Love this, thanks!
Elias Schmied
Karma: 8
The Darwinian Honeymoon—Why I am not as impressed by human progress as I used to be
Thanks for this post—I’ve learned things about the AI safety community that I didn’t realize before. I wonder if much of the value of external criticism isn’t in changing the behavior of those being criticized, but rather in explicitly stating and making into common knowledge negative factors that by default are not talked about publically as much. (Both for future projects to do things differently, and for people today to update about how to relate to the entities involved).
There does seem to be non-negligible content in the references to hits-based giving and the lower funding bar, but otherwise I agree.
It’s something that was recently invented on Twitter, here is the manifesto they wrote: https://swarthy.substack.com/p/effective-accelerationism-eacc?s=w
It’s only believed by a couple people afaict, and unironically maybe by no one (although this doesn’t make it unimportant!)
I hope my post can add something novel, that I haven’t come across in the pre-existing discussion (see my footnote 1) of the specter of long-term evolutionary competition: the observation that this at first predictably benefits you (an instance of Goodhart’s Law), a vivid example, and a memetic handle for the concept: The Darwinian Honeymoon.