That’s great news. We’ve been preparing for exactly this version of it for more than 25 years now - learning, hacking, travelling, doing extreme sports and environments and exploring tribal outdoor gatherings with zero amenities. Hope we see you on the other side.
WOW! , a complete history, manual, and set of rules for bieng wierd, almost like a beurocratic normalisation of wierdnesz, which is of course the standard method of the normys when they notice that the strategy of useing the same tactics is failing (and quickly at that) and they need new ideas to steal.
Interesting essay! Yeah, I think there's some truth to the premise. As it becomes cheaper and cheaper to exploit predictable patterns, a person's value-add needs to include unpredictability. That's a necessary and not a sufficient condition, though, since you can be unpredictable and still mostly useless.
> Obviously, there is nuance. You can take this argument to the limit and say that ultimately the world is made of only two things: Chaos (a.k.a. the vast seas of Wolfram's computational irreducibility, a.k.a. pure noise, a.k.a. quantum randomness) and Logos (the small islands of compressible patterns).
Within computational irreducibility, there's pure noise as well as universal computation, which is neither meaningfully predictable nor random. Since you mentioned Wolfram, in terms of elementary cellular automata, it's the difference between rule 30 and rule 110. The latter seems to me to be on the boundary between Chaos and Logos, and where I would expect to find the human intellect. (I think this is also largely the same distinction I made above where unpredictability can be useful or not.)
Since you also mentioned the economy and the possibility of UBI...I also don't know the answer, but I think it's worth thinking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which to me is pretty tightly coupled to weirdness. Moreover, I think societies similarly have their own hierarchy of needs, but that's something I don't understand very well. In any case, weirdness seems to be coupled to both of these, in that it best flourishes at the higher levels, when the more fundamental needs are mostly taken care of. At the lower levels, there's too much pressure to reduce social friction to cooperate with others for the sake of survival, and you just can't really afford to be too weird. I don't know if UBI is the answer, but there may be some benefit to just solving the lower levels of the needs hierarchy so we can move past this.
Which means your ability to communicate well becomes paramount. Being weird, being unique does not equate to being unintelligible - but far too many are going to go this way. If "we" want our weird to infect, you need to communicate why your means of expression of self are there, your "weird" is a message: what is it?
Okay they buried their point in the middle of the piece in a lot of words but it is this:
Being normal... used to be a good strategy for most people because being normal == being predictable == being useful in the context of larger structures of society... the relative value of being normal and predictable is rapidly evaporating... In building, maintaining and expanding institutions you need more than predictability... When normalcy is being rapidly automated, the relative value of weirdness is shooting upwards.
I can buy that. But as an autistic person, you have to be very very careful with this. They make the point elsewhere:
Weirdness without the adaptability, weirdness without tolerance, without tools to manage it, without a sufficient amount of common ground to make communication and empathy and communion possible - this kind of weirdness is clearly as disastrous as the totalitarian dictate of normalcy.
Yes, very much so, and I think that autistic people are exactly the people who won't get that nuance. AI hasn't changed anything about human nature and its proclivity to stamp out weirdness, so all the prelude to the author's point still stands. People will still go on witch hunts and still call you names and still ostracize you for being weird. You may deploy weirdness as a strategy, selectively, but cultivating weirdness will make you weird. This is fine, I am weird too but there are social consequences we all know. I feel that weirdness can help you leverage AI but it won't mitigate any social fallout.
Culture us already far more ironic and appreciative of irreverent and absurdist humor, and open-minded to ideology- than it was prior generations.
Why would it tend this way before AI? Something to do with the creative potential where tech reduces the consciousness and menial work requirement perhaps.
That was a Millennial generation thing. Back in 2002, "Be Your Own Brand: A Breakthrough Formula for Standing Out from the Crowd"
by Speak and McNally, was arguing for that. They pushed heavy self-promotion. That got us the "brogrammer", "move fast and break things", and startups that tried to buy market share with venture capital.
The things you list seem completely unconnected to me, and not driven by people embracing weird. Stereotype "brogrammers" were very similar to each other.
