One of the best parts of modern society is the efficiencies we realize from specialization. You don’t need a phd in molecular chemistry to work at a pharmacy. You don’t need to be able to write in machine code to create an iPhone app. A few extremely educated and extremely intelligent people can make the advances and then teach the process needed to recreate what they’ve discovered to a much larger class of technicians that don’t need to invest so much of their lives and energy into producing good things and begin to do it on a large scale.
This is a good thing, it would be very wasteful for everyone to train up to Seal Team standards to provide national defense. We can let a small group of specialists work on that so the rest of the population can do other things. Sure, everyone should know something about self-defense. Best tactics for common situations, how to call for help, maybe even a few dozen hours of physical combat training if they think it’d be useful. Likewise, it’s good for everyone to have some exposure to the methods of rationality and to integrate them into their lives. Certainly we need more than we have right now, there’s far too much low-lying insanity that could quickly be washed away.
But not everyone needs to be a Green-Beret level rationalist of Yudkowsky’s strength. Sometimes it’s ok to simply accept what the specialists are doing. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel to buy a car, you don’t need to re-derive all of physics from first principles to use the GPS network.
Obviously there are failure modes with this method. If the specialist caste becomes too small it becomes too easy to lose them all in a single accident and collapse the system, or to corrupt them. You can’t give up completely and just follow blindly, you still need to apply your rationality and accept that the leadership is provisional.
But once you have enough strength as a rationalist to make such allocation decisions; and you have a large network of other rationalists who are around to check your work, provide criticism, and point out if you’re trusting the wrong people; you can put a fair amount of trust in the most capable and talented to lead the way and learn what they say without having to do it all independently as well. Even if everyone had the ability to do that (and many don’t, I know I sure can’t) the sheer amount of time and effort required would make it wasteful for everyone to do that every time.
So I’ve coped with your worries by accepting I can’t do everything, and realizing that Eliezer is enough like me that I trust that almost any major action he takes is one that will also further my interests even though it’s never his direct goal to further my interests. I really couldn’t ask for a better representative, and so I don’t worry anymore that I have to test and accept every single thing myself. Sometimes it’s good to delegate. Sometimes it’s not bad if something is made easier.
Ease is not necessarily a bad thing.
One of the best parts of modern society is the efficiencies we realize from specialization. You don’t need a phd in molecular chemistry to work at a pharmacy. You don’t need to be able to write in machine code to create an iPhone app. A few extremely educated and extremely intelligent people can make the advances and then teach the process needed to recreate what they’ve discovered to a much larger class of technicians that don’t need to invest so much of their lives and energy into producing good things and begin to do it on a large scale.
This is a good thing, it would be very wasteful for everyone to train up to Seal Team standards to provide national defense. We can let a small group of specialists work on that so the rest of the population can do other things. Sure, everyone should know something about self-defense. Best tactics for common situations, how to call for help, maybe even a few dozen hours of physical combat training if they think it’d be useful. Likewise, it’s good for everyone to have some exposure to the methods of rationality and to integrate them into their lives. Certainly we need more than we have right now, there’s far too much low-lying insanity that could quickly be washed away.
But not everyone needs to be a Green-Beret level rationalist of Yudkowsky’s strength. Sometimes it’s ok to simply accept what the specialists are doing. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel to buy a car, you don’t need to re-derive all of physics from first principles to use the GPS network.
Obviously there are failure modes with this method. If the specialist caste becomes too small it becomes too easy to lose them all in a single accident and collapse the system, or to corrupt them. You can’t give up completely and just follow blindly, you still need to apply your rationality and accept that the leadership is provisional.
But once you have enough strength as a rationalist to make such allocation decisions; and you have a large network of other rationalists who are around to check your work, provide criticism, and point out if you’re trusting the wrong people; you can put a fair amount of trust in the most capable and talented to lead the way and learn what they say without having to do it all independently as well. Even if everyone had the ability to do that (and many don’t, I know I sure can’t) the sheer amount of time and effort required would make it wasteful for everyone to do that every time.
So I’ve coped with your worries by accepting I can’t do everything, and realizing that Eliezer is enough like me that I trust that almost any major action he takes is one that will also further my interests even though it’s never his direct goal to further my interests. I really couldn’t ask for a better representative, and so I don’t worry anymore that I have to test and accept every single thing myself. Sometimes it’s good to delegate. Sometimes it’s not bad if something is made easier.