There’s another hypothesis worth considering: that while a few vanguard transhumanist-identified intellectual leaders think this way, the majority of people associated with the trend are in fact just looking for things mood-affiliated with their aesthetic. Aesthetic modernism is a thing, after all, even though art deco skyscrapers aren’t more convenient to built than blocky ones, any more than Mussolini actually made the trains run on time.
This recent news article seems relevant, especially the final paragraph:
“I expected to get a decent amount of pushback, but I also believed that I could explain to them why I’d taken those positions and why,” he told BuzzFeed News. “But you know, I’ve always had these kinds of thoughts that people were not really listening to the principles of things, that they had aligned with me for some other reasons, and that some of those [reasons] are good and some of those might not be, but this last video kind of confirmed that.”
It’s not obvious that people are making a mistake by assuming you’re just a nerd who likes futuristic stuff, if you’re doing a lot of things that are characteristic of that group and principles meant literally are rare. Most people repeating clever arguments that favor their political affiliation don’t actually believe what they’re saying in the sense of having constrained anticipations, and after a certain point you simply shouldn’t expect people to parse the arguments.
There’s another hypothesis worth considering: that while a few vanguard transhumanist-identified intellectual leaders think this way, the majority of people associated with the trend are in fact just looking for things mood-affiliated with their aesthetic. Aesthetic modernism is a thing, after all, even though art deco skyscrapers aren’t more convenient to built than blocky ones, any more than Mussolini actually made the trains run on time. This recent news article seems relevant, especially the final paragraph:
It’s not obvious that people are making a mistake by assuming you’re just a nerd who likes futuristic stuff, if you’re doing a lot of things that are characteristic of that group and principles meant literally are rare. Most people repeating clever arguments that favor their political affiliation don’t actually believe what they’re saying in the sense of having constrained anticipations, and after a certain point you simply shouldn’t expect people to parse the arguments.
I basically agree with this. I once went to a transhumanist conference and attendees I talked to seemed at least a bit like this.