Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…I would be very excited about it because it would give us some more unconventional embodiments to think about- Right? A data point that’s pretty far away from our existing data points, at least in this solar system. So that would be cool. I’d be very excited about it. But I must admit that my level of, my set point for surprise has been pushed so high at this point that it would have to… you know, it would have to be something really weird to make me shocked. I mean, the things that we see every day is just, yeah. I think you’ve mentioned in a few places that like you wrote that the “Ingressing Minds” paper is not the weirdest thing you plan to write. How weird are you going to get? Maybe a better question is, in which direction of weirdness do you think you will go in your life? In which direction of the weird Overton window are you going to expand? Yeah, well, the background to this is simply that I’ve had a lot of weird ideas for many, many decades, and my general policy is not to talk about stuff until it becomes actionable. And the amazing thing, I mean, I’m really just kind of shocked, is that in my lifetime, the empirical work, I really didn’t think we would get this far. And the knob, I have this mental knob of what percentage of the weird things I think do I actually say in public, right? And every few years when the empirical work moves forward, I sort of turn that knob a little, right, as we keep going. So I have no idea if we’ll continue to be that fortunate or how long I can keep doing this or whatever. But just to give you a direction for it, it’s going to be in the direction of what kinds of things do we need to take seriously as other beings with which to relate to. So I’ve already pushed it, you know, so like, we knew brainy things, and then we said, “Well, it’s not just brains.” And then we said, “Well, it’s not just…” So, you know, it’s not just in physical space, and it’s not just biologicals, and it’s not just complexity. There are a couple of other steps to take that I’m pretty sure are there, but we’re going to have to do the actual work to make it actionable before, you know, before we really talk about it. So that direction.…

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