It's confusing to watch ideas that were once very niche permeate thru the intellectual zeitgeist. Why are the people I met through politics at Oxford interacting with SF rationalists on Twitter? How do my high school friends from New Zealand keep ending up in AI safety? 1/4
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I think it's because the academic mainstream lacks constructive narratives about where the world is heading. Skeptics attack crazy new ideas, but don't defend any exciting visions. So unusually curious people are forced to engage with the wacky stuff. 2/4
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Richard Ngo Retweeted Richard Ngo
And they should: it's important. But that changes my own epistemic context. Like, https://twitter.com/RichardMCNgo/status/1212842205792161793?s=20 … was mainly meant to organise my own thoughts. But I'm contributing to memeplexes that apparently don't have much competition. Feels like I'm taking some responsibility. 3/4
Richard Ngo added,
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Problem is, I don't know which direction that responsibility pushes in. Should I discuss many alternative ideas, to prevent us overlooking things? Or should I be more careful in what I advocate? I think the former is currently better, but worth keeping an eye on. 4/4
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Most alternative ideas are crap (maybe most ideas are crap?). It's easy to look at contrarianism through the filter of survivorship and assume they are right more often than they are.
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