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The world is always in a mess. It’s just that in some eras there’s also a big positive thing that swamps out the cosmic background shitshow. You don’t have to fix everything that’s wrong. You just have to get one big thing really really right, and put bandaids on the rest.
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Democracy and Moore’s law were the last two big things humanity got really really right. Both ran out of steam at about the same time. They’re still strong forces, just not strong enough to be the swamp-out source of positivity.
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This also applies to life, startups, marriage, and basically anything. Get one big thing really really right. The rest will always be a shitshow.
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Maybe a dark age is when the biggest things that are going right are smaller than city-scale. Right now we’re almost there. I can think of some cities doing well, and a few large corporations. 🤔
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It’s amazing the degree to which Moore’s law has been a monocausal explanation for everything good for 50 years. The democratic recession is usually dated to around 2009, but arguably it began decades earlier but Moore’s law kinda made up for it.
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Take away Moore’s Law and you never really recover from World War 2, and the Cold War just turns into a global Cold Swamp.
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I think you’re missing one whole branch of possibilities here. The vector I follow, along with my friends whom I consider _technologists_, is that of focusing on the world of atoms. I think largely ignoring the former vector set here is the one big thing my camp is getting right.
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The 2 main options are to capture broad swathes of futures we can make with computing.. Universal Consciousness: AGI, VR world, hyper-neuralink, etc.— inner world of bits Theory of Everything: change physics, interstellar travel, new states of matter, etc.— outer world of atoms
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>You only have to be right about it, >and bet enough, once in your life. Yeah, sure, man. Tell that to somebody who put their life savings into bitcoin in 2015 and held it. Oh, wait.