Well, look, if someone wants to join a community that is interested in building cool things then consider hplusroadmap: https://diyhpl.us/wiki/hplusroadmap we recently added a discord bridge. We’ve been going for 15 years at this point. We have funding available for cool wacky projects, or for not-so-wacky projects, and people are always interested in collaborating or at least providing some input on ideas or what’s up. I think the problem is that the extropians, as much as I like them, didn’t keep going, and they didn’t continue to build or learn or educate and they ended up stagnating. At some level, maybe they were just a group writing cool emails about cool concepts they found interesting? At another level, maybe they really were the origination point of the financial singularity (bitcoin) and maybe their work with the cypherpunks on PGP and SSL and other technologies really should be attributed to the transhumanists… But for a lot of other tech (like germline engineering, human cloning, etc), we could have done this decades ago and it simply hasn’t been done yet. Why? We should encourage more people to build and work on these things. I don’t have the culture stuff solved & I’m open to ideas.
My interest in bitcoin could by some be considered a distraction from the more important projects you mention, but with regards to the scams and frauds, I’d point out that my interest has been in bitcoin- which is built by a very conservative group of programmers- and the edge between open-source permissionless innovation and figuring out how to interface with the regulated financial system. This started first with my work at LedgerX, the first CFTC-regulated bitcoin options exchange and clearinghouse, and then with the state-chartered bank in Wyoming that I co-founded. If bitcoin is going to grow and be physically accessible to the general public, then there are going to need to be regulated interfaces into the rest of the world of finance.
I know that might sound a little odd, because the wild west of bitcoin is all about decentralization and often the anarchists promote a very “screw the government” message or what not. But the reality is that only a few people can live like that, in the current environment. If you really want to impact people, there needs to be a transitory pathway available. There are trillions of dollars of financial assets operating on completely archaic systems and rails, and this directly limits our overall liquidity and financial wealth as a society. Likewise, with do-it-yourself biology and biohacking there needs to be a way to do things the right way and take things outside the system and unite them back into the global mainstream systems when the time is right.
More people should just do important things that move progress forward. Laws, policies, regulations and approvals can be figured out. I have faith in this because it’s fundamentally moral to work on making things better, even if “better” (or working on “better”) has been temporarily defined as unethical by precautionauts/precautioneers. I think that future history will show that working on technological progress is good and important.
Separately my interest in startups, writing software for income, and cryptocurrency has been that this is one way of funding all of the other cool and interesting projects for the transhumanist future. It’s kind of interesting to think that the extropians almost missed the financial singularity. Oops?
As for lesswrong.. I think Eliezer Yudkowsky and lesswrong have been something of a “false flag” of technological acceleration. If you were a nerdy kid interested in artificial intelligence, then the watering hole on the internet that you would most likely find would eventually be lesswrong. On the surface, it looks like it has all the things you would want: people interested in talking about AI, people talking about star lifting, or black hole engineering, or total cosmological flourishing of a quadrillion quadrillion humans for the next trillion years. But the more they hang out on lesswrong, the deeper into the philosophy you dwelve, you find that it’s mostly a watering hole designed to suck people into a precautionary ideology. As I said, it’s something of an ongoing “false flag”. I think that many people could have been working on leveling up their skills and projects in biology, chemistry, mechanical engineering, rocketry, or many other subjects, and instead they get sucked into writing long posts about why we shouldn’t do anything and how dangerous it all is and how if you do the math just right there’s no reason to do anything ever or whatever. I know many of you will say this is an unfair characterization, but I really do believe that lesswrong has done more harm than good to this population that would otherwise have been working on building things.
((While I am ranting about this, I would also like to register a complaint against the form of argumentation that goes like “well if you don’t agree with us that AI x-risk is the most important totalizing thing in the world and that all of your actions should be aligned with preventing that outcome then you simply don’t understand the arguments” and I assure you I certainly do understand. I have been here for a while lol. But it’s a very effective way of dismissing people on the edge of that community who disagree. It’s a cool immune system really, you have to admire it for what it is.))
