ME tl;dr-ing:: Ignore history at your peril. Colonialism was bad despite GDP gains. Bostrom's paperclip maximizer is not more important than anti-colonial resistance. We should not ignore current political crises in favor of 'trajectory changes' in the near future ; READ Joan Westenberg:: Why Are All the Smart People So Bad at History?

Discovered: Apr 6, 2025 17:58 ME tl;dr-ing:: Ignore history at your peril. Colonialism was bad despite GDP gains. Bostrom’s paperclip maximizer is not more important than anti-colonial resistance. We should not ignore current political crises in favor of ‘trajectory changes’ in the near future ; READ Joan Westenberg:: Why Are All the Smart People So Bad at History? <– QUOTE: “But history isn’t a clean dataset. It doesn’t behave like a lab experiment. You can’t rerun the 20th century with a tweak and expect a stable result. Contingency is everything. People make choices. Systems react. Culture evolves. Timing matters. Change one node and the network shifts in ways you can't predict. There’s no control group for history. You don’t get to A/B test the Russian Revolution. ... Technocrats and rationalists often talk like you can.”