This, mostly. I think your concerns are valid (I’ve pondered them myself) and I upvoted your comment.
I will admit that this first and foremost a humanist song—I’m willingly to sacrifice a bit of “technically correct rationality” for the sake of humanist ideals. Also worth noting that I am explicitly an instrumental rationalist—I value epistemic rationality only insofar as it is useful, and I think there are areas where its more important to be confident than to be strictly correct.
I also don’t think my phrasing is strictly wrong (where dark malthusian futures are concerned—I take responsibility for my artistic licenses with history and don’t consider them that big a deal). There are plenty of possible bad futures, and many of them are even likely. The wording of the song is not that a great glorious humanist dawn is inevitable. It’s that it CAN happen. And whether it does happen depends on the choices we make. Making the right choices requires us to believe that success is possible, and to be passionate about it.
I may be wrong about the number of people who care about reason growing—I lack adequate research to compare across the ages. But I’m pretty confident that the growth of literacy and education has radically increased the upper limit on people who even COULD be rational if they wanted to, and even if the majority are still parroting high-status ideas, I think the quality of those ideas has improved over time. That’s still valuable even if there’s plenty of room for improvement.
It is my belief (I won’t pretend that it’s much more than faith) that humanity is capable of solving the problems before it, and that if we fail, it’s not because we weren’t smart enough or strong enough, it’s because we were too lazy or didn’t care enough. It’s the job of intellectuals to figure out the right thing to do. It’s the job of artists to make people care. And we have our work cut out for us if we want to compete with religion as something that people are inspired by.
And as magfrump said, independent of whether any of the above turns out to be realistic, there is still the joy in music itself, and that is valuable regardless of the other benefits I hope for.
Very well said! Some notions in there that I’ve been hoping LW will absorb for quite a while now.
I’m not quite able o take the same epistemic stance as you in the second paragraph, but I do believe it is valuable for the community to contain individuals that do. There are some signs LW suffers from everyone trying to become the next Eliezer, while really only the top smartest 10% should do that and the rest specializing in helping the community other ways.
Artistic license is not the same as lying. I wouldn’t write a song that communicated an idea that I didn’t think was supported by rationality, but the purpose of the lyrics is not to communicate the idea accurately, it’s to communicate the emotion associated with that idea.
Insistence that all art meet Less Wrong standards for technical accuracy is not a meme that will successfully spread to the general population. And I do not think that’s a bad thing.
This, mostly. I think your concerns are valid (I’ve pondered them myself) and I upvoted your comment.
I will admit that this first and foremost a humanist song—I’m willingly to sacrifice a bit of “technically correct rationality” for the sake of humanist ideals. Also worth noting that I am explicitly an instrumental rationalist—I value epistemic rationality only insofar as it is useful, and I think there are areas where its more important to be confident than to be strictly correct.
I also don’t think my phrasing is strictly wrong (where dark malthusian futures are concerned—I take responsibility for my artistic licenses with history and don’t consider them that big a deal). There are plenty of possible bad futures, and many of them are even likely. The wording of the song is not that a great glorious humanist dawn is inevitable. It’s that it CAN happen. And whether it does happen depends on the choices we make. Making the right choices requires us to believe that success is possible, and to be passionate about it.
I may be wrong about the number of people who care about reason growing—I lack adequate research to compare across the ages. But I’m pretty confident that the growth of literacy and education has radically increased the upper limit on people who even COULD be rational if they wanted to, and even if the majority are still parroting high-status ideas, I think the quality of those ideas has improved over time. That’s still valuable even if there’s plenty of room for improvement.
It is my belief (I won’t pretend that it’s much more than faith) that humanity is capable of solving the problems before it, and that if we fail, it’s not because we weren’t smart enough or strong enough, it’s because we were too lazy or didn’t care enough. It’s the job of intellectuals to figure out the right thing to do. It’s the job of artists to make people care. And we have our work cut out for us if we want to compete with religion as something that people are inspired by.
And as magfrump said, independent of whether any of the above turns out to be realistic, there is still the joy in music itself, and that is valuable regardless of the other benefits I hope for.
Very well said! Some notions in there that I’ve been hoping LW will absorb for quite a while now.
I’m not quite able o take the same epistemic stance as you in the second paragraph, but I do believe it is valuable for the community to contain individuals that do. There are some signs LW suffers from everyone trying to become the next Eliezer, while really only the top smartest 10% should do that and the rest specializing in helping the community other ways.
So what you’re saying is that you’re willing to lie to people to get them on board with your ideology!
Artistic license is not the same as lying. I wouldn’t write a song that communicated an idea that I didn’t think was supported by rationality, but the purpose of the lyrics is not to communicate the idea accurately, it’s to communicate the emotion associated with that idea.
Insistence that all art meet Less Wrong standards for technical accuracy is not a meme that will successfully spread to the general population. And I do not think that’s a bad thing.
I don’t think this is meant for people who don’t already believe in what it says anyway.