I have been telling my colleagues for years: a bunch of very desperate and very amoral people are getting all your work in plaintext, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

You’d be surprised. The usual icebreaker is the topic of the deep-seated unstated assumptions that people have in their mind when the construct models of evolutionary history, the future of Earth’s biosphere, and the place of biology in the universe. I am lucky enough to run in the circles with astrobiologists, evolutionary biologists interested in the evolution of complex life, and abiogenesis types, who tend to appreciate the deep importance of unstated assumptions. It is very easy to point out a set of unstated assumptions that have poisoned areas of science near them… which always points back to the god damned singulatarians because when you assume the future is Humanity’s Grand Destiny Among The Stars OR BUST, it severely constrains your notions of what is possible in a universe that looks like ours and inevitably mutilates the study of the topics they/we run in.

As someone who has started guarding their internet anonymity jealously after a series of VERY weird events (which fortunately do not involve our ‘friends’) I remember this incident soooo much…

It helped that the first person I explained this to at a conference was explicitly working on deconstructing models of the origin of complex life that imply that it’s slow and unlikely that have been uncritically accepted in a lot of circles without actual evidence, and he was already confused about why following the chain of citations bottomed out at weird economist named Robin Hanson and why his naive model was ever taken seriously… oh MAN we had a fun evening.

Amusingly enough, something much like this has happened to me twice two years apart. The scientists deconstructing this stuff are always the most interesting people too.

Good God. Sometimes I wonder how small the population that understands all these references and knows all this deep lore and history is. How few people really understand the true nature of this bunch of people and how their ideas have ruined so much. When I go to conferences I get to have 4 hour conversations over beer with astrobiologists explaining how ideas from a blog in 2009 started showing up uncited in their literature 8 years later (when late undergrads who read a blog post start writing papers during their PhDs) and have since completely fucked whole subfields. They are flabbergasted at first, but then they see it, and see the damage done. So few people actually see this.

I suppose my only-half-joking grant proposal I talk about with linguist friends in which you run an entire large text through a base-model LLM, extract the residual stream, and score every token according to perplexity compared to the ground truth reality in order to ask and answer super interesting questions about information theory in human communication doesn’t count?

I still point people to the bed net research from fifteen years ago

omg the rationalists discovered the case for universal healthcare

I recently re-read Accelerando after more than fifteen years. I appreciated it so much more this time around. Me being me I particularly appreciated that apparently the default state of a G-type star transitioning into a post-tech state was it being overrun with selfish replicators and grinding down into malthusian competition, but a few apparently underwent an evolutionary transition to higher levels of organization…

Oh god is this about the guy who keeps trying to defraud people saying he’s satoshi?

True! Still, you have to admit it’s quite the opportunity to exploit silicon valley sfi-fi fanatacism into a whole series of own goals.

I really do wonder how much of the whole we must beat china narrative is being stoked by the Chinese powers-that-be finding a super cheap way to sabotage American finance and industry. Pushing their own local minibubble by comparison to what we are up to would just be a cheap cost of ‘doing business’.

It’s really not that bad of a disease. Still would be super interesting if playing with bullshit peptides made things like it more likely.

I had to go on a long-term medication recently and I agonized about it for a YEAR before deciding that pushing my biochemistry into an unusual state while I was still ticking over without severe acute problems was worth it. I’m always afraid of thinking I know better than evolution.

Is this what happens when a Cosmist heresy syncretizing with objectivism springs up?

I mentioned the calendar because it really captures the tone of the explicitly Extropian-derived writing of the early days. Which seems like it has to always break or change upon contact with reality.

https://archive.is/20260826031928/https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/situational-awareness-leopold-aschenbrenner-ai-fund-4dbb00a4 got the archive

A few interesting things:

In November 2023, when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was suddenly fired, hundreds of employees signed a public letter pressuring the board of directors to reinstate him. Aschenbrenner didn’t… After an interim CEO was appointed, OpenAI executives learned from multiple eyewitnesses that Aschenbrenner had appeared to welcome Altman’s replacement, according to the people familiar with the matter. They grew suspicious about who was loyal to whom, even after Altman was reinstated as CEO. Those who spent the following weeks trying to understand the crisis focused in part on Aschenbrenner’s role, concluding that he had been in contact with at least one director who voted to fire Altman.

More confirmation he’s one of the True Believers rather than only a greasy opportunist

When it was time to toast the newlyweds, one speaker thanked Citadel CEO Ken Griffin for making it all possible.

These people’s personal lives are so bound up with financial forces… who knew this particular Cosmist heresy would get so freaking weird

I didn’t recall it in 2027, just in the afterward of 2040. I took it as another weird idiosyncrasy of the particular authors, but I guess this is evidence that it’s been a private shibboleth among the In The Know Central Types for a while and they just think its obvious to the point its leaking out into public documents…

So, this is something a little different, and I almost think it’s worth a top level post. It’s not directly about our friends the Rationalists, the current delusional billionare vortex infesting the US government with religious psychosis, or any of that. It’s an analysis of some collaborative fiction and what it tells us about the zeitgeist behind the mythological core of singulatarian/endless-progress thought.

