Perry E. Metzger

[continuation/conclusion of the same tweet as the previous two screenshots]
...giant society, there isn't even a way to do it in principle, you don't have the knowledge or predictive capability to do it no matter how smart you are, and you certainly can't make decisions for or predict the behavior of eight billion people with their deeply different interests, desires, cultures, etc.

When you're young, you imagine someone is in charge of the world, and you're either angry with what they're doing or comforted by the illusion that your leaders are looking out for you. When you get older, if you have your eyes open, you may at some point realize no one is in charge of the world and become scared of that. If you're older still, you may eventually realize no one is in charge, no one could be in charge even in principle, and that's okay, you can live with it, it's fine, indeed, it's better than someone trying to be in charge and f'ing everything up.

We must tend our own gardens. Build great and ambitious things, build small things, build what you like, but whatever you do, don't delude yourself, and especially don't delude yourself into thinking you have more control than you do, or that anyone else does either. Wisdom really does consist of learning the difference between what you control and what you don't, between what you can plan for and what you have to accept.

Most importantly: learn to live with uncertainty; it's the only thing you can be sure of.

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Perry E. Metzger ✔️ @perrymetzger · 1h
When I was young, I used to think it was important for smart people to have grand visions about the future in order to plan well for it and avoid disasters. Now, I think many disasters are caused by smart people trying to think too much about the future, especially the far future, getting lost in mazes of their own imagination, and pushing the gullible (including themselves) towards bad decisions on the basis of false certainties.

I don't mean you shouldn't plan personally for the future at all, the usual general things like saving your money or working hard at things that pay off are good advice. It's also fine to have goals like "colonize Mars" and to work on the tools you need to accomplish such a goal as they won't appear by accident, though imagining that you will even approximately know the exact details of what will be built years or decades in the future is always delusional. Dreams are fine, imagining you can engineer things without making mistakes and iterating a lot is self deception. Trying to make sure you're still healthy in thirty years is great, imagining that you know exactly what health crises or issues you might have in thirty years is ridiculous.

So I don't mean that planning is entirely useless. Rather, what I mean that the people who spend a lot of their time on grand messianic or dystopian visions about the far future usually get everything wrong, including details and impacts. They also usually cause enormous damage (see people like the Marxists who continue to do untold harm, Paul Erlich or the Club of Rome, who did vast harm to society, or more recently, the EA/"Rationalist" cult people, who are doing insane harm right now).

If you want what's best for yourself and those around you, you're better off just focusing on the next two or three or five years and flexibly adapting to the world as it comes. If you want what's best for the world, well, tend your own garden first, you're [cut off]

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[continuation of previous screenshot's tweet, scrolled down]
...So I don't mean that planning is entirely useless. Rather, what I mean that the people who spend a lot of their time on grand messianic or dystopian visions about the far future usually get everything wrong, including details and impacts. They also usually cause enormous damage (see people like the Marxists who continue to do untold harm, Paul Erlich or the Club of Rome, who did vast harm to society, or more recently, the EA/"Rationalist" cult people, who are doing insane harm right now).

If you want what's best for yourself and those around you, you're better off just focusing on the next two or three or five years and flexibly adapting to the world as it comes. If you want what's best for the world, well, tend your own garden first, you're not likely to be able to plan the lives of others better than they will for themselves and you're very likely to harm them.

Another example, and I'm sorry to bring it up because I'm extremely fond of the people involved: when Eric Drexler decided that nanotechnology would be so transformative that rather than working on nanotechnology he should worry about nanotechnology *policy*, many years in advance of any nanotechnology at all existing, he more or less wrecked his own field and rendered it irrelevant for decades instead of (as he imagined he was doing) helping mankind guide itself into a smooth transition.

You can't actually plan "smooth transitions" for a giant society, there isn't even a way to do it in principle, you don't have the knowledge or predictive capability to do it no matter how smart you are, and you certainly can't make decisions for or predict the behavior of eight billion people with their deeply different interests, desires, cultures, etc.

When you're young, you imagine someone is in charge of the world, and you're either angry with what they're doing or comforted by the illusion that [cut off]

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