Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…on and the natural tendency of the system to adapt towards its growth. And that actually the laws of physics say that the future is going to be better and grander statistically, and we can make it so. And if you believe in it, if you believe that the future would be better and you believe you have agency to make it happen, you’re actually increasing the likelihood of that better future happening. And so I sort of felt a responsibility to sort of engineer a movement of viral optimism about the future, and build a community of people supporting each other to build and do hard things, do the things that need to be done for us to scale up civilization. Because at least to me, I don’t think stagnation or slowing down is actually an option. Fundamentally life and the whole system, our whole civilization wants to grow. And there’s just far more cooperation when the system is growing rather than when it’s declining and you have to decide how to split the pie. And so I’ve balanced both identities so far, but I guess recently the two have been merged more or less without my consent. You said a lot of really interesting things there. So first, representations of nature, that’s something that first drew you in to try to understand from a quantum computing perspective, how do you understand nature? How do you represent nature in order to understand it, in order to simulate it, in order to do something with it? So it’s a question of representations, and then there’s that leap you take from the quantum mechanical representation to the what you’re calling meso scale representation, where the thermodynamics comes into play, which is a way to represent nature in order to understand what? Life, human behavior, all this kind of stuff that’s happening here on earth that seems interesting to us. Then there’s the word hyperstition. So some ideas as suppose both pessimism and optimism of such ideas that if you internalize them, you in part make that idea reality. So both optimism, pessimism have that property. I would say that probably a lot of ideas have that property, which is one of the interesting things about humans. And you talked about one interesting difference also between the sort of the Guillaume, the Gill front end and the @BasedBeffJezos backend is the communication styles also that you are exploring different ways of communicating that can be more viral in the way that we communicate in the 21st century. Also, the movement that you mentioned that you started, it’s not just a meme account, but there’s also a name to it called effective accelerationism, e/acc, a play, a resistance to the effective altruism movement. Also, an interesting one that I’d love to talk to you about, the tensions there. And so then there was a merger, a get merge on the personalities recently without your consent, like you said. Some journalists figured out that you’re one and the same. Maybe you could talk about that experience. First of all, what’s the story of the merger of the two? So I wrote the manifesto with my co-founder of e/acc, an account named @bayeslord, still anonymous, luckily and hopefully forever.…

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