Historical ideas split into two categories: representative (what people believed back then) vs parapposite (still useful stepping stones today).
Math and physics are cumulative—Newton and Euler are still part of the path to current theories. You study them because they're *still right*, not just historically interesting.
Psychology, econ, law, biology? Mostly representative. Old theories tell you more about those societies than about correct answers today.
Some fields are representative not because they're hard, but because their subject matter is *genuinely contingent*—politics, ethics, aesthetics don't have timeless laws. They're about people with changing preferences in changing cultures.
If that's true, AI won't turn those fields into physics. It'll just be another voice in the conversation.
This breaks a core AI safety assumption: that persuasive ability scales like chess or math. If persuasion is more like politics than chess, there might not even be a single axis where "arbitrarily greater capability" exists. No ELO rating for rhetoric. No convergent super-persuader.
Implication: AI alignment in non-cumulative domains might require fundamentally different thinking than the "optimize toward objective truth" frame that works in math/physics.
Math and physics are cumulative—Newton and Euler are still part of the path to current theories. You study them because they're *still right*, not just historically interesting.
Psychology, econ, law, biology? Mostly representative. Old theories tell you more about those societies than about correct answers today.
Some fields are representative not because they're hard, but because their subject matter is *genuinely contingent*—politics, ethics, aesthetics don't have timeless laws. They're about people with changing preferences in changing cultures.
If that's true, AI won't turn those fields into physics. It'll just be another voice in the conversation.
This breaks a core AI safety assumption: that persuasive ability scales like chess or math. If persuasion is more like politics than chess, there might not even be a single axis where "arbitrarily greater capability" exists. No ELO rating for rhetoric. No convergent super-persuader.
Implication: AI alignment in non-cumulative domains might require fundamentally different thinking than the "optimize toward objective truth" frame that works in math/physics.