The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

i don't know, to me they are very different things - accelerationists might be really calling for Better Capitalismism, but that's only because chatbots (the thing you are accelerating) are really good at math, and math is important for making money. if it weren't good at making money, literally nobody would care, kids would not be CS and math majors, they wouldn't care about STEM. they only care because $. But most real problems, including human problems, are not math problems.

this is a huge blind spot in the whole, rationalist and broader STEM cultural-professional community: math isn't the best way to solve problems, most problems are not math problems. SOME of school might be math problems, and it feels good to be a Doctor or a Software Developer Engineer and get your kids to practice "problem solving" - no, they are practicing math problems, not problem solving.

for example there's no math answer to whether or not a piece of land should be a parking lot, or an apartment building, or a homeless shelter, or... you can see how just saying, "whoever is the highest bidder" - that's the math answer, that's why capitalism and accelerationism are related to their core - isn't a good answer. it pretends to be the dominant way we organize land, and of course, it isn't the dominant way we organize land usage anywhere at all, even if we pretend it is. there's no "bidding" for whether a curb should be a disabled parking spot, or a bike lane, or parking, or a restaurant seating, or a parklet, or... these are aesthetic, cultural choices, with meaningless economic tradeoffs. it's not about money, so it's not about math, so math does not provide an answer. there are lots of essential human questions that cannot even be market priced, such as, what should we pay to invent new cures to congenital, terminal illness in children? parents, and a lot of people, would pay "any" price, which is a market failure - but there are a lot of useful political answers to that question. a chatbot cannot answer that question, and it would struggle to take leadership and get elected to answer that question.

mathematicians are basically never elected. so chatbots would not be. and elezier yudlowsky would not be. are you getting it? capitalism does definitely need to be elected, you might think it wins every election but it very often loses at the local level!

i am agreeing with Hashem Sarkis dean of the MIT SAP and kind of disagreeing with Bong Joon-Ho, for further reading.

Sayings like those are aspirational rather than being realist or simulationist, and they're supposed to be aspirational.

They're stories, just like all morality. It seems when cultures get to a certain point in dissolution you have a growing population that have difficulty drawing lines between stories and reality, what stories are *for* in the first place.

Having aspirational moral systems is critical for a hyperdeveloped mostly-democratic society. It creates a gap between the Best Of Us and the Worst Of Us, and thus suggests a vector. When that aspirational system fails - whether to cynicism or brutality or both matters little - you have a societal collapse incoming or under way.

One depressing example was the progression of the United States' moral judgement on torture during the 21st century. During the worst of the Cold War years I have very few illusions that torture was occurring - extremely imaginative variants in fact. Everyone knew what happens in bush wars - we had quite a few veterans who remembered very clearly. But if in 1963 someone self-identified as a torturer, or recommended we just do it in the open, the same persion would be roundly (and justly) castigated[0].

After 9/11, the idea surfaced that yes, we're going to torture, and yes, it's ok to do it. We accept the "realism".

To see the impact of this, well, I could point to a police officer in 1992 and then to a police officer in 2022. I could also point to an Action/Adventure TV program of the 1980s - say, MacGuyver - and then point to an Action/Adventure TV Program of the 2000s - like, say, 24. Imperial Boomerang is a real thing, turns out, and now we all get to be Fallujah.

In reality, though? The answer to Scalia's "Shouldn't Jack Bauer torture a guy to save Los Angeles?" was always rhetorical[1], but if you took the bait, the correct answer was always, "No", because it destroys the aspirational vector that defines our society. Or, more practically, if for no better reason than the fact a SC justice is legally reasoning from a television show.

[0] The mixed reaction to incidents like Mai Lai show how deep this division went. Not all of America thought it was a terrible thing, but we decided we were made of better stuff. Or we wanted to be, which as it turned out, also important.

[1] The "ticking time bomb" hypothetical which is almost always presented as a stack of epistemic certainty but which is actually unfalsifiable.

> When the British cavalry came to Virginia in 1781, Thomas Jefferson famously fled the governor’s mansion.

Yes, rather than stay and get captured by British dragoons, he left.

This became a rallying cry by the Federalists (who would love the current power structure in the US right now).

The act was investigated by the Virginia General Assembly and found that he had done nothing wrong.

(Staying would have been extremely dumb)

Ok, I don't think anyone suggested killing puppies. Are you going to take this topic seriously or just dodge the question?

"It’s not a safety movement. It’s a priesthood with an origin story written in fanfiction." Is that the opinion of the author, or an LLM?

I feel like this is one topic where using an LLM detracts from the author's thesis; doubly so if they don't disclose it.