Dear Mat,
Apologies for lateness. This time my excuses are: homelessness and food poisoning.
Thanks for the comments on my hastily drawn up golden rule for politics, namely: Judge political systems according to how great a chance they have of discovering and thereby achieving new goals, in perpetuity.
I think you found much more in it than I meant to go into it. Great.
You make it sound like there’s a space of possible politicses, or possible policies, or possible social systems and that we should explore this space, regardless of whether some of them might be good or bad. In fact, if I infer what you mean correctly, you’re aware that most will be bad and certainly none of them perfect, but we should plough on anyway, possibly achieving new universalities (props to David Deutsch). All perfectly exciting, but then I wonder if some of the possibilities end in annihilation, it might not be worth having some kind of precautionary caveat (props to Nassim Nicholas Taleb)?
But then again, I like how short the original rule was, I can’t be bothered to add footnotes.
And yet that does make me think how weird it is that none of us devote more than a blip of our attention to existential threats. It’s getting a bit of attention nowadays but, along with the effective altruism movement, folks who talk about this stuff seem to get written off because they’re a bunch of nerdy men, who are often trained in quantitative disciplines and are probably on the spectrum. I’m happy that our generation has actually taken an interest in these things and yet it’s also alarmingly dumb how our generation criticise those who try to improve the world on purely aesthetic or ad hominem levels. To use a Gen-Y analogy, it’s like a bunch of Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs want to criticise the EA movement just because they’re Ravenclaws.
So my question is, how much do you think about existential threats?
Jamie.