But the main lesson is that all three of these things—warm fuzzies, status, and expected utilons—can be bought far more efficiently when you buy separately, optimizing for only one thing at a time
(The world has plenty of fiery outrage and impulsive action and going-with-the-flow, but not a lot of cold utilitarian calculus, principled integrity, rationalism, utopian humanism, and technical alignment research. If I don’t want humanity’s potential to be snuffed out, I need to prioritize filling those gaps over pure self-expression.)
The specific phrasing “ruthlessly do whatever you want all the time” sounds more MtG-black to me than MtG-red, but if I interpret it as MtG-red, I think I understand what it’s trying to convey. :)
This is an attitude I hold strongly, though my internal spin on it is something like:
This really works for me as a framing, personally. Someone pointed out to me today it’s very MTG red, if that means anything to you.
(Obviously, this only works well if ‘whatever you want’ is ~always harmless)
This is of course, pretty much the conclusion of Yudkowsky’s classic Purchase fuzzies and utilons separately.
Yep. As the author of https://nothingismere.com/2014/12/03/chaos-altruism/ , I think of myself as an MtG red person who cosplays as esper because I happen to have found myself in a world that has a lot of urgent WUB-shaped problems.
(The world has plenty of fiery outrage and impulsive action and going-with-the-flow, but not a lot of cold utilitarian calculus, principled integrity, rationalism, utopian humanism, and technical alignment research. If I don’t want humanity’s potential to be snuffed out, I need to prioritize filling those gaps over pure self-expression.)
The specific phrasing “ruthlessly do whatever you want all the time” sounds more MtG-black to me than MtG-red, but if I interpret it as MtG-red, I think I understand what it’s trying to convey. :)