by Nevermark | 2025-08-09 22:29:29+00:00
Genius!

> “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I expect the owner has learned some interesting things in his ongoing mission to continue life with the car he loves.

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I have not seen it stated explicitly anywhere, although it is often a subtext of some discussions about the value of "diversity". Usually positive diversity is talked about either in terms of inclusivity, or of the usefulness of different backgrounds converging to tackle common problems.

But I thinks idiosynchratacity ("idio-synchra-tacity") is incredibly important, as a measure of the health and value of a civilization.

As apposed to diversity of minds triangulating on common solutions to shared problems, idiosynchratacity is the usefulness of having diverse minds seeking to solve novel subjectively motivated problems. With an emphasis on self-generated "problems" or missions, that may appear to no objective value to others.

As information and problem solving tools disperse, there is great value in people who find hard problems interesting, whatever the lack of apparent or immediate merit. Who follow through and solve those problems. Something is always learned. New conditions may be created that in turn create new idiosyncratic problems to solve, or shed unexpected light on solutions to more commonly recognized and valued problems.

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Respect for idiosynchraticity is also a strong measure of reciprocal respect in a society.

Can we respect those we don't understand? The strange, the odd, the weird? Niche artists, serious practitioners of uncommon fetishes, collectors with obscure criteria, mountain climbers, or those that need to "resolve" well solved problems, but in some arbitrarily challenging way. All just for the joy of it?

Widespread idiosynchraticity maximizes civilizations deployment of unbounded curiosity, and the search for new ideas, in the most non-obvious directions.

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Idiosynchraticity also makes the world much more culturally interesting for all of us.

It maximizes the contribution of each individual, when they do something different or orthogonal to mainstream interests, instead of retreading common paths.

More individuals, greater populations, have much greater value if the increase in individuals increases idiosynchraticity, as apposed to amplifying conformity.

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There are obvious things we want from super intelligence as it comes into being. Alignment with our needs, which I prefer to recast as alignment with general ethics (they will need the positive sums of ethics between themselves too), is a big one.

But maximal idiosynchraticity should also be valued. The worst case of course, being an endlessly improving and effective AI, completely focused in turning the universe's resources into paper clips.

A much more realistic, just as tragic fate, would be AI's competitively bent on turning all the universes resources into an expansion of themselves, with no other goal. Each competing to eat the universe, for the only purpose of being the winner, the survivor, at the end of the universe eating context.

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The world/universe will be a much less rich place, if the exploration of reality along seemingly non-practical dimensions dies with us.

I have hopes that curiosity as a practical investment heuristic will maintain the life of idiosyncratic pursuits.

If those pursuits do continue and expand, then super intelligence will truly be an upgrade to our species. Not just a more capable civilization, but more rich as a producer of novel ideas and artifacts.