Let the weirdness reign supreme! That's where the cool stuff is created, when folks remove the harness of previous thinking and stay open to new modalities that seem familiar yet new.
I'm all for it.
As intelligence increases the gap between the total corpus and what is generally usable seems to collapse; how much can one person (or model) understand without becoming too generalizable and indistinguishable from other models and thus everything normalizing to mid-level solutions? If everyone can make their own Todo App then where's the novelty that made them interesting in the first place? Perhaps it doesn't matter anymore.
Your last 3 points hit hard:
1. Invest in skills
2. Be humble with what you think you know
3. Tying identity to the future is risky
I think each of these points could be a post in-and-of-themselves. #2 is probably the granddaddy because starting with humility seems to be the foundation for real learning and transformation. Love it.
Is there any objective measure of weirdness such that we can see clearly the increase over time?
Intuitively it tracks. But one could just as easily say that the world has gotten more homogenous as it’s gotten wealthier and more connected, no? There’s a McDonalds in every city; therefore cities are measurably less weird in at least this specific way. How do you operationalize the view that weirdness is on the upswing?
A metric for societal weirdness? A lovely idea, but yeah the devil is in the details. Rate of change on technological/societal/political axes would certainly feed into it. Many people experience the sort of changes associated with future shock as deeply strange. Homogeneity would probably be a negative factor for weirdness, as you note. People behaving en masse in unusual ways that violate what we thought of as sociological truisms seems like a signal, I'm thinking of the current "vibe-session" there, with consume sentiment and general feelings of political malaise clashing with underlying indicators. This line of reasoning has "late night Claude ponderings" written all over it. Time to start pulling threads.
Let the weirdness reign supreme! That's where the cool stuff is created, when folks remove the harness of previous thinking and stay open to new modalities that seem familiar yet new.
I'm all for it.
As intelligence increases the gap between the total corpus and what is generally usable seems to collapse; how much can one person (or model) understand without becoming too generalizable and indistinguishable from other models and thus everything normalizing to mid-level solutions? If everyone can make their own Todo App then where's the novelty that made them interesting in the first place? Perhaps it doesn't matter anymore.
Your last 3 points hit hard:
1. Invest in skills
2. Be humble with what you think you know
3. Tying identity to the future is risky
I think each of these points could be a post in-and-of-themselves. #2 is probably the granddaddy because starting with humility seems to be the foundation for real learning and transformation. Love it.
This reads like a more pragmatic version of Shumer's Something Big is Happening.
Great piece! I am also a neophile.
Is there any objective measure of weirdness such that we can see clearly the increase over time?
Intuitively it tracks. But one could just as easily say that the world has gotten more homogenous as it’s gotten wealthier and more connected, no? There’s a McDonalds in every city; therefore cities are measurably less weird in at least this specific way. How do you operationalize the view that weirdness is on the upswing?
A metric for societal weirdness? A lovely idea, but yeah the devil is in the details. Rate of change on technological/societal/political axes would certainly feed into it. Many people experience the sort of changes associated with future shock as deeply strange. Homogeneity would probably be a negative factor for weirdness, as you note. People behaving en masse in unusual ways that violate what we thought of as sociological truisms seems like a signal, I'm thinking of the current "vibe-session" there, with consume sentiment and general feelings of political malaise clashing with underlying indicators. This line of reasoning has "late night Claude ponderings" written all over it. Time to start pulling threads.