Some thinkers see that the world is far more insane than is acknowledged, and that our narratives about society/the future/the self don’t make sense. They develop a theory to explain things.

Here’s a list of some of those theories (as I interpret them), one tweet each:

[thread]

1. Singer: we would ruin expensive shoes to save a drowning child we walked by, but not forgo expensive shoes to save one far away. We say it’s wrong to torture animals, yet our factory farms constantly torture them to make the meat/eggs we choose to buy. We should do more good.

2. Bostrom: technology is often good, but not always, and sometimes it is incredibly dangerous (eg nuclear weapons, engineering of viruses). If we invent enough technologies, eventually we may invent one that totally devastates civilization, even if actors are well intentioned.

3. Yudkowsky: each year AI gets more powerful. It’s on course to eventually be smarter than the smartest human in all or almost all ways. When that happens, more likely than not it will go extremely badly for humanity. Nobody knows how to make such a system safe.

4. Hanson: many of the explanations for why we do things don’t make sense (if we did X for claimed reason Y we’d also do Z, which we don’t do). The most parsimonious explanation is that much of our behavior is just social signaling, which we engage in without even realizing it.

5. Musk: if we let climate change or A.I. get out of control before we get off this planet, we’re F’d. Let’s work on controlling climate, figuring out how to make A.I. safe, and getting off this planet, before it’s too late.

6. Weinstein: our major institutions have largely become non-sensical (eg universities). They were designed for a world of rapid growth, but wealth creation has not kept up with expectations. False narratives prop up the decaying system, at the expense of younger generations.

7. Haidt: we often think we use our reason to arrive at moral conclusions, but mainly we use our reason to try to rationalize or justify what our moral intuition tells us. Political parties/groups have differing moral intuitions, and there are good people on all sides.

8. Chomsky: we view the U.S. as a democracy, yet large corporations and a small group of elites have far more sway over what happens than anyone else. We view the U.S. as a world benefactor, yet its actions abroad are self-serving.

9. Thiel: we view technological progress as accelerating ever faster, but outside of a few key areas (like software), progress has actually been slowing down. Far more human behavior than is generally acknowledged is just us copying the desires and behaviors of others.

10. Yang: automation is eventually going to take away a massive number of jobs (with eg self-driving cars and trucks, automated checkout, AI assistants). We need to figure out how to make society work for all as jobs disappear and wealth becomes even more unequally distributed.

11. T. Harris: tech companies continually figure out how to make their products more and more addictive, and how to steal even more of our time and attention. This will get even worse if we don’t act, and will increasingly have terrible effects on our lives and society.

I had to vastly oversimplify your views to fit them in a tweet, but I hope I did so accurately: 1. @PeterSinger, 2. Nick Bostrom, 3. @ESYudkowsky, 4. @robinhanson, 5. @elonmusk, 6. @EricRWeinstein, 7. @JonHaidt, 8. Noam Chomsky, 9. Peter Thiel, 10. @AndrewYang, 11. @tristanharris