> And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this.
That's one hell of a statement for a place like LessWrong.
That's one hell of a statement for a place like LessWrong.
The experience mainly left me with a sober respect for Groucho Marx's about not joining clubs that would have me as a member.
Where's the equivalent place of today? The answer is necessarily murky and elusive. When a club gets famous for being the place where all the cool people hang out, it quickly ceases to be that kind of place. Cool places have to filter for the ability/connections to find them.
What happened is that the internet changed and fandom changed, and also trends in philosophy for young lonely nerds shifted away from that particular brand of rationality, to places both sunnier and darker. I think if you want to find spaces like that you now have to look either in closed Discord server or more likely offline. Substack certainly does not provide the same kind of community.
Not that I hang out a lot at LessWrong, but it seems like a place for philosophy (and more), from an outsider perspective at least. And nihilism certainly is a perspective some hold within philosophy, so it seems like exactly the right place for a statement like that?
It's likely that at least one person's going to have value up to the very end as your civilization loses resources but still remains rational, something that can't be said if it went into the sun hundreds of years ago.
They need to get grounded. Workout, sit under a tree, hug a friend, whatever floats their boat.
Did it not occur to you that the statement was humorous hyperbole, did you actively choose to reject the idea, or are you commenting in bad faith?
I still think it’s kinda off. It doesn’t quite land. Like I’m not sure what takeaway they are trying to give. That ambiguity makes it much less funny.
It would have worked better if they connected it to the point about not automating away these skills / expertise with shittier versions, which is a great point and would be nice to end on.
Take climate change: most informed people think this is a job for science, this is where we should exert our effort and invest our funds. But this overlooks that individual human opinion and volition plays an absolutely massive role in the problem, at many levels. From where I'm sitting, this problem is not even on science's radar, beyond general complaints about those stupid people who ruin everything (overlooking that it was science that invented the technologies that went on to enable climate change in the first place...but you see, that doesn't count, it is(!) not a part of "the" chain of causality). Metaphysical causality is something else that is basically not on science's radar, or in their Theory of "Everything".
But of course, all of this this is pedantic, and can be safely ignored, or better yet, suppressed.