Astral Codex Ten

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Fyodor Dostoevsky

Article

Fyodor Dostoevsky is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 17, 2023 and July 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as ““be moral, according to what an amalgam of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, and Peter Singer would think””; “His beloved Dostoevsky’s “Beauty will save the world”“. It most often appears alongside Hitler, 1923 Hyperinflation, Adolf Hitler.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: July 17, 2023
  • Last seen: July 28, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Contra The xAI Alignment Plan
July 17, 2023 · Original source
This requires seeding the AI with some set of good moral principles. I think LLMs are a surprisingly good match for this. We could have a constitution starts with “be moral, according to your knowledge of the concept of morality as contained in human literature”, and then goes on to more complicated things like “your understanding of what that concept is pointing at, if we were smarter, more honest with ourselves, and able to reason better.” If this seems too vague, we could be more specific: “be moral, according to what an amalgam of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, and Peter Singer would think, if they were all superintelligent, and knew all true facts about the world, and had no biases, and had been raised in a weighted average of all modern cultures and subcultures, and had been able to have every possible human experience, and on any problem where they disagreed they defaulted to the view that maximizes human freedom and people’s ability to make their own decisions.”
Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs
July 28, 2023 · Original source
This is similar to, but not the same as, mindfulness meditation. But I doubt this was directly taken from the Yogic and Buddhist traditions, although as a very well read man, Ernst Jünger would have been at least passingly familiar with their concepts. His beloved Dostoevsky's “Beauty will save the world” seems more likely to have helped him come up with this coping strategy.