Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
How does one find purpose/meaning? That is, what gives you a "reason to get out of the bed in the morning"? Particularly when "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" seem particularly aimed your way.
(More specifically, with neither the usual standbys of "faith and family," and while being too anhedonic for hedonism?)
Edit: to put it more simply, how do I find a reason to keep struggling through another 30+ years of miserable, pointless, futile existence, rather than just skipping to the end?
In my case, I think the near future is probably going to be really fucking sick. AGI. Full immersion VR. Colonizing the solar system and then the galaxy. Immortality in one form or another. The best fucking movies, video games, books and music you can imagine, delivered custom made and nigh instantly on demand
As far as I'm concerned, there's no other period in time I'd rather have been born, and even as someone who is rather depressed and gritting his teeth to pull through more days a year than he'd like, especially when so much of my hopes and dreams have been sabotaged by circumstances outside my control, I still have so much to look forward to that even at my lowest I have no real desire to "skip forward to the end". They'll cure my depression and ADHD sooner rather than later. And even if I get paperclipped, we're far too close to the end of an era for me to bear missing out on that closure.
At any rate, the human body and mind was designed to keep trucking through far worse. Most depressed and unhappy people don't kill themselves. Even if you don't have a "reason to live" (and I cherish life for its own sake), you'll find that you keep on rolling, if only slightly downhill. It is what it is, but will probably get better.
I think most of that tech-optimism you lay out is unfounded to the extreme (except the VR bit, but that's just more escapism). If "AGI" is even possible at all, it's not happening this century. Aging and lifespan has been so deeply ingrained into us by countless evolutionary trade-offs to a degree that pretty much any "life-extension" project is almost certainly doomed to failure, let alone "immortality." "Colonizing the solar system and then the galaxy." Not with chemical rockets, are we doing that any time soon. We're not going to figure out the brain well enough to cure depression or ADHD. There will be no "singularity," no "end of an era," not even the "closure" of "paperclippingm," just slow civilizational decay.
I've been doing that for ~20 years now. It's never getting better.
Have you seen Claude 3? It's going around answering PHD-level questions in a bunch of different fields. https://twitter.com/idavidrein/status/1764675668175094169
Five years ago we had none of this. The whole field of chatbots was a joke: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6rEkKWXCcR4
If you weren't predicting five or six years ago that we'd have AI this capable, how can you possibly say 'it's not happening this century'? You think you can predict 75 years into the future?
Claude 3 (Sonnet, not Opus) gave a PhD-candidate-quality answer to a qualitative applied math question I asked it, so I tried a couple related quantitative questions. The easiest was basically Calc-3, and it made a sign error, and trying to get it to correct that error (it only even admitted it on my third try) made it go completely off the rails.
Formatting its math responses in LaTeX without being asked was pretty cool, though. And it was clearly ahead of GPT4 and Bard, which beat the snot out of GPT3.
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