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- Hacker News
- It's not about being weird--it's about change vs. stasis.
The problem with weird is that not everyone can be weird, almost by definition. Moreover, people get things done collectively, and for that to work, the group (at whatever size) has to push in the same direction. Pushing in the wrong direction just to be weird will cause the group to fail.
Instead, I think, the future belongs to those who help change the present.
At the limit, any existing process can be done by AI, given a goal. What AI cannot do (and must not do) is come up with new goals. Coming up with new goals must always remain a human prerogative.
We don't need humans to work the assembly line--we need humans to make the assembly line better. AI can't do that alone because it cannot define "better". Humans must decide what "better" means. Do we want the assembly line to be faster or use fewer resources? Should it continue to produce this product or work on a new one? Should we build a bigger assembly line or turn the whole thing into a park?
As long as the world keeps changing, we will need humans to direct that change. People who fear change, who want everything to stay the same will have the hardest time in the future. Those are the people who will be replaced by AI.
The future belongs to those who change the present.
by GMoromisato - I always took weird to mean "not easily digestible," not necessarily harmful. Like, if the guy is weird, processing his actions is hard, but I'm never threatened by him.by butlike
- I think the cherry-picked examples at the beginning completely ignore the massive number of examples throughout history where groups of people pushed back against mainstream society. A lot of them were hurt or died in the process but societies throughout history have been changed by people who refused to fit in.
- "Don't think a small group of dedicated people can't change the world. They are the only thing that ever has".by GJim
- Yes. But my argument is about what's the best strategy for the majority!
- “When the going gets weird,the weird turn pro.” Surprised I didn’t find this quote from Hunter S Thompson in the comments yet.by miesman
- Oh shit this should have been the epigraph
- I wish this would be true, but simply sampling unusual ideas is something eminently automatable. We already have temperature and other settings to guide a LLM towards this kind of "weird". So I don't think it's just about thinking outside the box as most weird ideas are probably also stupid, you can probably almost exhaust the search space of interesting ideas quite easily.
Maybe we will need humans to experience entirely new things instead. No one knows the taste of a new, bioengineered animal. No one knows what it's like to stimulate specific cell types in their brain. And so on. There are things that are and will remain uniquely human, forever.
by pu_pe - > sampling unusual ideas is something eminently automatable. We already have temperature and other settings to guide a LLM towards this kind of "weird"
This isn’t true and changing the temperature of your LLM doesn’t create weird in any way that’s marketable or interesting to people.
But what I will say anything that gives your reach the slightest advantage will just be replicated by a human when they notice it. Think of how niche ASMR content was and now every brand under the sun has done an ASMR unboxing
by whywhywhywhy - The truly "weird"—the kind "futures belong to"—cannot be commodified into yet another off-the-shelf-personality. You either are or you aren't.by rglover
- Which means your ability to communicate well becomes paramount. Being weird, being unique does not equate to being unintelligible - but far too many are going to go this way. If "we" want our weird to infect, you need to communicate why your means of expression of self are there, your "weird" is a message: what is it?by bsenftner
- The future of ~2000 belonged to the weird, too. We commodified all that. Anything briefly and seemingly "quirky" is fodder for branding. Or you can go a little further than quirky, and someone like RFK will want to put you on a list.by Arubis
- Yes. Being weird now means either getting crushed into a fine paste by the machine or being squeezed into an empty crumpled husk for your valuable weirdness juices. There is no winning scenario left for weirdnessby Lord-Jobo
- We sure do punish people for being weird, and it's definitely seeing an increase. Ask any gay, trans, disabled, neurodiverse, furry, anarchist, or other outsider group whether life has gotten easier lately.
