Early adopters of new things often tend to have bad vibes, or be oblivious to the bad vibes that the new thing has. This can happen in the case of new ideas, new technologies, or new cultural movements — and it can happen even when the new thing is legitimately good and important in and of itself.
Take AI images, for example. AI image generators are getting better all the time, and they’re already pretty useful (and fun!) for creatives. But there’s a bad vibe associated with AI image generators, for a few reasons:
- It was easy to produce mediocre-looking outputs from early AI image generators
- Early users of AI image generators tended to be tech people, not artists. Having good aesthetic taste is not the job of most tech people
- Early adopters weren’t the kind of person who was able to discriminate mediocre from excellent outputs
- When AI image generators produce great outputs, it’s not obvious that those outputs were AI-generated
As a result, it’s easy for the general public to dunk on AI image generators, because AI image generators seem to be inherently connected to aesthetic mediocrity.
This effect can also happen with ideas. In the 1960s and 1970s, many Americans perceived anti-Vietnam War protesters as having a bad vibe, probably because the type of person who cared to protest the war also tended to be interested in things like psychedelics and New Age music - not to mention the protests’ debatably necessary violence. If the hippies were around today, their style of protest would probably rightfully be denigrated as “performative”.
But that doesn’t mean the hippies were wrong — in fact, history has dramatically borne out their cause. Not only was it important that the US stop waging a war with lots of civilian casualties, nominally Communist Vietnam turned around and almost immediately became a de facto US ally against the two countries’ mutual enemy/rival in China.
Today, we forget that the hippies had bad aesthetic taste and mostly just remember that they were right about a few important things. On the other hand, the people who had better aesthetic taste than the hippies and silently judged them faded away impotently. These people are who I would call “reactionaries”. The one thing they don’t teach you about reactionaries is that oftentimes reactionaries have better vibes than radicals, at least in the moment.
In general, there’s probably something to be learned from people in our own day who are oblivious to bad vibes/people who get dunked on by society:
- ENM people
- Environmental activists
- Transhumanists/longevity advocates
- Effective altruists
- Rationalists
- Georgists/Land Value Tax enthusiasts
- Liberals
- Electric unicycle riders
It often takes someone who is themselves uncool to speak up about something uncool that they believe in. But if they care to do so, there’s a decent chance that they might be right.
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