Optimistic Determinism and Existentialism
Tags: philosophy, ethics, singularity, utilitarianism
Published: 2023-09-04 04:21:34


> **TLDR**: It's okay to appreciate the advancements society has made, feel humbled by the scale of human progress, and yet still strive for meaningful contributions toward advancing human civilization.

## Rational algorithms

The world is far from perfect, and humans are far from rational. It's not hard to come up with examples of inefficient systems or irrational behavior. And yet, when you look closer, many important situations in our daily life are already optimized to produce the best possible outcome given the practical constraints.

A few examples:
- **Triage in Emergency Situations**: In situations like natural disasters or pandemics, medical personnel follow a triage system aimed at saving the most lives.
- **Progressive Taxation**: Taxing the rich at higher rates is justified on the grounds that money has diminishing marginal utility, and wealth redistribution can increase overall happiness.
- **Cost-Benefit Analyses**: Many companies use these to decide on new initiatives, weighing the expected utility of different options.
- **Standardized Testing**: Designed to allocate educational resources where they could be most useful, although this is often a subject of debate.

## Real-life limitations

Besides these, there are many rules in modern society - while some of them are outdated, many are based on what has been shown to be true (i.e. faster speeds are more dangerous, and drunk driving kills).

Similarly, while Democracy has flaws, it's better than all the other systems we have (until we have AGI).

More importantly, while I was deeply infuriated reading about the irrationality of much human behavior or the inefficiencies of systems, I am seeing that in many cases these systems are already very good, given the practical realities they had to work in (i.e. while USCIS is very slow, even by government agency standards, [they are pretty good given how underfunded they are and how high of a turnover they have, and how many artificial roadblocks they have](https://www.reddit.com/r/USCIS/comments/y4xb08/why_is_uscis_so_slow_from_a_former_officers/)).

Additionally, while it's easy to critique a system, it's harder to propose a solution, and much much harder to propose a solution that actually works once all the complexities and practical constraints are account for.

## Optimistic Determinism

From reading history, it's easy to see how much the systems we have today, at least in the Western world, are substantially better than what we had in the past (even 10 years ago), and constantly improving, and most likely will keep on improving (just think of the lax food standards in the past, or how the future generations in the US would be astonished at why it took their ancestors so long to set up proper gun control laws).

For example, while humans have been slow to react to climate change, the momentum is finally increasing, and while it may not increase as fast as we might want, in my opinion, the momentul is unlikely to stop (aided with increasing climate crises) until the climate change issue is resolved, at which point our society would have transformed a lot for the matter - towards more sustainable use of resources, and away from fueling oil monopolies and dictatorships (no pun intended).

## Existentialism

> Existentialism - The realization of individual insignificance in the grand scheme of things, but still finding value in personal actions

While all of this is extremely well, it at the very least hints at how individuals are irrelevant, or at least not crucial in many situations (like in the Seldon Plan from the Foundation). Most of us can't hope to single-handedly change a large system. While in an unlikely scenario, you might produce some invention that has huge positive impact, even if that were to happen, it's highly certain that if you weren't there someone else would have made that discovery sometime later, given that most discoveries are enabled or inspired by something prior to it. For example, advancement in computers caused a lot of inventions, and even if some particular people weren't there to make these inventions, someone else would have likely been there to make the invention now that they are enabled by powerful computers.

The realization is that, while an individual might be able to improve a large system or create a new system with the help of others, it's unlikely that their contribution alone was the deciding factor between complete failure and utter success - even without you in the picture, some measure of success would have been achieved, maybe a bit later, but still.

All of this makes me rather sad about the low value of individuals today, and even lower value of individuals in the distant future when there are many billions more intelligent beings in the galaxy. Not to mention that more and more important tasks are being done by computers/AI systems/robots.

It makes me think that while I ought to try my best in my, all to short, lifetime to improve the human condition as much as possible, my individual actions or failures won't likely count for too much, so I might as well relax a bit and enjoy the process a bit more.

What do you think about this thinking of mine?