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aog's Shortform — LessWrong

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Views on AGI seem suspiciously correlated to me, as if many people's views are more determined by diffusion through social networks and popular writing, rather than independent reasoning. This isn't unique to AGI. Most individual people are not capable of coming up with useful worldviews on their own. Often, the development of interesting, coherent, novel worldviews benefits from an intellectual scene. What's an intellectual scene? It's not just an idea. Usually it has a set of complementary ideas, each of which make more sense with the others in place. Often there’s a small number of key thinkers who come up with many new ideas, and a broader group of people who agree with the ideas, further develop them, and follow their implied call to action. Scenes benefit from shared physical and online spaces, though they can also exist in social networks without a central hub. Sometimes they professionalize, offering full-time opportunities to develop the ideas or act on them. Members of a scen

x aog's Shortform — LessWrong aog's Shortform by aog 19th Apr 2025 1 min read 22 6 This is a special post for quick takes by aog . Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page . aog's Shortform 58 aog 46 Chris_Leong 5 aog 14 1a3orn 2 Seth Herd 4 Chris_Leong 35 Tenoke 8 Seth Herd 20 TsviBT 10 plex 4 Matthew Barnett 2 plex 9 Ben Pace 9 Neel Nanda 9 Buck 2 Neel Nanda 2 Buck 2 aog 3 TFD 6 Bronson Schoen 2 TsviBT 5 aog 22 Comments 22 22 comments , sorted by top scoring Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 2:08 PM [ - ] aog

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