Political writer Phil Sandifer once began a book saying “Let us assume that we are fucked” and went on to examine rationalism, effective altruism and neoreaction through that lens. You may be wondering what neoreaction is doing alongside the other two, but that’s not the point.
Ozymandias reviewed the book saying “Wait a minute, why are you assuming that we’re fucked?”
The global poverty rate recently fell below 10% for the first time. (For most of history, the global poverty rate was close to 100%.) The global life expectancy at birth has risen from 26 during the Iron Age to 67 today, more than doubling. 500 million have died of smallpox but not one single one more, ever again. The environmentalist movement keeps slowly, quietly, winning, its victories celebrated only in the fact that the movement starts yelling about something else.
All these signs of non-fuckedness and still “assume we are fucked”.
And Sandifer was not talking about X-risk. There the estimate is less of an assumption. But it’s still an estimate without a well-developed model. And once we see there’s this tendency to assume the worst… are we sure we’re not doing that too?
Maybe when we stack the correct parity of meta-adjustments onto our crude object-level guesswork, we’ll be left with just ordinary confusion? And the potential of the future becomes relevant again?
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