Let a Thousand Worldviews Bloom
We've been living with a paucity of worldviews in the US: red tribe, blue tribe, and grey tribe. In an age of infinite information, that's all we get to choose from? A Right that wants to go back to an idealized 1950s, a Left that wants to go back to some romantic, pre-industrial, egalitarian utopia, and a marginal (but rational!) Gray Tribe?
Maybe this was just a temporary drought. Maybe the selection of worldviews is increasing. Maybe the development of worldviews is being democratized with AI. We have been living in a world with superabundant information but limited means of navigating that abundance. Now we are rapidly developing tools for navigating and synthesizing that information with the advent of broadly accessible free-to-low-cost AI.
Now every person can be their own philosopher, developing their own worldview. Not everyone will create their own, of course. Some will be better than others at developing worldviews and will recruit people into their ways of thinking. But more people will create new ways of thinking about the deepest questions. We are entering an age of an abundance of worldviews.
The Rise of the Techie Philosopher
We're seeing a preview of this trend now. It might be especially evident in my own world of tech, in a couple of ways. Techies are differentiating into sharply opposed accelerationist and decelerationist camps. They are facing off over the big question of the rate at which to develop AI.
And it goes deeper. If you follow just a couple of hops from a mainstream tech podcast, you might find yourself diving all the way into existential questions. Some surprising figures are popping up in the tech discourse. The rising new tech podcast Moment of Zen frequently refers to Nietzsche and his concepts of Slave Morality and Master Morality. Marc Andreessen, whose appearances on Moment of Zen and sister podcast Upstream featured prominent discussions of Nietzsche, recently published a blog post that was just a long Nietzsche quote.
Erik Torenberg, a co-host of Moment of Zen and the host of Upstream, frequently links to essays by Brett Andersen. Andersen, with this Intimations of a New Worldview newsletter and YouTube videos, is undertaking an ambitious and promising effort to develop a healthy, empowering worldview for our time.
These are nascent schools of thought emerging in a more distributed, accessible way than in the legacy intellectual world. These thinkers inhabit a different world than the academics they are succeeding. As they are largely centered in the ascendant world of tech, they default to positive-sum thinking and optimism instead of the zero-sum status games and pessimism of academia.
In the last few months, I have been regularly listening to Torenberg's Moment of Zen and Upstream podcasts and discussing them with others who regularly listen. I have followed tangents from Torenberg's newsletter to thinkers like Andersen. Andersen has led me to Nietzsche. This has been like the best humanities class I've ever taken. A greater diversity of viewpoints are represented than in any university-level course I've experienced. I have a greater feeling of agency, as I am choosing what path to explore. It's fun!
Every One a Philosopher
The next step for people like me who are interested in ideas is to contribute our own. This is where AI tools come in. Tools like ChatGPT make it easier to summarize, compare, and contrast ideas. You can put Socrates in conversation with Nietzsche or any fantastical combination you can think of. You can perform arbitrary operations on an approximation of the sum total of human knowledge.
Generative AI tools make it easier to create writing and images, enabling people to channel all this learning into creative output. AI-enhanced writing tools allow you to shorten or expand on any point. Image generation tools enable even the least artistic to create original, high-quality images to enhance their creations. Substack now has a built-in image generation tool. I’m still learning how to use these tools, so a non-AI-generated image will have to do to symbolize progress.
Overall, it is just getting easier to navigate information and create content. This will lead to a blossoming of a variety of ideas. Some of them will be bad, sure, but it is, on balance, a good thing to enable more expression from more people.
It's early days for this proliferation of worldviews and this new era of broader intellectual production, but it is promising so far. I look forward to seeing more Marc Andreessens, Erik Torenbergs, and Brett Andersens boldly put forth new answers to the deepest questions. We need all the new ideas we can get to navigate this complex modern world.