Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
There is a techno-optimist narrative that there is a real possibility, large enough that a VC would bet on it given the size of the payoff, that the Great Filter is in our past (or is in the near future, with a slim-but-real chance of crossing it - the Yudkowskian view on AI), we see no other signs of a civilization that has crossed it, and accordingly given the potential impact of a supercivilization, humanity is the most important thing in the observable universe. This is a major source of meaning to the longtermist-EA crowd in practice, and in a weaker form is a very obvious source of meaning that everyone involved is space exploration talks about.
The fundamental narrative is more general - most religious source-of-meaning narratives are of the form "humanity is special because God made us special" and this is a secular version. It can be relied on by anyone who is part of the load-bearing infrastructure of human civilization (including parents) or who thinks they are.
The old jaibot blog (jaibot was the bard of the early Berkeley rataionality community) recently disappeared, but he had some excellent inspirational posts of this type.
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