As far as I know, it's been a while since our last meta thread, so let's have a space for the administration of praise and the airing of grievances. Hopefully we can keep the conversation distant enough from first order culture war issues to justify this being a separate thread from the main CW thread.
I've been here on and off over the years since about 2016. To my mind, the two most exciting times to be a part of this community were the period around the first Trump election, and then again in 2022 around the time of the site migration. I don't think it's a coincidence that these time periods coincided with major new social and political issues entering the public consciousness (or at least, entering the consciousness of this community): in 2016, the culture war as we know it was still very fresh and nascent, with battle lines still being drawn and positions still being clarified, and in 2022, DALL-E and ChatGPT introduced machine learning to those of us who had not been feverishly following the LessWrong comments section since the 00s.
Unsurprisingly, discussion is good when there's something new and shiny to discuss. But eventually, you start to run out of things to talk about. People have been complaining about this problem with regards to the "classic" culture war issues for at least a good 3 or 4 years now. In the time period from 2014-2018, there was still a sense that it was all brand new: people were being forced to think about questions and perspectives that they had never thought about before, they were still figuring out how to make sense of their own positions and the positions of others. But now it's all well-trodden ground. You can only rehash the same foundational questions about race and free speech so many times before people on both sides start to think "yes, I've seen it all before, I know how this ends".
Even with AI, despite it still being a very rapidly evolving field, I've been feeling less motivated to participate in AI discussions lately, largely because it feels like such a straightforwardly empirical question. The classic culture war questions are the sorts of evergreen philosophical questions that you could, in principle, go back and forth on endlessly. You can walk away and come back in 10 years and the same questions will still be sitting there. But with AI, it ultimately all boils down to "well we'll just have to wait and see" in the end. Either there will be a singularity and/or the extinction of humanity, or there will not be. Sitting here and talking about it won't change much. We kinda just have to wait to see what happens.
Perhaps these forces have played a role in causing the forum to become less theoretical and abstract over time, leading to the rise of what I like to call "nuts and bolts" type posts: local politics at the city/state level, the minutiae of urban and suburban life, court cases and legal briefings. I don't remember these types of posts being so common in the early years of the forum (probably because, again, the culture war was brand new and people wanted to discuss the hottest culture war questions). I'm glad that at least some people are invested in doing the actual necessary work that makes the world function. But these types of posts generally bore me to tears, so I skip over them. I'm sure many people skip over the dumb shit I like to post about too, so, I understand that it goes both ways and there are no hard feelings. At least I'm still trying to be the change I want to see and I try to balance out the discussion with more philosophical posts.
Something I do lament is the evaporative cooling of interesting characters over time, not only due to bans but also due to natural attrition. At this point in the community's lifespan, it's unlikely that we're going to get another Hlynka, or another TracingWoodgrains. One starts to get the impression that the window for new foundational community narratives has passed.
All complaining aside, I still derive an incredible amount of value from this forum, as evidenced by my return to daily participation, and I would hate to ever see it go. It doesn't remind me of the Old Internet, but it does remind me of the Middle Internet: that time period from roughly 2012-2018 when there was a flourishing of strange ideas and it genuinely seemed like many bold new things were possible. (Maybe it reminds some other people of Usenet, I don't know; that was before my time.) I sincerely hope that this forum can remain roughly stable in its current state for as long as possible.
Anyway, what do you think? What do you think about how TheMotte has evolved over the years, what do you like about it now, what do you want to see changed, etc.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
The state of AI ability is an empirical question, but to me is a fascinating topic nonetheless. To quote Jurassic Park, "You did it. You crazy son of a bitch, you did it."
Humans actually did it. They created AI.
This struck me suddenly just now, after several hours of working with AI.
It's strange... it's as if for many of us, the actual fact hasn't quite sunk in yet. For me it's still sinking in, I still haven't really wrapped my head around it. Is it even possible to wrap one's head around it?
It almost makes me think of Lovecraft's concept of coming into contact with something that uproots one's understanding of humanity's place in the world so much that one retreats from it with psychological defense mechanisms that try to blot out the knowledge, or reduce it to something manageable. More likely, though, than that explanation is the more ego-damaging explanation that I've just been slow on the uptake, lol.
AI was always some thing in the fuzzy horizon... maybe 50 years away, maybe 100, who knows? It wasn't supposed to actually just happen.
But it did happen. We are the human beings who happen to be alive at that point in human history where humanity genuinely, for the first time ever, has created artificial intelligence. If you want to get speculative, you could go into interesting speculative and philosophical questions of 'hmm... that seems like quite the coincidence doesn't it? why us specifically? us the people who are alive right now? is it possible that that's a bit too much of a coincidence to really be a coincidence?'... but I'll refrain because that way lies fun but completely unproveable speculation about simulation hypotheses and so on. And in any case, maybe there's nothing more special about being the people alive when AI was created than being the people who were alive when the first nuclear weapons were created.
But still... shiiiiiiit. What the fuck? Humanity actually did it. The crazy bastards did it. It exists. Not only can it code and prove new mathematics, but I've also seen it make novel (as far as I know) connections between various more personal or more humanities type ideas that I talk to it about.
I feel like I'm still catching up to the fact that it exists. I know some people are way ahead of me. Some are behind.
Fire is amazing. Penicillin is amazing. Nuclear weapons are... I won't say amazing, but impressive. Artificial intelligence has a different quality though. The creation of alien intelligence, on Earth. Something you can talk to. Something that routinely does novel things. Not yet to the point of writing an actually interesting... well... novel, for example. But routinely does novel things on a somewhat smaller scale when it comes to art and psychological insight. And a grander scale when it comes to mathematics, it seems, though my math understanding is not sufficient to follow any of the recent proofs.
The implications are to some extent difficult to talk about simply because they are so huge.
All that sci-fi speculation about the psychological and social impacts of contact with alien intelligence... are starting to become a reality.
This struck me recently when replaying Portal 2. There’s a part where you’re going up against a rogue AI, armed with nothing more than hope and a logic paradox, and I remember suddenly being struck by the fact that this isn’t sci-fi any more.
I have GLaDOS and Wheatley in my pocket.
And it’s smarter than they are.
I hit ChatGPT with “this statement is false” and the reply was broadly, “Lol, indeed. Would you like to hear about some systems of formal logic where that statement can be valid?”
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