Well, look, if someone wants to join a community that is interested in building cool things then consider hplusroadmap: https://diyhpl.us/wiki/hplusroadmap we recently added a discord bridge. We’ve been going for 15 years at this point. We have funding available for cool wacky projects, or for not-so-wacky projects, and people are always interested in collaborating or at least providing some input on ideas or what’s up. I think the problem is that the extropians, as much as I like them, didn’t keep going, and they didn’t continue to build or learn or educate and they ended up stagnating. At some level, maybe they were just a group writing cool emails about cool concepts they found interesting? At another level, maybe they really were the origination point of the financial singularity (bitcoin) and maybe their work with the cypherpunks on PGP and SSL and other technologies really should be attributed to the transhumanists… But for a lot of other tech (like germline engineering, human cloning, etc), we could have done this decades ago and it simply hasn’t been done yet. Why? We should encourage more people to build and work on these things. I don’t have the culture stuff solved & I’m open to ideas.
My interest in bitcoin could by some be considered a distraction from the more important projects you mention, but with regards to the scams and frauds, I’d point out that my interest has been in bitcoin- which is built by a very conservative group of programmers- and the edge between open-source permissionless innovation and figuring out how to interface with the regulated financial system. This started first with my work at LedgerX, the first CFTC-regulated bitcoin options exchange and clearinghouse, and then with the state-chartered bank in Wyoming that I co-founded. If bitcoin is going to grow and be physically accessible to the general public, then there are going to need to be regulated interfaces into the rest of the world of finance.
I know that might sound a little odd, because the wild west of bitcoin is all about decentralization and often the anarchists promote a very “screw the government” message or what not. But the reality is that only a few people can live like that, in the current environment. If you really want to impact people, there needs to be a transitory pathway available. There are trillions of dollars of financial assets operating on completely archaic systems and rails, and this directly limits our overall liquidity and financial wealth as a society. Likewise, with do-it-yourself biology and biohacking there needs to be a way to do things the right way and take things outside the system and unite them back into the global mainstream systems when the time is right.
More people should just do important things that move progress forward. Laws, policies, regulations and approvals can be figured out. I have faith in this because it’s fundamentally moral to work on making things better, even if “better” (or working on “better”) has been temporarily defined as unethical by precautionauts/precautioneers. I think that future history will show that working on technological progress is good and important.
Separately my interest in startups, writing software for income, and cryptocurrency has been that this is one way of funding all of the other cool and interesting projects for the transhumanist future. It’s kind of interesting to think that the extropians almost missed the financial singularity. Oops?
As for lesswrong.. I think Eliezer Yudkowsky and lesswrong have been something of a “false flag” of technological acceleration. If you were a nerdy kid interested in artificial intelligence, then the watering hole on the internet that you would most likely find would eventually be lesswrong. On the surface, it looks like it has all the things you would want: people interested in talking about AI, people talking about star lifting, or black hole engineering, or total cosmological flourishing of a quadrillion quadrillion humans for the next trillion years. But the more they hang out on lesswrong, the deeper into the philosophy you dwelve, you find that it’s mostly a watering hole designed to suck people into a precautionary ideology. As I said, it’s something of an ongoing “false flag”. I think that many people could have been working on leveling up their skills and projects in biology, chemistry, mechanical engineering, rocketry, or many other subjects, and instead they get sucked into writing long posts about why we shouldn’t do anything and how dangerous it all is and how if you do the math just right there’s no reason to do anything ever or whatever. I know many of you will say this is an unfair characterization, but I really do believe that lesswrong has done more harm than good to this population that would otherwise have been working on building things.
((While I am ranting about this, I would also like to register a complaint against the form of argumentation that goes like “well if you don’t agree with us that AI x-risk is the most important totalizing thing in the world and that all of your actions should be aligned with preventing that outcome then you simply don’t understand the arguments” and I assure you I certainly do understand. I have been here for a while lol. But it’s a very effective way of dismissing people on the edge of that community who disagree. It’s a cool immune system really, you have to admire it for what it is.))