Books
Finished the solid dad lit title the Wager (review here) and continue to work my way through the Beast, the Attia book on longevity and more. I’m not sure what to make of this new thing of having multiple books going at the same time. I think it’s leading to more reading, but it’s not as linear as my usual one book at a time vibe. We’ll have to see how the numbers add up at the end of the year.
Articles
If you spend too much time on the odder corners of the world where tech and EA overlap you might have started to see the term “Tescreal” floating around as an abbreviation of the sort of techno religious philosophy allegedly popular among a subset of folks. It stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism and was, as far as I can tell, coined by the former EA researcher turned apostate Émile Torres. The term now is escaping twitter and got the short think piece treatment in the FT this week in this sort op-ed “we need to examine the beliefs of today’s tech luminaries”.
I suspect few people actually subscribe to every aspect of Torres’s definition of Tescreal in real life but it appears to be becoming short hand for the techno-philosophy nerds who cluster around places like Astral Codex Ten and Less Wrong. Torres thinks these folks are dangerous, veering into eugenics and ignoring real problems today (inequality, climate change) for science fiction x-risk problems (unaligned AI, bio-weapons). I suspect both are true at the same time. Is this communities obsession with IQ suss? Yes. Is it worth it to have some nerds thinking about the far future? Also, yes. This world of ideas, whether you’re for or against them, feels like where philosophy and ethics is heading. I’ll be paying attention.
Podcasts, Videos, Etc.
You want to get a sense of just how out there the world of Tescreal can get? Start listening to one of its flagship podcasts, 80,000 hours. In fact, start with this absolutely bananas episode about AI risk with Tom Davidson. The biggest name in “AI is going to kill us” is Eliezer Yudkowsky, but I find him to be a bit of a bullshit artist. Davidson also thinks we are at serious peril from extinction (yes, extinction) from AI, but he’s a much more careful and clear thinker. I found this conversation interesting, and also completely unhinged, but maybe I’m the sucker? Worth listening to yourself.