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Human understanding of the universe grows at a fairly slow rate, even with exponentially growing production of raw knowledge. We understand what it *means* much more slowly. So in say 80 years between birth and death human species-level self-understanding grows by maybe 1%...
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By the time you get to some version of the species leading edge of self-understandings (there’s no consensus but it takes till around 40 to get to any of the edge nodes) you’re acutely aware that the line of scrimmage between us and universe won’t move much more in your lifetime
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So you have a choice once you get to the edge. Accept a snails pace of further growth tracking shared understandings or move faster with less sharing but higher risk of deeper understanding being wrong. This is solipsistic dark growth.
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At the edge, “faster alone, farther together” breaks down because you don’t have the time. So there’s a strong temptation to break off from the herd and go farther alone in the time left. Old crackpots, unlike young ones, kinda consciously choose to go somewhat crazy 😝
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The entire species has been unable to see itself until relatively recently, and we keep expanding those flows (modulo some areas of the world that aren't participating for political or economic reasons) Does this 1% number consequently creep higher, or is it self-limiting?
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Even isolated places like North Korea have leaky boundaries - if they made a breakthrough in e.g. quantum mechanics, we would still likely learn about it at some point. Secrets are getting harder to preserve
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I suspect it is akin to a punctuated equilibrium in some cases. To complete the analogy of the evolution of ideas to the evolution of species, we can even suspect that societal collapse is like a great extinction event.