Given recent events, are you concerned about progress studies being too closely associated with the Bay Area-centric Rationalist and Effective Altruism communities (even down to using the LessWrong software for this forum)?
I think the progress community has its own identity that is distinct from (if partially overlapping with) adjacent communities such as rationalism. For instance, I got interested in progress when I knew very little about rationalism and nothing about EA. The article that coined the term “progress studies” was published in The Atlantic, not on LessWrong.
Along the way, the communities discovered each other and found we had a lot of interesting things to talk about. But there is a set of motivations animating the progress effort that is original and not derivative of any contemporaneous movement.
I think the most important thing for us to do here is to focus first and foremost on the facts of reality that we think are most interesting, the goals and values that we think are most important, and the premises or principles that we think are most deeply true, and follow all that where it leads—with our relationship to any other intellectual communities or movements being a distant second.
Given recent events, are you concerned about progress studies being too closely associated with the Bay Area-centric Rationalist and Effective Altruism communities (even down to using the LessWrong software for this forum)?
I think the progress community has its own identity that is distinct from (if partially overlapping with) adjacent communities such as rationalism. For instance, I got interested in progress when I knew very little about rationalism and nothing about EA. The article that coined the term “progress studies” was published in The Atlantic, not on LessWrong.
Along the way, the communities discovered each other and found we had a lot of interesting things to talk about. But there is a set of motivations animating the progress effort that is original and not derivative of any contemporaneous movement.
I think the most important thing for us to do here is to focus first and foremost on the facts of reality that we think are most interesting, the goals and values that we think are most important, and the premises or principles that we think are most deeply true, and follow all that where it leads—with our relationship to any other intellectual communities or movements being a distant second.
Note that “smart, rich, and free” roughly tracks David Pearce’s three supers: superintelligence, superlongevity, and superhappiness.