Davidzmorris
@davidzmorris
I've been thinking about Foundation and Dune in relation to Sam Bankman-Fried, Rationalists and EAs for like a year. I think I finally cracked it. Asimov posits "psychohistory" as a functional mathematics of prediction. EA shares the faith. Frank Herbert says "hold up."
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Davidzmorris
@davidzmorris
EA and Rationalists - and broadly, the techno-utopianism shared by Musk, Thiel, and SV as a whole - posits math and science can predict the future, enabling "maximizing" investment into predictable solutions. More specifically, EAs and Rats at a high level fail to distinguish between uncertainty and risk. This justifies their often undemocratic accumulation of financial and other power.
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Davidzmorris
@davidzmorris
Asimov's "Foundation" books largely share this understanding of history as an engineering problem, solvable by math and logic. Asimov calls this "psychohistory." In Rationalism and EA, it's called "expected value," p(doom), Bayesianism, etc.
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Davidzmorris
@davidzmorris
But the certainty instilled by math also leads to overleveraging and even more catastrophic blowups and malinvestment, since you ultimately can't manage true uncertainty. This is part of what Herbert baked into Dune - along with the point that prophecy is political.
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