Conversation

2022: Welcome to the Great Filter, population, us. You’re stuck on this godforsaken planet full of hippies, there’s nothing to do besides solving increasingly onerous problems and retreating to increasingly escaped realities.
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A weird blindsspot of tech culture, a different problem with solutionism is that small-minded investors and entrepreneurs reduce innovation to “solutions to problems.” That’s easily the least interesting kind of innovation. Horizon-expanding innovations are misunderstood.
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Tech critics don’t like solutionism because of legibilizing high modernism, externalities, dehumanizing effects etc. I am fine with all that. I don’t like them because they are horizon-blind.
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Solutions to problems bore me. They’re important but not that interesting. Without a bunch of horizon expanding, mind expanding generative things going on, there’s no real point to solving problems is there.
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A good way to summarize this view… if I magically discovered a cure for cancer tomorrow m, I’d be sort of abstractly happy for people with cancer but not particularly more fulfilled personally or find life more meaningful. Aliens landing though… yay!
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Replying to
This thread sponsored by an acute lower back ache I’m dealing with today (while on a short road trip). Between spasms the thought that hits me forcefully is: “what’s the point of solving back aches if no prospect of warp drives?”
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