Organic Thinking: The Philosopher's Salon | Mr. Market

Organic Thinking: The Philosopher's Salon

29 May, 2026

Right now, we're on a plane that has been hijacked by 5-10 really smart but misanthropic people. They have a lot of money. They have made a long series of good decisions in their lives, and now they're in a position where their influence is hundreds of multiples larger/bigger than that of comparably smart, but less moneyed people.

So we're all on this plane. We are headed for disaster. The hijackers are piloting the plane straight toward a mountaintop. It's pretty clear to those of us on the plane who are paying attention that this is not an ideal flightpath. We're thinking, 'If our goal is to survive, I feel like we would be better off flying the plane toward a tarmac instead of a mountain.'

But the people hijacking the plane don't have a particular interest in ensuring we survive. Rather, they've been told they'll receive riches beyond their imagination if they pilot this plane right into the broadside of a mountain. So that's what they're going to do.

They have some naive machinations about ensuring their own survival in the face of obvious disaster, but they haven't totally ironed it out just yet. They perhaps believe they can figure it out when they get there. They are mostly focused on the riches.

This is the situation we find ourselves in, more or less. We are plunging unstoppably toward doom. We might survive, but even if we do, we will certainly be badly maimed.

In our case, rather than barreling toward bodily injury or death, we are heading straight toward crippling passivity, unchallenged psuedo-intellectualism, and the lowest discomfort tolerance of any living species. This is what we'll be dealing with if we fully outsource thinking and effort to AI.

Each of these afflictions are mentally, spiritually, and morally injurious, and they'll kneecap the human race if left unchecked. And so far, it's looking like this will all go on unchecked.

The perverse incentive of the last few decades<br>It's pretty easy to see how we got here. The great unseating of humanity as the world's most cognitively capable entity is the result of comfort and convenience becoming our primary win conditions.

This was a perverse incentive: we sought to make our lives easier, and in doing so, we have processed the 'living' part right out of our experience of life.

You have probably noticed people talking a lot lately about the negative consequences of AI on the human experience. Many are sick of hearing about it, which is fair, but I think we should probably all be talking/thinking about this as much as we can.

It is a big deal. While anti-intellectualism, passive consumption, and Wall-E-ification have been on the rise for a while, we're obviously accelerating toward a kind of escape velocity thanks to AI. As much as I sympathize with those who are annoyed at yet another think piece about the negative impacts of AI on human culture, it's also one of the more consequential ethical dilemmas of our time.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of some highly valuable, productive things that have been damaged or destroyed in our pursuit of an easier/more convenient life:

Boredom

Silence

Working on simple but challenging manual tasks

Waiting

Effort

Patience

These aren't minor virtues. They are integral to the development of character, critical thinking, imagination, creativity, and problem solving skills, which are crucial both for the maintenance of a functioning society and the experience of a worthwhile-seeming life.

While the technological advancements of the past 100 years or so have yielded massive, undeniable quality of life improvements, everything is a trade-off. So yes, things that were once unreasonably hard are now much easier, which is net-good in many many cases, but we've also succumbed to the Diderot effect at scale (but for offloading effort rather than consuming things.)

Rerum Novarum<br>Pope Leo XIV's encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas, is making the rounds right now in tech circles. It's interesting but not totally surprising that tech people are taking a letter from the Catholic Church so seriously: Catholicism is experiencing a resurgence, for one, but also, lifelong theologians are scholars at their core and the Catholic Church, like any other religious institution, does have a deep history of serious intellectual work.

I am not a follower (or a particularly big fan) of any organized religion. That said, there are several truly moving excerpts, and overall, there's a ton of value in what the Vatican published here.

He notes that, in life, there will always be rerum novarum, or "new things". We'll never truly have a handle on everything, and there will always be a new challenge. It is our humanitarian duty to face these new things with rationality, fairness, courage, and a deep sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of our fellow man, current and future.

This letter instructs us...