Another conversational post today; still writing a longform piece for next week.
I’ve written before about how I like ‘inaugural cohorts’ and think joining them can be a great opportunity for growth.
I think one reason for this is that when you join a long dynasty of cohorts, there are always seniors jostling and giving recommendations on what to do, whereas when you’re in an inaugural cohort, there’s ‘nothing above’.
‘Nothing above’ is a Yudkowskian concept:
“There is no war here,” said a soft voice emanating from within the emptiness. “No conflict and battle, no politics and betrayal, no death and no life. That is all for the folly of men. The stars are above such foolishness, untouched by it. Here there is peace, and silence eternal. So I once thought.”
Harry turned to look at where the voice originated, and saw only stars.
“So you once thought?” Harry said, when no other words seemed to be forthcoming.
“There is nothing above the folly of men,” whispered the voice from the emptiness. “There is nothing beyond the destructive powers of sufficiently intelligent idiocy, not even the stars themselves. I went to a great deal of trouble to make a certain golden plaque last forever. I would not like to see it destroyed by human folly.” —Ch.95, HPMOR
No rescuer hath the rescuer.
No Lord hath the champion,
no mother and no father,
only nothingness above. —Ch.75, HPMOR
Once, I made a friend who was a few years older than me, and was surprised at how well we got on despite this. What’s more, this friend was the youngest in her social group, and I was the oldest in mine at the time. If we’re the average of the people we spend most time around, shouldn’t this make the cultural distance between us feel subjectively larger?
We concluded this wasn’t the case. Being the youngest in a social group often means you get treated like the youngest, perhaps docking a year from your subjective age. Meanwhile, being the oldest in a social group can mean taking on roles associated with the oldest. Suddenly, the gap doesn’t seem so large, and it seems intuitive that two such people could get along.
Having ‘nothing above’ had worked well for me.
(Under this theory, what seems more unlikely is the oldest in Social Group A and the youngest in Social Group B getting along, even if Social Group A and Social Group B are bijectively distributed in age-space).
Something I’m concerned about in the case of longevity breakthroughs / human immortality is that there will be “too much above”—we’ll be disturbing the longstanding cycles of ‘creative destruction’ wherein the old die out with their power and ideas, freeing space for innovation.
One solution could be extraterrestrial expansion / stratifying across planets by age, which is a way to enforce ‘nothing above’ and all the creativity it engenders.
I’ll write more about ‘nothing above’ on some other days; it’s a concept dear to my heart.
Huh. When I was a kid I was constantly worried about my parents dying before the singularity, or my grandparents dying (too late now...) and THEM having their parents die before the singularity.
And then what, I thought? Spending millennia with no parents? Indefinitely without? Would that generation be subject to higher suicide rates, I thought? Would they then in turn cause MY generation to be parentless forever? What is a life with nothing but peers to hold you?
Would I then have to hold steady, find happiness despite nihil supernum, at the cost of slight strain, because I can put up with a lot but NOT being part of the problem?
I did outgrow this, mostly. It turns out at age 12 or whatever it was vastly more difficult to imagine a life without my parents. Now it's been nearly 2 months I've been away from them, just like it was in college, and I notice I'm doing fine.
I suppose I grew up, and humans don't need to expend much effort to keep "nihil supernum" in the background radiation. Still, gerontocracy has a protective element to it—we don't think of a comfortable childhood as gerontocracy but it is—and I'm not sure how I would fare eventually, on reflective nights, if my parents were long, long dead.