In his recent interview with Lex Fridman, Beff Jezos / Guillaume Verdon compared Effective Accelerationism with Effective Altruism in a way that was really stri

In his recent interview with Lex Fridman, Beff Jezos / Guillaume Verdon compared Effective Accelerationism with Effective Altruism in a way that was really striking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fEEbKJoNbU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fEEbKJoNbU > (02:29:04) [Effective Altruism's] loss function is sort of hedons, units of hedonism. How good do you feel, and for how much time? And so, suffering would be negative hedons, and they’re trying to minimize that. But to us that seems like that loss function has sort of spurious minima, you can start minimizing shrimp farm pain, which seems not that productive to me. Or you can end up with wire heading, where you just either install a neural link, or you scroll TikTok forever, and you feel good on the short-term timescale because of your neurochemistry, but on a long-term timescale, it causes decay and death, because you’re not being productive. > (02:29:54) Whereas sort of EAC, measuring progress of civilization, not in terms of a subjective loss function like hedonism, but rather an objective measure, quantity that cannot be gamed that is physical energy, it’s very objective, and there’s not many ways to game it. If you did it in terms of GDP, or a currency, that’s pinned to certain value that’s moving. And so, that’s not a good way to measure our progress. But the thing is we’re both trying to make progress, and ensure humanity flourishes, and gets to grow. We just have different loss functions, and different ways of going about doing it. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it feels a little disingenuous to frame reduction of suffering as "hedonism". While at the same time, framing increased energy production as obviously and universally a desirable outcome. I would argue that can be worthy goals, with both very necessarily needing caveats and effort toward not perverting the original intents of the goals.