One of the amusing things about the ‘hinge of history’ idea is that some people make the mediocrity argument about their present time—and are wrong.
Isaac Newton, for example, 300 years ago appears to have made an anthropic argument that claims that he lived in a special time which could be considered any kind of, say, ‘Revolution’, due to the visible acceleration of progress and recent inventions of technologies, were wrong, and in reality, there was an ordinary rate of innovation and the invention of many things recently merely showed that humans had a very short past and were still making up for lost time (because comets routinely drove intelligent species extinct).
And Lucretius ~1800 years before Newton (probably relaying older Epicurean arguments) made his own similar argument, arguing that Greece & Rome were not any kind of exception compared to human history—certainly humans hadn’t existed for hundreds of thousands or millions of years! - and if Greece & Rome seemed innovative compared to the dark past, it was merely because “our world is in its youth: it was not created long ago, but is of comparatively recent origin. That is why at the present time some arts are still being refined, still being developed.”
One could read these mistakes in a very Kurzweilian fashion: if progress is accelerating or even just stable, every era *can* be (much) more innovative and influential on the future than every preceding era was, and the mediocrity argument wrong every time.
Similarly, people sometimes claim that we should discount our own intuitions of extreme historic importance because people often feel that way, but have so far (at least almost) always been wrong. And I’m a bit skeptical of the premise of this particular induction. On my cursory understanding of history, it’s likely that for most of history people saw themselves as part of a stagnant or cyclical process which no one could really change, and were right. But I don’t have any quotes on this, let alone stats. I’d love to know what proportion of people before ~1500 thought of themselves as living at a special time.
My read is that Millenarian religious cults have often existed in nontrivial numbers, but as you say the idea of systematic, let alone accelerating, progress (as opposed to past golden ages or stagnation) is new and coincided with actual sustained noticeable progress. The Wikipedia page for Millenarianism lists ~all religious cults, plus belief in an AI intelligence explosion.
So the argument seems, first order, to reduce to the question of whether credence in AI growth boom (to much faster than IR rates) is caused by the same factors as religious cults rather than secular scholarly opinion, and the historical share/power of those Millenarian sentiments as a share of the population. But if one takes a narrower scope (not exceptionally important transformation of the world as a whole, but more local phenomena like the collapse of empires or how long new dynasties would last) one sees smaller distortion of relative importance for propaganda frequently (not that it was necessarily believed by outside observers).
Thanks for these links. I’m not sure if your comment was meant to be a criticism of the argument, though? If so: I’m saying “prior is low, and there is a healthy false positive rate, so don’t have high posterior.” You’re pointing out that there’s a healthy false negative rate too — but that won’t cause me to have a high posterior?
And, if you think that every generation is increasing in influentialness, that’s a good argument for thinking that future generations will be more influential and we should therefore save.
One of the amusing things about the ‘hinge of history’ idea is that some people make the mediocrity argument about their present time—and are wrong.
Isaac Newton, for example, 300 years ago appears to have made an anthropic argument that claims that he lived in a special time which could be considered any kind of, say, ‘Revolution’, due to the visible acceleration of progress and recent inventions of technologies, were wrong, and in reality, there was an ordinary rate of innovation and the invention of many things recently merely showed that humans had a very short past and were still making up for lost time (because comets routinely drove intelligent species extinct).
And Lucretius ~1800 years before Newton (probably relaying older Epicurean arguments) made his own similar argument, arguing that Greece & Rome were not any kind of exception compared to human history—certainly humans hadn’t existed for hundreds of thousands or millions of years! - and if Greece & Rome seemed innovative compared to the dark past, it was merely because “our world is in its youth: it was not created long ago, but is of comparatively recent origin. That is why at the present time some arts are still being refined, still being developed.”
One could read these mistakes in a very Kurzweilian fashion: if progress is accelerating or even just stable, every era *can* be (much) more innovative and influential on the future than every preceding era was, and the mediocrity argument wrong every time.
Interesting finds, thanks!
Similarly, people sometimes claim that we should discount our own intuitions of extreme historic importance because people often feel that way, but have so far (at least almost) always been wrong. And I’m a bit skeptical of the premise of this particular induction. On my cursory understanding of history, it’s likely that for most of history people saw themselves as part of a stagnant or cyclical process which no one could really change, and were right. But I don’t have any quotes on this, let alone stats. I’d love to know what proportion of people before ~1500 thought of themselves as living at a special time.
My read is that Millenarian religious cults have often existed in nontrivial numbers, but as you say the idea of systematic, let alone accelerating, progress (as opposed to past golden ages or stagnation) is new and coincided with actual sustained noticeable progress. The Wikipedia page for Millenarianism lists ~all religious cults, plus belief in an AI intelligence explosion.
So the argument seems, first order, to reduce to the question of whether credence in AI growth boom (to much faster than IR rates) is caused by the same factors as religious cults rather than secular scholarly opinion, and the historical share/power of those Millenarian sentiments as a share of the population. But if one takes a narrower scope (not exceptionally important transformation of the world as a whole, but more local phenomena like the collapse of empires or how long new dynasties would last) one sees smaller distortion of relative importance for propaganda frequently (not that it was necessarily believed by outside observers).
Thanks for these links. I’m not sure if your comment was meant to be a criticism of the argument, though? If so: I’m saying “prior is low, and there is a healthy false positive rate, so don’t have high posterior.” You’re pointing out that there’s a healthy false negative rate too — but that won’t cause me to have a high posterior?
And, if you think that every generation is increasing in influentialness, that’s a good argument for thinking that future generations will be more influential and we should therefore save.