> We tell founders presenting at Demo Day, 'If you dress up too much, you will read to the investors as a stupid person.' They're coming to see the next Larry and Sergey, not some junior MBA type.
lol I didn't realize it got as bad as them literally telling founders to dress like that. The irony is of course in no small part because of YC, the junior MBA types flocked to SV, so that's who the VCs ended up meeting anyway, wearing a sweatshirt instead of a suit jacket.
I don't see the connection of the brogrammer's to the idea of being your own brand and embracing the weird. To me, the brogrammer's were the result of the huge influx of money into the tech ecosystem. It was the arrival of those just chasing a paycheck and stock options rather than those who enjoyed programming for its own sake.
I think the cherry-picked examples at the beginning completely ignore the massive number of examples throughout history where groups of people pushed back against mainstream society. A lot of them were hurt or died in the process but societies throughout history have been changed by people who refused to fit in.
The best strategy for the majority is homogeny, right? Just go with what others say to do 100% of the time offering no input yourself until the distribution of people becomes homogenous.
ChatGPT, please write an essay about weirdos that follows Paul Graham's methods but not his style. Insert AI as the savior in the end.
The reality is that everything that was considered weird has been co-opted by the tech industry already. LGBTQ and Burning man are boring, commercialized and institutionalized now.
The tech industry did this, because tech people are relentless online advertisers for the industry and they had to placate them. It stopped when Trump was elected, which shows that the people holding the power are normie CEOs and not weirdos.
If you say Amodei is a weirdo: Only to a certain extent and he will be removed one day just like the Google founders. Some Eric Schmidt figure will take over.
Really, this is just AI generated or assisted fiction that improves morale for the tech influencers.
that was revolting to read.
unbelievable cinical double speak.it leaves all real control to industry and is DESIGNED to make "repair" a bespoke boutique privlage.
what was that very reliable french device that was used as "the argument that ends all debate", many I am sure could are likely still operable even aften centuries of sitting, but even if out of commisioncan be quickly returned to service to trim beurocratic and industry excess at the source.
I wish this would be true, but simply sampling unusual ideas is something eminently automatable. We already have temperature and other settings to guide a LLM towards this kind of "weird". So I don't think it's just about thinking outside the box as most weird ideas are probably also stupid, you can probably almost exhaust the search space of interesting ideas quite easily.
Maybe we will need humans to experience entirely new things instead. No one knows the taste of a new, bioengineered animal. No one knows what it's like to stimulate specific cell types in their brain. And so on. There are things that are and will remain uniquely human, forever.
> sampling unusual ideas is something eminently automatable. We already have temperature and other settings to guide a LLM towards this kind of "weird"
This isn’t true and changing the temperature of your LLM doesn’t create weird in any way that’s marketable or interesting to people.
But what I will say anything that gives your reach the slightest advantage will just be replicated by a human when they notice it. Think of how niche ASMR content was and now every brand under the sun has done an ASMR unboxing
> But with AI (disembodied in software and embodied in robots), the relative value of being normal and predictable is rapidly evaporating.
I would argue this is precisely backwards. The normal and predictable is more valuable. Human errors are largely predictable. AI errors are not. This is one of the reasons why human code is much easier to review than AI code.
The author make a typical mistake, saying that witches were burned at stake in pre-modern times. Which is not true; surprisingly burning witches was not a big thing in Medieval period; it was actually early modernity when witch hunts have become widespread (not in England though, were witchhunts were far less popular, than say in Germany or some other parts of modern UK).
Per wikipedia: "The period of the European witch trials with the most active phase and the largest number of fatalities seems to have occurred between 1560 and 1630." Which is very pre-modern. And that's the language that was chosen in the essay, not the Medieval.
Future belongs to ones (let's call them ruling class) who utilizes averages (let's call that masses) to own advantage. Weirds here are the systemic risk to the ruling class. And there is nothing in weirds for masses. Masses avoid, ridicule, mock and exclude the weird stuff. Even the "weird" is about other's perception, not innate property of an individual. Nothing suggests that this perception will change in any observable time.
And what about weirdos who are wrong and selfdelusional? Are they minority of majority of weidos? Then can you blame masses who avoid/exclude veridos?
--
To have a society in which weirdos thrive means to put at risk so many things the ruling class thrive for: control, power, social status. Such society will need to cultivate curiosity and critical thinking. Good luck with arranging that at scale.
