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Comment by xanderlewis | Hacker News Reader

Maybe someone needs to start a small group of people who specifically want to do this — seek refuge from the chaotic and increasingly worrying world (in particular the threat of replacement by extremely general automated systems) by immersing themselves in learning, and sharing the results with others.

I’m sure such groups already exist, but maybe not specifically with this goal in mind.

Learning for its own sake really is the answer to lasting happiness… for some of us, anyway.

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> seek refuge from the chaotic and increasingly worrying world (in particular the threat of replacement by extremely general automated systems) by immersing themselves in learning, and sharing the results with others.

Since 529 CE!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedictines

I skimmed the article and couldn’t see which part was particularly relevant. Can you point out the similarity?

If you’re just talking about the idea of becoming a monk: yes, I very much like the idea of becoming a modern, digitally-enabled monk.

I think his point is that people have felt like the world is going to shit for a very long time, it's just that with the presence of hindsight we can see that in the past everything worked out, but we can't see the future so our present is troubling.

But none of these feelings are new, just different problems manifesting the same.

I've got about a million things I'd like to delve into if such a group existed(let's call it a realist monastery?)

The key though is to avoid becoming a cult.

Cults presumably need leaders, and there wouldn’t be one. It would be kind of like a church though. But we worship pure knowledge and learning.

We could call it...a university.

Sure but since we know everything we know will be wrong in 500-1000 years we might as well register it as a church complete with creation myths. :)

Hey, Euclid's ideas from 2000+ years ago are still going strong.

I doubt much of what we know today will turn out to be wrong. Maybe our abstractions will turn out to have been naive or suboptimal, but at least they're demonstrably predictive. They're not just quackery or mysticism.

Things dont have to be wrong to be considered wrong :)

Well… in subjects like mathematics they kind of do, don’t they? There’s not much room for opinion on what’s true and what isn’t. Of course, how something is done or the language used to describe it is always up for debate.

You did say ‘wrong’, though, not ‘considered wrong’.

There are no negatieve quanta and there are no negatieve qualities. It would be hilarious to suggest there would be products of the two.

You have 3 baskets with 5 apples each, you remove 7 apples from each basket, remove 5 baskets and you have -2 baskets with -2 apples each thus therefore you have 4 apples left all without the involvement of trees, like Jezus!

Yeah, i can see people laugh at that.

I knew someone would say this. Have a think about whether universities really achieve what I’m describing.

It's kinda like how church attendees aren't always upstanding moral individuals.

Not really. Universities barely even pretend to be ‘churches of learning’ — at least anymore. Going to university, for the vast majority of students these days, is more an exercise in CV-building than self-development and learning.

In any group there are people that are more talented, more persuasive and/or have more initiative than others. These people will naturally become the group's leaders. This can only be avoided in groups which don't have to make on decisions or conduct activities.

Such groups are by definition reclusive, hard to find on social media, and might be a lot more fringe or "weird" than you'd prefer. For a while, subreddits were a bit like this.

I don't think it's too far fetched to hypothesize that the next major global conflict will be between accelerators (e/acc) and decelerators. I see a parallel with political/economic ideologies like capitalism and communism. One of them will eventually prevail (for most of the world) but it won't be clear which until it happens. Scary but also exciting times ahead!

I can't imagine any coherent 'deceleratorionist' political program. It will be all different flavors of acc.

Is this a joke? Go outside. Go hiking. Make a garden. Visit Yosemite. Take up bouldering. Learn to surf. Cycle. Go camping. There's a world of living and massive communities but around real life. Explore what your body and mind can do together. Find kinship because it's out there in spades for people not obsessed with the automation of machined content.

What about it makes you think I’m joking?

San Francisco, Zurich, etc are quite different from other places in the world.

No mountains here + no garden for me, Yosemite is thousands of kilometers away. The sea has no waves. It's -5 degrees.

Which is "fine", but it means that indoor activities are more prevalent, including computers.

And I'm sure for some other people their options are way more restricted.

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