11 Comments
Apr 15Liked by David Shapiro

Excellent communication, David. While reading, I noticed the similarities between the concepts described, and those of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, as explained on his paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation.” I very much align with these concepts; they “speak to me.” Thank you!

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Others thinking along the same lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjaXIUHyhOI

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My mother is deaf, my father was on the night shift. It made me resilient, resourceful, autonomous. For me love is a bourgeois concept.

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Disconnection is necessary phase. I want AGI to align with me, not the other way around. I am living your dream. Suerte.

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To be more specific, you're doing a couple things at once here: prescriptions for how individuals ought to live their life, and also an attempt to use the same framework for societies, economies, etc. You mention it's universal in this way. There is something right about this, and Aristotle did a fairly good job of outlining what that is (living in balance between different tensions). But I'm highly skeptical that this could be rolled out at a societal level because in order to do that, you need to enshrined it in laws and rules, and you have to deal with collective action problems, etc. Because of this, the advice as it relates to individuals might be wise, but the advice as it relates to society is somewhat naive, especially from a pragmatic/logistic perspective.

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Good, so far as it goes. But the devil is always in the details, and I don't think this philosophy is novel enough or thorough enough to actually raise us above the cynicism of our age. There is, under the current political milieu, for example, a tension between alignment with the nature of our biology and equity, which you also advocate for. Without digging into the philosophical details of these tensions, Radical Alignment is nothing more than any other utopian ideal, where "if everyone would just think this way the world would be great".

If course, there may be people out there for whom this is eye opening and extremely helpful, so I don't want to diminish the possible benefits of your efforts. And I'm largely in support of the advice. It's just that this is nowhere near through enough or informed enough to do the job it sets out to do.

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