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1325 sats \ 4 replies \ @elvismercury 7 Nov 2023 \ parent \ on: Inevitability of cypherpunk for a proper civilization bitcoin
I hadn't made the connection either till just now.
I have always been mildly grumpy about TBP for its unexamined axioms. Well, I guess they were 'examined' by dramatic presentation, but the idea that the inevitable outcome of civlilization is a zero-sum contest for the goods of the universe seems like a very big pill to swallow.
While on the small scale resources are obviously finite, on the interstellar scale, perhaps something else is even more finite. For instance, if you're an intelligent, space-faring species, maybe the thing that is truly scarce and that you care about the most is having someone to talk to? Once you put a couple of Dyson spheres around proximate suns, maybe you have way more pressing concerns, given the vastness of the universe, and the smallness of intelligent life to populate it?
Obviously, who can say. But the idea that you can just deduce all of this in a quasi-praxeological manner rubs me the wrong way. There's so many other potential frames to adopt.
I have significant media-memory pruning so I can hardly recall the books now, but I'm fond of believing powerful species might not see things as zero-sum. If many such species existed, there's reason to believe such a species probably wouldn't be powerful for very long. On the other hand, if being powerful is an aberration it's plausible they might always engage in a ruthless strategy successfully.
I'm hopeful community is favored by evolving agents though - even agents that are aggregations of agents. It certainly seems so in humans and our experiment has been going on for a long time.
The idea that you can just deduce all of this in a quasi-praxeological manner rubs me the wrong way. There's so many other potential frames to adopt.
Now that you say it, Cixin did adopt a pessimistic frame. I hadn't bothered judging the frame he adopted. I was happy he was brave enough to adopt a frame at all and was probably thrilled he picked the upsetting one. It's so much easier to imagine.
Which frame would you adopt?
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Which frame would you adopt?
Closer to what you said, crossed with what I said: among the scarcities for super complex hyper-intelligent beings, having interesting things to do and discovering novelty in the universe is far scarcer than getting the alien equivalent of a Lambo. They want friends to play and interact with. Self-actualization at cosmic scale.
But they're so smart that they know that you can't just give a baby civilization what they seem to want. You can't force someone to have the right insights. So what to do? It's like a combination of parenting struggle with Brin's uplift universe. How to encourage life in its complexity and interestingness? And perhaps curtail its gross destructiveness? That's a hard problem too, with its own weird drama.
Hard to write though. Hard to even imagine. We have such a ready paradigm for the usual thing.
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Oh man, novelty is the last scarce thing, isn't it? By definition novelty is a kind of relative, consumable scarcity. Can novelty terminate? The search space for novelty is every possible state of every "particle" in the universe which might or might not be finite. I feel like I accidentally drank decaf this morning lol. So interesting though.
It's like a combination of parenting struggle with Brin's uplift universe. How to encourage life in its complexity and interestingness?
I can totally image myself as a bored and infinite alien seeding life throughout the universe for fun. What's left to make beyond that? Other universes?
We have such a ready paradigm for the usual thing.
We do. I feel like we're so exhausted at a cultural level we only have energy for the usual thing. Fear is the easiest emotion to manufacture. The best bad movies are horror movies for a reason.
It makes me recall my favorite tech siren Peter Theil's observations of science fiction trends:
Today, the sci-fi novels of the sixties feel like artifacts from a distant age. “One way you can describe the collapse of the idea of the future is the collapse of science fiction,” Thiel said. “Now it’s either about technology that doesn’t work or about technology that’s used in bad ways. The anthology of the top twenty-five sci-fi stories in 1970 was, like, ‘Me and my friend the robot went for a walk on the moon,’ and in 2008 it was, like, ‘The galaxy is run by a fundamentalist Islamic confederacy, and there are people who are hunting planets and killing them for fun.’ ”
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Shit, how did I miss this? So many thoughts crammed into one comment, you should make a post about it. I gave some extra sats to apologize for my neglect :)
I can totally image myself as a bored and infinite alien seeding life throughout the universe for fun. What's left to make beyond that? Other universes?
Have you seen this thing on fun theory? This is proximate to something I know a great deal about from an academic perspective, and the thinking on LW on this topic is absolutely top notch; and very evocative.
We do. I feel like we're so exhausted at a cultural level we only have energy for the usual thing. Fear is the easiest emotion to manufacture.
I wonder if this is a by-product of goblin mode?
I also wonder if this is first instance of a SN conversation spilling across time and causing a SN post to forward-link to another one? Surely not. But possibly?
The Thiel quote is spot on. We have, as a culture, a different macro aspiration now, a different self concept. I guess it shouldn't surprise me -- people change how they perceive themselves, why not a civilization? -- but it's still unsettling.
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