[2018]
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Robert Anton Wilson, 1979: Any false premise, sufficiently extended, provides a reasonable approximation of insanity 2025: Any false premise, sufficiently extended, turns out to be an already-existing thread on something called "lesswrong dot com" and it turns out a cofounder of Paypal has already given it 10 million dollars Quotes from Jeff Miller @jmeowmeow in a followers-only discussion I wanted to foreground: "Runaway inflation in the philosophical flattery economy." "As wealth and power is narrowly concentrated, the reward of flattery as a practice increases. If there's competition for flattery work as verbally charming people lose other opportunities for subsistence, there's motivation to go bigger and bigger." 
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@TomF @ireneista @emaytch @mcc I love how in e/acc and xrisk language, climate change is not "existential," only these pretend billion-year-future things. @xgranade @TomF @ireneista @emaytch There's this idea from indigenous philosophy (the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois, I think? i found about it from uh, a cleaning products company) that you should do all things while considering its impact on people seven generations from now. I think that's a really good rule actually. That's a really reasonable timespan. I don't know if people exist in 10^10 years. I'm certain people exist in 7 generations, or at least, what we do now decides whether they exist. 
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@xgranade @TomF @ireneista @emaytch There's this idea from indigenous philosophy (the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois, I think? i found about it from uh, a cleaning products company) that you should do all things while considering its impact on people seven generations from now. I think that's a really good rule actually. That's a really reasonable timespan. I don't know if people exist in 10^10 years. I'm certain people exist in 7 generations, or at least, what we do now decides whether they exist. @xgranade @TomF @ireneista @emaytch Notably, seven generations turns out to be right in the sweet spot for "work to hold back greenhouse emissions now results in benefits then". 
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@ireneista @emaytch @mcc It's the exact same fallacy as Pascal's Wager. Once you assign infinite cost or reward to a decision, any "empirical" or "rational" framework applied to that loss function absolutely shits the bed. The resolution, of course, is "why in the hell do you think that's a possible outcome? what is your basis for that belief?" @xgranade @ireneista @emaytch @mcc as i like to say, i wouldn't say there's such a thing as reading too much science fiction…but there is such a thing as not reading enough stuff that isn't science fiction 
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@xgranade @ireneista @emaytch @mcc as i like to say, i wouldn't say there's such a thing as reading too much science fiction…but there is such a thing as not reading enough stuff that isn't science fiction @nev @ireneista @emaytch @mcc Or at least, forgetting the "fiction" part of "science fiction." Fiction is a wonderful thing, but you still need critical reading skills! 
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@mcc I once saw an EA person do a presentation and their shiny formula for the expected value of the future of humanity included terms for the star density both in the milky way as well as in the local virgo supercluster as a whole. Absolute clown show of a movement. @lambdatotoro @mcc the fun thing is that they aren't even doing THAT right. As an example (and shameless plug) some time ago I did some back of the napkin calculations to check what energy requirements world be like if we didn't stop pushing for “growth at all costs”. Billions of years? Turns out that at current growth rates we'd exhaust the entire Milky Way in a couple thousand years even if we could convert it to energy at 100% efficiency. 
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@natevw @emaytch so there's a "soft problematic" version of EA where they get really really focused on dollars that go directly to services and this winds up over-funding things that accidentally game that number and de-funding important community work which due to the structural nature of its work means a slightly higher percentage gets spent on facilities or outreach your city gets a lot of mosquito nets but no arts funding, in blunt terms 












 

