Unfathomable intelligence vacuum
(the 21st century)
What we call “wisdom” is often just “so deeply accepting the way things are going to go that you’re always living in the future”.
If you grab for an extra candy bar after lunch and mentally multiply that decision by 365, you know where you’ll end up in a year, and you can just live in that future NOW (and drop the candy bar, because 365*no-candy-bar is the better future);
If you predict you’ll go through a specific character arc at some point, and you keep bemoaning it out loud to your friends, you could just skip all the fuss and live in the future NOW.
You could escape your alcoholism arc NOW. You could refuse that nicotine NOW. You could skip that whole edgy teenager phase where you take ideas way too seriously and believe you can flout the EMH where it clearly applies NOW.
Being wise isn’t that hard.
The reason why this is is that conservation of expected evidence holds true. Whenever you come up with a meta-level gripe, you can just plug it right back into the object level.
If you think you aren’t maximally wise, then you could just ask yourself what specifically makes you think that, and perform the mental update on yourself NOW.
So that’s where I’m coming from in this post. I’ve decided to live in the future as much as I can, with as much precision as I can, and one of the most interesting things it has led me to notice is: there’s so many intelligence vacuums.
i.e., when people find it absurd that the economy might one day grow at a rate where it would double every year, they’re lacking in imagination. If you look around the room, and gain a visceral understanding of what past generations have experienced in terms of “true wealth added to their lives”, you notice:
Just how many ideas hit you if you take out a sheet of paper and imagine small ways in which true wealth can be added to your life (if you’ve ever had a complaint about anything ever, that’s it, that the thing)
Just how little optimization pressure has been aimed at true wealth (the complains are still here!) We have mere 21st century markets design. A mere 8 billion people. A mere 110 trillion USD of capital. We are so smol.
We live in a century of desert soil, tumbleweeds, and far-off spaghetti western coyote calls. There’s a handful of humans around, and we know each other well. Every day we encounter a few dozen problems that we could use exogenous intelligence for. (If you don’t think of these problems naturally, consider it a skill issue).
Exogenous intelligence is coming. By the boatload. Way, way more than we are perhaps ready for. I’m unsure what happens next.
Anyway. People keep underestimating the singularity.1