Anyone here ever hear of the Orion’s Arm universe collaborative worldbuilding project? https://www.orionsarm.com/

I, for one, love it. Single weirdest and most expansive scifi worldbuilding thing ever, I think. It seems to have been founded by some old-school extropian types around the turn of the millennium. It is bonkers. Click through links on pages, start here, do a random walk: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b170f9e0941 .

It’s ultimately structured kind of like the SCP wiki but from before wikis were a thing, an utterly enormous interlinked compendium of encyclopedia style articles about a 10,000+ year future history of the post-singularity “Terragen sphere” expanding outwards at the speed of light. A few key figures have exerted editorial control to enforce an approximate history and a set of core ideas to keep it coherent. There have been retcons at multiple points to bring things into coherence, some of which I will get to later because they actually tell you something fascinating.

Rather than point out my favorite parts of it though, going through it, I have noticed something.

Early work was typically extropian-optimistic and exuberant. Immortal Transhumans and uplifted animals and ahuman AIs and robots expanding through the universe near the speed of light and diversifying and building interweaving empires, wormhole networks. Six successive singularities that become available to intelligent systems that pass the previous one, each one of which renders the intellect past it incomperehensible to those at lower levels, with the highest ones dependant on multiple stars converted into computronium linked by wormholes into massive processors.

But you can tell the work is a palimpsest. Newer stuff superimposed over older. Retcons occasionally not quite erasing the old. And you can tell the whole project has been slowly slowly taking a turn. Early work is SUPER extropian, SUPER libertarian, and SUPER weirdo-esoteric. Only people forged in 1980s Extropianism would invent the Tranquility Calendar as the core timekeeping method of the project, time measured from the apollo 11 landing with months of the year named after scientists and philosophers. The 12 greatest high-singularity powers are literally called the Sephirotic empires. It makes no bones about its exuberant transcendant idea of progress and expansion.

But something strange has happened over time. Over time, the authors seem to have realized the fundamental contradiction of a world in which this endless expansion and consumption and rebuilding of the universe in your image is possible. People call it the Fermi paradox but its not a paradox, its an observation: if it were possible to expand through the universe, why hasnt something already expanded here? Early work had more aliens, more high weirdness that was not terragen. But I can track down different examples of the galactic map - it has narrowed down the map of ‘high energy emission civilizations’ (things exuberantly using the energy of whole stars like the terragen sphere) from many to 2 in our galaxy, and the whole universe is now mostly ‘dead’ - most other galaxies do not have high energy civilizations, and there are multiple ancient ‘optimized galaxies’ that are stagnant, things expanding like the terragen sphere visible over cosmological distances are super rare and they even saw one vanish. Works involving aliens have started taking on an almost lovecraftian tone, evidence of erased ruins on planets only visible in vague impressions in the mantle, an ancient slow-liviging civilization with evidence of terrible secrets from millions of years in the past that they refuse to talk about or risk terrible consequences (the Muuh Taboo), civilizations that dont vanish ossifying into something that does not expand like their optimistic early ideas. Factions looking at all of this, going dark, and launching stealth seeds at the speed of light to other galaxies because they think the Terragen sphere is doomed.

With all this, recent retcons and recent writings are starting to take on a tinge of almost cosmic horror. Here you have this optimistic exuberent explosion of posthumanity, looking out into a universe that is otherwise almost dead and full of strange old things and wondering why the rest of the universe doesn’t look like them, what is going to go wrong to destroy them just like must happen to others.

This trajectory seems intrinsic to any singulatarian, endless-progress ideology. It always has to come to grips with the fact that the universe just doesn’t look like the kind of place where their ideas would actually work, and they have to posit weird things - the Great Filter, Mass-Effect style reapers, super weird transubstantiation out of this universe - to keep it going. All this optimism must eventually always collapse, into paranoia and despair or insanity. Since if you assume that you CAN keep progressing and expanding, that you DO have unlimited potential power, it means something even more powerful is waiting, threatening you, trying to stop you. I find this FASCINATING.

https://futurism.com/future-society/leopold-aschenbrenner-ai-investor-buy-galaxies

According to a new scoop from The Wall Street Journal, the 24-year-old former OpenAI employee wanted to buy entire cosmic realms after he got rich off of AI — as in, yes, galaxies of stars and planets like our Milky Way, or the neighboring Andromeda.

This is something that he’s reportedly been telling people, completely unprompted, at San Francisco dinner parties for years. The way Aschenbrener explained it, advances in AI would soon enable humanity to unlock unlimited resources and colonize distant planets. After that, conquering parts of the universe would be a triviality.

This was a serious and imminent enough possibility, in his mind, that Aschenbrenner said he planned to save money so he could buy galaxies in the future. He even apparently promised to buy a galaxy for his wife, Anthropic chief of staff Avital Balwit. Love conquers all.

Still searching for an archive of the ultimate source https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/situational-awareness-leopold-aschenbrenner-ai-fund-4dbb00a4

Working in academia I have close friends who were born all over the world. A good friend of mine from Iran has told me that the two things he has read from Egan that take place in Iran - this novel, and a short story in a recent collection in which the main character is an afghan refugee woman trying to go through higher education - capture the essence of life in Iran better than any other english-speaking work he has ever read, to the point he was questioning Egan’s Australian origin to me.