This is beautiful and important Tyler, thank you for sharing.
I’ve seen a few people burn out (and come close myself), and I have made a point of gently socially making and reinforcing this sort of point (far less eloquently) myself, in various contexts.
I have a lot of thoughts about this subject.
One thing I embrace always is silliness and (often self-deprecating) humour, which are useful antidotes to stress for a lot of people. Incidentally, your tweet thread rendition of the Eqyptian spell includes
I am light heading for light. Even in the dark, a fire bums in the distance.
(emphasis mine) which I enjoyed. A case of bad keming reified?
A few friends and acquaintances have recently been working on something they’re calling Shard Theory, which considers the various parts of a human’s motivation system and their interactions. They’re interested for other reasons, but I was reminded here. See also Kaj Sotala’s Multiagent Models of Mind which is more explicitly about how to be a human.
As a firm descriptive (but undecidedly prescriptive) transhumanist, I think your piece here also touches on something we will likely one day (maybe soon?) have to grapple with, which is the fundamental relationship between (moral) agency and moral patienthood. As it happens, modern humans are quite conclusively both, by most lights, but it doesn’t look like this is a law of nature. Indeed there are likely many deserving moral patients today who are not much by way of agents. And we may bring into being agents which are not especially moral-patienty. (Further, something sufficiently agenty might render humans themselves ourselves to the status of ‘not much by way of agents’.)
This is beautiful and important Tyler, thank you for sharing.
I’ve seen a few people burn out (and come close myself), and I have made a point of gently socially making and reinforcing this sort of point (far less eloquently) myself, in various contexts.
I have a lot of thoughts about this subject.
One thing I embrace always is silliness and (often self-deprecating) humour, which are useful antidotes to stress for a lot of people. Incidentally, your tweet thread rendition of the Eqyptian spell includes
(emphasis mine) which I enjoyed. A case of bad keming reified?
A few friends and acquaintances have recently been working on something they’re calling Shard Theory, which considers the various parts of a human’s motivation system and their interactions. They’re interested for other reasons, but I was reminded here. See also Kaj Sotala’s Multiagent Models of Mind which is more explicitly about how to be a human.
As a firm descriptive (but undecidedly prescriptive) transhumanist, I think your piece here also touches on something we will likely one day (maybe soon?) have to grapple with, which is the fundamental relationship between (moral) agency and moral patienthood. As it happens, modern humans are quite conclusively both, by most lights, but it doesn’t look like this is a law of nature. Indeed there are likely many deserving moral patients today who are not much by way of agents. And we may bring into being agents which are not especially moral-patienty. (Further, something sufficiently agenty might render humans
themselvesourselves to the status of ‘not much by way of agents’.)Agree so much with the antidote of silliness! I’m happy to see that EA Twitter is embracing it.
Excited to read the links you shared, they sound very relevant.
Thank you, Oliver. May your fire bum into the distance.