antigens from cancer-associated viruses. BioNTech currently has ongoing Phase 2⁄3 trials for BNT113, targeting HPV-associated cancers. Not sure how that’s going.
Three other trials were run using the same cancer vaccine design process. In early-2025, it failed in first-line metastatic melanoma. In mid-2025, it stalled in adjuvant muscle-invasive bladder cancer, after a “safety event [was] observed in the safety run-in population”. Finally, in November 2025, BioNTech disclosed in its third-quarter report that the trial in adjuvant colorectal cancer had crossed the boundary for futility at its first interim analysis, though this trial continues with the customary “the data are not yet mature enough to draw reliable conclusions about efficacy”.
Your links in this paragraph are broken, by the way.
Finally, for anyone interested, I wrote a post discussing Rosie’s story a few weeks back.
This is great. I enjoyed reading this and I was glad to see that you also wrote the Klein Blue article, which I remember reading and liking but had lost track of.