From an interview with Nick Beckstead on the topic of existential risk, meaning fundamental threats to the human race.
In his view, uploads are just an idea that some people came up with, most ideas don’t work, and most institutions are dysfunctional. Those truths seem more important for thinking about the distant future than any complicated arguments for the feasibility and importance of uploads.
Emphasis added to highlight the phrase that grabbed me.
Another aphoristic excerpt from the interview:
People in rural areas care most about things like fights with local villages over watermelon patches. And that’s how we are, but we’re living in a fog about it.
People in local villages will prefer aphorism #1. People in cities , 2.
I think what you see in many organizations is that, sometimes, out of serendipity, one can see that the social ‘magic’ is happening. Something about the social mix, the mood, and the project just ‘gelled’ and there’s no real way to make it happen, though perhaps you can nudge the probability of it happening up a bit with good, functional institutions.
There was an NPR show about Van Morrison recording his most popular album, and that’s how everyone described it – almost a ‘zen’ style inexplicably productive perfection, “like we were all on a special cloud.” A lot of the early space-program is described this way by the people directly involved, and that’s a big theme in, “The Right Stuff”.
The implications of truly embracing, “most ideas don’t work, and most institutions are dysfunctional.” are ‘more ideas’, ‘trial and error’, ‘frequent but graceful failure’, and ‘breaking up dysfunctional groups, while leaving functional ones completely alone.’
A journal of negative results has been mused in the past. They started one in biomedicine. Every field should have one…if it is a good idea.