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It's indeed easier times for weird. But way far from thriving or even "having the future".
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There are way more things in the article to argue about. I just outlined couple.
88 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 17.9 ms ] threadgood luck with that.
> Obviously, there is nuance. You can take this argument to the limit and say that ultimately the world is made of only two things: Chaos (a.k.a. the vast seas of Wolfram's computational irreducibility, a.k.a. pure noise, a.k.a. quantum randomness) and Logos (the small islands of compressible patterns).
Within computational irreducibility, there's pure noise as well as universal computation, which is neither meaningfully predictable nor random. Since you mentioned Wolfram, in terms of elementary cellular automata, it's the difference between rule 30 and rule 110. The latter seems to me to be on the boundary between Chaos and Logos, and where I would expect to find the human intellect. (I think this is also largely the same distinction I made above where unpredictability can be useful or not.)
Since you also mentioned the economy and the possibility of UBI...I also don't know the answer, but I think it's worth thinking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which to me is pretty tightly coupled to weirdness. Moreover, I think societies similarly have their own hierarchy of needs, but that's something I don't understand very well. In any case, weirdness seems to be coupled to both of these, in that it best flourishes at the higher levels, when the more fundamental needs are mostly taken care of. At the lower levels, there's too much pressure to reduce social friction to cooperate with others for the sake of survival, and you just can't really afford to be too weird. I don't know if UBI is the answer, but there may be some benefit to just solving the lower levels of the needs hierarchy so we can move past this.
Why would it tend this way before AI? Something to do with the creative potential where tech reduces the consciousness and menial work requirement perhaps.
> We tell founders presenting at Demo Day, 'If you dress up too much, you will read to the investors as a stupid person.' They're coming to see the next Larry and Sergey, not some junior MBA type.
https://www.wired.com/2010/04/ff-hackers
[1] https://www.clrn.org/what-is-counterculture-in-sociology/
I think it depends.
For measurable goals and simulatable systems, AI and other methods like evolutionary optimization can create weird things on their own.
But what if the goals themselves are weird? This exists, There's a niche for that in the economy, but it's pretty small.
I suspect this is a very Eurocentric view. Take India for a counter-example, it has always been full of weirdoes starting their own cults.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Indian_castes
The reality is that everything that was considered weird has been co-opted by the tech industry already. LGBTQ and Burning man are boring, commercialized and institutionalized now.
The tech industry did this, because tech people are relentless online advertisers for the industry and they had to placate them. It stopped when Trump was elected, which shows that the people holding the power are normie CEOs and not weirdos.
If you say Amodei is a weirdo: Only to a certain extent and he will be removed one day just like the Google founders. Some Eric Schmidt figure will take over.
Really, this is just AI generated or assisted fiction that improves morale for the tech influencers.
Maybe we will need humans to experience entirely new things instead. No one knows the taste of a new, bioengineered animal. No one knows what it's like to stimulate specific cell types in their brain. And so on. There are things that are and will remain uniquely human, forever.
This isn’t true and changing the temperature of your LLM doesn’t create weird in any way that’s marketable or interesting to people.
But what I will say anything that gives your reach the slightest advantage will just be replicated by a human when they notice it. Think of how niche ASMR content was and now every brand under the sun has done an ASMR unboxing
Change that and the weirdos will create a society that will die out.
See: modern liberal society and feminisim which leads to population collapse and destruction of the civilizations that embrace it.
I would argue this is precisely backwards. The normal and predictable is more valuable. Human errors are largely predictable. AI errors are not. This is one of the reasons why human code is much easier to review than AI code.
There is no pre-Modern. Right after Late Middle Ages [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Middle_Ages] goes Early Modern.
And what about weirdos who are wrong and selfdelusional? Are they minority of majority of weidos? Then can you blame masses who avoid/exclude veridos?
--
To have a society in which weirdos thrive means to put at risk so many things the ruling class thrive for: control, power, social status. Such society will need to cultivate curiosity and critical thinking. Good luck with arranging that at scale.
--
It's indeed easier times for weird. But way far from thriving or even "having the future".
--
There are way more things in the article to argue about. I just outlined couple.
That it might actually be remunerative (economically, socially)...