This article is copied and reposted from the https://effectiveaccelerationism.substack.com/, for increased accessibility and discussion space. Authored by @BasedBeffJezos and @bayeslord.

The following are some quickly put together point-form notes following several of our public and private conversations on some of the basic thinking that eventually led to the formalization of effective accelerationism as a philosophy.

These represent a somewhat fundamental physics-based first-principles explanation of some of the concepts underlying the movement, and an exploration of why e/acc is so fundamentally important.

• * Life emerged from an out-of-equilibrium thermodynamic process known as dissipative adaptation (see work by Jeremy England): matter reconfigures itself such as to extract energy and utility from its environment such as to serve towards the preservation and replication of its unique phase of matter
• * This dissipative adaptation (derived from the Jarzynski-Crooks fluctuation dissipation theorem) tells us that the universe exponentially favors (in terms of probability of existence/occurrence) futures where matter has adapted itself to capture more free energy and convert it to more entropy
• * As a byproduct, this explains why life seeks to replicate, having more entities that consume free energy and convert it to more entropy faster is “more optimal”, thermodynamically speaking
• * This yields evolution itself as a special case of this principle; the universe thermodynamically favors configurations of matter that are better at replication.
• * Intelligence emerges as a smaller timescale specialization of this adaptation principle; it allows life to identify patterns in the environment which have utility towards acquiring more resources to procreate and/or maintain said intelligent life form
• * Beyond consciousness of single agents, one can consider “meta-organisms”; organizations of many agents forming an emergent whole (e.g. states, corporations, groups, etc.)
• * In a capitalist system, these meta-organisms compete for resources, as such, typically resources are dynamically assigned towards meta-organisms that have utility to the meta-meta-organism that is our civilization
• * Hierarchies of information propagation and control are part of the civilizational intelligence; these should be dynamically adapting at all organisational scales and on various time scales, in order to be optimal at identifying and capturing civilizational utility1
• * Capitalism is hence a form of intelligence; dynamically morphs the meta-meta-organism such that any sort of utility/energy in the environment is captured and utilized towards the maintenance and growth of civilization2
• * One goal of e/acc is to not only acknowledge the existence of this underlying mutli-scale adaptive principle, but also help its acceleration rather than attempt to decelerate it
• * Technocratic control typically leverages low-order models (typically first or second-order) of resulting consequences of top-down interventions (sudden changes in system hyperparameters, e.g. changes in regulations), and often seeks to try to control meta-organisms from simplistic and primitive/human-interpretable world models
• * Due to the nature of complex chaotic systems, partial observability due to imperfect information acquisition and propagation in societal hierarchies make accurately controlling a dynamically shifting chaotic process practically impossible
• * Furthermore, even given full observability (e.g. via CCP-style panopticon), bottlenecking ourselves to human-interpretable/natural language models of fractal, chaotic and complex systems is doomed to failure at effective optimal control towards any meta-organism objective
• * Attempts at top-down control often seek to supress variance of various dimensions of civilization in order to simplify its control

• * e/acc is about having faith in the dynamical adaptation process and aiming to accelerate the advent of its asymptotic limit; often reffered to as the technocapital singularity
• * e/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism

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