I think its the newest in a long line of fad words popular among the rat pack that aren't quite jargon because of their general usefulness but still signal the ingroup when you use them abnormally often. See also: prior, orthogonal, and epistemic.
The most insidious of these linguistic markers are the needless qualifiers and intensifiers.
The one commonality among all these types is that they are all talking about 'super this' or 'mega that'. It's, if you will forgive the indulgence, super culty.
They are letting you know that they are confident, they know what they are talking about with such certainty that you would be a fool not to accept it at face value.
It's possibly the one linguistic tic that extends across all silicon valley, bay area, rat, tech bro circles. It's a hallmark of the con and they can't stop doing it because once you start, the moment you stop people start to wonder why.
You can stop using words like priors and substitute them for something else, but you can't drop the intensifiers, they're locked in. It's shocking to me that these people write hundreds of thousands of words on blogs and twitter; some of them are CEOs of companies whose business is building natural language interfaces by which an average person can operate technology, and yet they don't seem to have figured out the actual value of the words they use.
I’ve noted a deep misanthropy and seeming hatred of the facets that
fundamentally make us human – our limitations & imperfections –
among AI boosters.
Like, you can be transhumanist for the joy of the art and realize
that imperfection and the “all-too-human” aspects of life can never be
engineered away – the 9000IQ “übermensch” cyborg will hate its guts out
knowing it could be yet more perfect and have an IQ of 10000. A
transhumanism built on misanthropy is a disaster.
> the 9000IQ “übermensch” cyborg will hate its guts out knowing it could be yet more perfect and have an IQ of 10000. A transhumanism built on misanthropy is a disaster.
It's not a coincidence that these very same people seem to fall easily into drug abuse via an interest in "nootropics".
Misanthropy is the acknowledgement of the imperfections of humanity and disapproval of its current state.
Therefore, because any attempt at progress indicates disapproval of the current state of humanity, all attempts at progress are - to some degree - based upon misanthropy.
The alternative to misanthropy, therefore, necessarily contains not progressing humanity.
Also, please explain why discontentment with oneself is bad, why humanity is intrinsically good, and why progress built upon the desire for improvement could somehow be disastrous.
Your whole syllogism is based on a weird definition of misanthropy.
It’s a hatred or strong dislike of humanity not merely a belief that humanity is imperfect and disapprove of its current state. Loads of people believe humanity is imperfect and needs improvement but don’t hate humanity (ex: all Christians)
True or not, the thrust of the tweet seems to me a moralistic put-down of humanity as merely instrumental in the birth of a greater being. More Calvinist than ecological.
It’s the apparent abandon towards & even distaste for humanity _as is_ that’s expressed by that sentiment – that whatever comes is justified because humans are too uppity about themselves anyway. AI is substituted for the all-knowing God in front of whom we are construed as rightly nothing more but ants – or carelessly dismissed as “merely” human.
This does not appear as a life-affirming approach to me.
I’m not familiar with the author of the tweet so there could be context I’m missing, but on its own the tweet doesn’t really rank beings as better or worse. Personally I’d agree with the basic sentiment that humans are not the final culmination of evolution and that it wouldn’t be a tragedy if some other kind of being eventually came to fill our niche, though it would be more tragic if some of our currently-unique cultural abilities (art, science, philosophy etc.) were lost.
Big fan of “attenuation”. Weird. Not a word I’ve ever felt compelled to use, much less multiple times in the same tweet thread.
Presented without comment: the opening graphic of a blog post he links to below that tweet.
I’ve noted a deep misanthropy and seeming hatred of the facets that fundamentally make us human – our limitations & imperfections – among AI boosters.
Like, you can be transhumanist for the joy of the art and realize that imperfection and the “all-too-human” aspects of life can never be engineered away – the 9000IQ “übermensch” cyborg will hate its guts out knowing it could be yet more perfect and have an IQ of 10000. A transhumanism built on misanthropy is a disaster.
in 40 years these ppl will just be normal, old and sad
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Hes kinda right tho lmao