If you have [a totalising worldview] too, then it's a good exercise to put it into words. What are your most important Litanies? What are your $n$ noble truths?

The Straussian reading of Yudkowsky is that this does not work. Even if your whole schtick is being the arch-rationalist, you don't get people on board by writing out 500 words explicitly summarising your worldview. Even when you have an explicit set of principles [LW · GW], it needs to have examples and quotes to make it concrete (note how many people Yudkowsky quotes and how many examples he gives in the 12 virtues [LW · GW] piece), and be surrounded by other stuff that (1) brings down the raw cognitive inferential distance [LW · GW], and (2) gives it life through its symbols / Harry-defeating-the-dementor stories / examples of success / cathedrals / thumos.

It is possible that writing down the explicit summary can be actively bad for developing it, especially if it's vague / fuzzy / early-stages / not-fully-formed. Ideas need time to gestate, and an explicit verbal form is not always the most supportive container.

I'm not sure if I'm persuaded that we can say that "evolution has intentions" - isn't evolution just a convenient word to describe a pattern? Evolution isn't an entity, it isn't a system, it doesn't have an identity. It is a quality or pattern that we notice in certain systems and at this point we risk getting into some kind of Hegelian matroishka doll about weltgeist - something which I'm afraid to even bring up.

I also feel like I'm missing something that "genocide and factory farms are instrumentally useful" especially if you're anthropamorphising evolution.

That being said, if the use of the Pathetic Fallacy allows you to make your beliefs pay rent - then I retract the above!

At any rate, thank you for posting this - because I realized something!

I think what this has made me realize is that I DO NOT have a conscious totalizing worldview or philosophy. But obviously I must have a worldview, I assume everyone does, all humans beings have a myriad of beliefs that lies on a continuum between a eclectic and byzantine (and very inconsistent) hodge-podge and the kind of totalizing and self-consistent system you describe.

Now, when I say I don't have a "conscious totalizing worldview or philosophy" - I am saying I don't have the self-awareness to know how self-consistent my beliefs are, and where on the continuum mine lies and this is partly because I couldn't summarize it. As such I'm guessing I'm somewhere on the inconsistent, eclectic, hodge-podge side - but perhaps unconsciously my beliefs are actually really self-consistent and I'm more on the totalizing side, but I doubt it.

This realization is surprising to me, because one thing I am is an aesthete with a curatorial bent - or in laymans terms "I know what I like, and I know what I don't like and avoid it like the plague". An aesthete is someone who is especially sensitive to (or excessively concerned with) the beautiful, especially in art. And by curatorial, I mean, someone who wants those beautiful art things to be coordinated in a certain way, to exclude anything which isn't beautiful rah rah rah. In this regard I have a very bright but narrow spotlight of self-awareness. 

I don't mean to say that I am some kind of superior tastemaker or have a better sense of what is beautiful than others, but I do believe I am especially attuned to my own, idiosyncratic and totally subjective sense of beauty or what I enjoy experiencing.  In fact if you ask me "what do most people like?" I would throw up my hands. If pushed, I would mumble something about Taylor Swift, Jeff Koons, and Michael Kors - the kind of answer you give when you have no idea what you're talking about.

To put it another way, I couldn't possibly be an aesthetic elitist, because I don't even know what most people like, so I couldn't even have something to compare my own aesthetics against.

I don't know if that counts as a totalizing worldview, since it is only a partial worldview - it is a hyperacuity about art, fashion, music, narrative, the written word, performance etc. that I "like". Me, myself, and only I.


 

Every major author who has influenced me has "his own totalising and self-consistent worldview/philosophy" [LW · GW]. This list includes Paul Graham, Isaac Asimov, Joel Spolsky, Brett McKay, Shakyamuni, Chuck Palahniuk, Bryan Caplan, qntm, and, of course, Eliezer Yudkowsky, among many others.

Maybe this is not the distinction you're focused on, but to me there's a difference between thinkers who have a worldview/philosophy, and ones that have a totalising one that's an entire system of the world.

Of your list, I only know of Graham, Asimov, Caplan, and, of course [LW · GW], Yudkowsky. All of them have a worldview, yes, and Caplan's maybe a bit of the way towards a "system of the world" because he does seem to have a overall coherent perspective on economics, politics, education, and culture (though perhaps not very differentiated from other libertarian economists?).

Paul Graham definitely gets a lot of points for being right about many startup things before others and contrarian in the early days of Y Combinator, but he seems to me mainly an essayist with domain-specific correct takes about startups, talent, aesthetics, and Lisp [LW · GW] rather than someone out to build a totalising philosophy of the world.

My impression of Asimov is that he was mainly a distiller and extrapolator of mid-century modernist visions of progress and science. To me, authors like Vernor Vinge are far more prophetic, Greg Egan is far more technically deep, Heinlein was more culturally and politically rich, Clarke was more diverse, and Neal Stephenson just feels smarter while being almost equally trend-setting as Asimov.

I'd be curious to hear if you see something deeper or more totalising in these people?

 I resonate with this framing of evolution as an optimizer and I think we can extend this perspective even further.

Evolution optimizes for genetic fitness, yes. But simultaneously, cultural systems optimize for memetic fitness, markets optimize for economic fitness, and technological systems increasingly optimize for their own forms of fitness. Each layer creates selection pressures that ripple through the others in complex feedback loops. It isn't necessarily that evolution is the only thing happening, it may be the outermost value function that exists but there's so much nesting here as well.

There's only modelling and what is being modelled and these things are happening everywhere all at once. I feel like I fully agree with what you said but I guess for me an interesting point is about what basis to look at it from.