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Ideas

Steve Phillips

• 1 min read

Mine

The End State

Here’s where we need to get to as a species:

I want every person in the world to be doing exactly what they want.

On some level, that is the right optimization. And when looking at everyone’s values as a whole, that is perhaps the optimal optimization, as it here. (When in doubt, go meta.)

Later I will write more about my value system, but for now, you can read much about my values in the AMA/interview I did with CodeBuddies.org .

Weighing Value

In this great video of Elon Musk being interviewed by Sam Altman, both of them agree that what you should optimize for is the area under the curve – that is, the total amount of good done in the world by your actions.

I strongly disagree.

I consider the saving of one person’s life to be radically more valuable than creating a slightly-better photo-sharing app that a trillion people use; the latter is utterly trivial, and the former is not.

A clearer example – improving someone’s life by such a small amount that they don’t even notice is, to me, worthless, regardless of how many people are “helped” by this trivial amount.

Ways to Think About Pursuance

  1. Pursuance is coordinating the Human Colossus

  2. Pursuance is a superorganism consisting of human beings, computers they control, and autonomous computing resources that perform tasks without human intervention

  3. Pursuance is increasing the fundemental effectiveness of human beings – a lever, of sorts

  4. Pursuance harnesses the world’s operational intelligence

Patterns
  1. Smart people blame themselves first

Others’

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