Love Specifically
And only theoretically when you reason out that yeah, you do have to do kindness at a distance for civilization to work but the specific love is what makes civilization worth preserving
This is the specific person I love the most across all of time and space. Even in the multiverse, where there are almost infinite near copies of me, he’s still the one they would all choose because if they didn’t they would lose the inherent property of the pattern that makes me myself. We will call him Dutch and everything I am wishes to be a good father to him. He hates Costco and loves for his nap times to be promptly at 10am and 3pm. Bath at 7pm, the first thirty minutes of Moana at 7:30, and bed by 8pm. He loves Miss Rachel and I love him enough to not let him watch her too much except when I’m doing something on the stove and have to keep him occupied. I love him so much that I’ve been cutting my own hair for the last year and a half because there’s never time to see a barber so excuse the pseudo bald spot.
I don’t really like writing here publicly and sharing my long held thoughts about how to preserve the world from the dangers it currently faces. There’s really no amount of money or acclaim that could compel me to do it. When I do speak publicly I like to be funny, which is my greatest weakness, or else the near robotic impersonal conveyor of information. Talking here about how to save the future for recognizably human humans makes me feel like someone’s uncle Randy, sitting in a garage drinking beer with an American flag pinned on one wall, laying out all the problems with society and showing off his all too simple solutions. I dislike that feeling intensely and usually do everything I can to avoid it and keep myself on a boring, sane, and stable path.
When I think about how I must appear to other people I get a sympathetic cringe because of course I must seem totally unbelievable and insane and it would be so much kinder if I simply went away.
There are only really two reasons I have continued to do so.
I think I am correct about the specific, executable changes within institutions that need to occur in order to maintain pace with the rapid rise of technology. I have tried to find the flaw in my reasoning and cannot and I don’t believe I am deceiving myself because I very much wish I was wrong because then I would not feel a duty to communicate this to other people. If you can prove to me how I am wrong by the way, I would very much like to be wrong, so please do so and I will immediately delete this substack.
I love this child so goddamn much the idea of him living in a hell scape motivates me to push against all my other personal desires. If there are battles to be fought let them be fought in my time so that my son might live in peace.
Okay I’m writing this early in the morning and didn’t think of this one before. You have to believe in the future of humanity for there to be anything like a life worth living. And unlike other crazy people my solutions aren’t to wave a magic wand and solve a symptom but to build technology that helps people coordinate to solve problems in general which is a really boring thing for a crazy person to want.
I think I need to make some videos or something in the near future because I’m not having the impact here that I want. I can write with both hands at the same time and that may seem like such a non sequitur but it makes people listen to me. I’ve crazily emailed a bunch of people trying to shift their opinions but it’s not enough. What is happening now will not be enough.
Community Notes on Twitter isn’t going to be enough if it isn’t rapidly expanded to specifically become the News Index. That won’t be enough unless they build those databases in a way that we can run deep learning models on them so that we can train an AI specifically in the process of human reason and give it a reservoir of data for how to find convincing yet rational human arguments. If we don’t build the Forum then there won’t be another reservoir for AI learning to train a model on how to execute and find changes that humans want, or a place for human volition to still matter in a future where our labor has no unique value and the only game we can play is finding wise things to wish for. And all of that will only matter if it happens quickly enough to build a model strong enough, wise enough, and smart enough to prevent other malevolent models.
I tell myself I am crazy more often than you could imagine. You’re a childhood sexual assault survivor, I say, and this is your survivor’s guilt finding weird ways to peek out and interact with the world. You want to help because you didn’t do anything to help the other victims. You saw God once, or some hallucination close to it, and it’s a pretty common pathology for people who have had those kind of experiences to think suddenly they know something other people need to know. Or I tell myself more simply that I’m missing some piece of the analysis. Plus I look like Shrek which is just sort of a rude thing to do if you know something that is important for other people to know.
Yet I return to Dutch and find I need to know that if I’m wrong, where specifically am I wrong?
I am crazy, yes. I do a good job of covering it over but I can’t deny it. I’ve even somewhat limited what I allow myself to do in life so that I don’t go even more crazy. Yet there are long poles in the tent when I try to dismiss everything else on that note. When I graduated from high school I got a scholarship from NASA and a Nobel Physics Prize winner. While a loud part of me says that they just both made a mistake I know that sounds crazy too. The Nobel Laureate even called me to ask me what my college plans were but my sister hung up on him because she thought he was a telemarketer for Oshkodh B’gosh and I was too intimidated to call him back.
If I am wrong, let my embarrassingly sincere, cringe worthy efforts to try motivate someone else to speak up who might succeed.
If you are that person please do so.
I do what I do for Dutch.
Try for whomever it is that you specifically love the most.