eric drexler

[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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