Eliezer Yudkowsky
Simplified Humanism and Positive Futurism
I will discuss a complex of related ideas that together form a more powerful whole: The idea of an upward-sloping future, as opposed to a worldview that locates utopia in the past and sees an inevitable downward slope going forward; humanism that focuses on personhood theory, rather than matters of outward form; the rejection of previously accepted ills, such as smallpox, or now aging, as unjustifiable; commitments to reason and rationality, the substitution of goals for prophecies, and the acceptance that each additional detail of a prediction is burdensome and must be separately justified. These ideas combine to form the natural continuation of the Enlightenment project, in which hope for a dramatically better future continues.