Guarantee it's almost (but not quite) universally no.
by forestrywat - Ridiculous. When Ellen Degeneres came out as gay in the 90s it was a groundshaking media event. Being gay was incredibly stigmatized, far more than today. The other groups at least have public supporters today, instead of being nearly universally rejected.by yCombLinks
- Interesting essay! Yeah, I think there's some truth to the premise. As it becomes cheaper and cheaper to exploit predictable patterns, a person's value-add needs to include unpredictability. That's a necessary and not a sufficient condition, though, since you can be unpredictable and still mostly useless.
> Obviously, there is nuance. You can take this argument to the limit and say that ultimately the world is made of only two things: Chaos (a.k.a. the vast seas of Wolfram's computational irreducibility, a.k.a. pure noise, a.k.a. quantum randomness) and Logos (the small islands of compressible patterns).
Within computational irreducibility, there's pure noise as well as universal computation, which is neither meaningfully predictable nor random. Since you mentioned Wolfram, in terms of elementary cellular automata, it's the difference between rule 30 and rule 110. The latter seems to me to be on the boundary between Chaos and Logos, and where I would expect to find the human intellect. (I think this is also largely the same distinction I made above where unpredictability can be useful or not.)
Since you also mentioned the economy and the possibility of UBI...I also don't know the answer, but I think it's worth thinking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which to me is pretty tightly coupled to weirdness. Moreover, I think societies similarly have their own hierarchy of needs, but that's something I don't understand very well. In any case, weirdness seems to be coupled to both of these, in that it best flourishes at the higher levels, when the more fundamental needs are mostly taken care of. At the lower levels, there's too much pressure to reduce social friction to cooperate with others for the sake of survival, and you just can't really afford to be too weird. I don't know if UBI is the answer, but there may be some benefit to just solving the lower levels of the needs hierarchy so we can move past this.
by WCSTombs - That was a Millennial generation thing. Back in 2002, "Be Your Own Brand: A Breakthrough Formula for Standing Out from the Crowd" by Speak and McNally, was arguing for that. They pushed heavy self-promotion. That got us the "brogrammer", "move fast and break things", and startups that tried to buy market share with venture capital.by Animats
- Not true. Not sure why you are hyperfixating on millennials either. Startups and programming/crunch culture existed in the 90s all the same.
- The things you list seem completely unconnected to me, and not driven by people embracing weird. Stereotype "brogrammers" were very similar to each other.by usef-
- I don't see the connection of the brogrammer's to the idea of being your own brand and embracing the weird. To me, the brogrammer's were the result of the huge influx of money into the tech ecosystem. It was the arrival of those just chasing a paycheck and stock options rather than those who enjoyed programming for its own sake.by awithrow
- >Unusually weak? They will not want to feed you. Unusually strong? They will send you to fight an impossible war. Unusually clever? They will accuse you of witchcraft and burn you at the stake. Yes, there were some exceptions (for example, "freaks" kept as curiosities by the kings), but the general rule for the vast majority of the population was: don't be weird, or get killed.
To me that sounds like a very post-romantic interpretation of the past, where everything that happened before now, the enlightened times, was savage,cruel and retrograde. It's my understanding that things were a lot more subtle than that and that's a very simplistic approximation. I don't think Da Vinci, Vauban Euclid or Grosseteste were burnt to the stake, not even Galileo was.
by altho123 - Dean Radin talked about psi genes that witches may have had in an interview with Rogan. When someone is acting truly unpredictably then normies are afraid.by 2snakes
- Galileo may not have been burnt at the stake, but he was placed on house arrest for the rest of his life for his beliefs.by boonzeet
- I think this is a narrow take, a bit like suggesting that women weren't historically discriminated against and putting forward Cleopatra as an example.
Surely, rich and noble eccentrics have existed in the past with several notable examples. But to point at exceptions and then suggests that this proves that no underlying trend is present seems like incorrect reasoning.
- Well be weird and be careful. Easier said than done. Because yes most people would rather want to bring you down to their level than try to rise up to yours e.g. Jesus Christ. Because of fear, doubt, and insecurity that they can not stand alone or that you standing alone is a threat to theirs.by randysalami